Retro Rollups

Retro rollups aggregate themes and action items from multiple retrospectives across different teams, giving engineering leaders a high-level view of what is working and what needs attention across the organization. Rollups are an enterprise feature designed for organizations managing several teams that need cross-team visibility without micromanaging individual retrospectives.

What is a retro rollup?

A retro rollup is a synthesized report that combines data from multiple completed retrospectives. Instead of reading through each team's retro individually, engineering managers and directors can review a single rollup that identifies shared themes, common blockers, and organization-wide patterns.

Rollups are especially valuable for organizations where multiple teams work on related products or share infrastructure. A blocker that appears in three different team retros is a systemic issue that deserves organizational attention — and rollups make these patterns impossible to miss.

Creating a rollup

Organization admins and owners can create rollups from the organization dashboard.

1. Navigate to Organization → Rollups and click New Rollup.
2. Give the rollup a descriptive name, such as "Q1 Sprint 6 Rollup" or "February Cross-Team Review."
3. Select the retrospectives to include. You can filter by team, date range, or sprint. Unpack shows a list of all completed retrospectives that match your filters, along with the number of cards and action items in each.
4. Review your selection. A rollup typically includes retrospectives from the same time period across different teams, but you can combine any set of retros that makes sense for your analysis.
5. Click Create Rollup. Unpack begins processing the selected retrospectives and generating the AI theme analysis.

AI theme analysis

The core of a retro rollup is the AI-generated theme analysis. Unpack reads through all cards and discussion notes from the selected retrospectives and identifies cross-team themes.

How theme detection works

The AI analyzes card content from every included retrospective and groups related ideas into themes. Unlike in-retro grouping, which works within a single board, rollup theme detection works across teams and identifies patterns that no single team would see on their own.

• Shared themes — topics that appear in two or more teams' retrospectives. These are the most actionable findings because they indicate systemic issues or shared successes.
• Team-specific themes — topics unique to one team but significant enough to warrant organizational awareness.
• Sentiment analysis — each theme is tagged with an overall sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) based on the cards that contributed to it.
• Source attribution — every theme links back to the specific retrospective cards that contributed to it, so you can drill down for context without losing the high-level view.

Reviewing themes and creating action items

Once the theme analysis is complete, themes are displayed as cards on the rollup board, ranked by the number of teams and cards that contributed to each. Each theme card shows an AI-generated title and summary, contributing team count, overall sentiment, and links to the source retrospective cards for deeper context.

From any theme, you can create organization-level action items. These differ from team-level retro action items in scope — they represent changes that affect multiple teams or require organizational support.

1. Click Add Action Item on any theme card.
2. Describe the action in SMART format (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). Unpack's AI suggests a SMART formulation based on the theme content.
3. Assign an owner. Rollup action items can be assigned to anyone in the organization, including people who were not part of the original retrospectives.
4. Set a due date and priority level.
5. Click Create. The action item appears in the rollup summary and on the assigned owner's dashboard.

Merging themes

The AI does its best to group related cards into coherent themes, but sometimes it creates themes that overlap or should be combined. Rollup editors can merge themes manually to refine the analysis.

1. Select two or more themes by clicking the checkbox on each theme card.
2. Click Merge Themes in the toolbar that appears.
3. Choose a primary theme to serve as the merged result, or let the AI generate a new title and summary that encompasses all selected themes.
4. Confirm the merge. All contributing cards from the merged themes are consolidated under the resulting theme, and any action items are reassociated.

Rollup phases and workflow

Rollups follow a structured workflow with distinct phases, similar to retrospectives but tailored for cross-team analysis.

1. Setup — select the retrospectives to include and configure the rollup. During this phase, you can add or remove retros and adjust the rollup's scope.
2. Analysis — Unpack processes the selected retrospectives and generates the AI theme analysis. This phase is automatic and typically takes 30 to 60 seconds depending on the volume of data.
3. Review — the rollup creator and any designated reviewers examine the detected themes, merge or split themes as needed, and validate the analysis before sharing.
4. Action — create organization-level action items from the identified themes. Assign owners and due dates to ensure follow-through.
5. Published — finalize the rollup and make it visible to the broader organization. Published rollups appear on the organization dashboard and can be shared via link.

Exporting rollup summaries

Published rollups can be exported for sharing in stakeholder reports, leadership reviews, or compliance documentation. Three formats are available:

• PDF — formatted document with theme summaries, sentiment indicators, and action items. Suitable for email attachments and archival.
• Markdown — plain-text version for pasting into Notion, Confluence, or other documentation tools.
• CSV — spreadsheet-friendly format listing themes, action items, owners, and due dates for import into project management tools.

To export, open the published rollup and click Export in the header bar. Select your format and click Download. Exports include theme data and action items but do not include individual retrospective cards, preserving the anonymity of team-level feedback.