retro (gstack)
- Product
Runs a look-back over a stretch of finished work — what shipped, what went sideways, what to change next time — turning recent experience into concrete process improvements. It faces backward at completed work, where idea pressure-testing, spec-writing and plan reviews all face forward at work not yet done.
A situation it fits
Three months after launch the team wants a focused meeting to list what went well, what failed, and one or two concrete changes for the next cycle.
3 scenarios in the bank answer to retro (gstack). The rest are in the game.
Skills it gets confused with
These share a family with retro (gstack), which is another way of saying they are the ones you might reach for by mistake.
- office-hours (gstack)Pressure-tests a raw product idea the way a sharp investor would — probing who it is for, why now, and what would make it fail — before any planning or building begins. Unlike turning an idea into a spec or grading a written plan, this is the earliest step: deciding whether the idea is worth pursuing at all.
- plan-ceo-review (gstack)Reviews an already-written plan from a founder's chair — is the scope right, are the priorities ordered well, is this the most valuable thing to build now. It judges a finished plan on business and product grounds, where an engineering review would judge that same plan on architecture, and idea pressure-testing would question the concept before any plan exists.
- spec (gstack)Turns a vague intent into a precise, buildable specification, working through the ambiguities in stages until the requirements are concrete enough to implement against. It assumes you have decided WHAT you want and need it made executable — not whether the idea is worth doing, and not a critique of a plan you already drafted.
Knowing what retro (gstack) does is the easy half. Telling it apart from the others under time pressure is the game.
Today's sessionretro (gstack) is part of garrytan/gstack. Licence: MIT. The description above was written for this game, not taken from the skill.