Engineering teams on r/ExperiencedDevs and HN report that sprint retrospectives generate action items that quietly die — nobody tracks whether last retro's 'fix the deploy pipeline' actually happened. RetroHeat is a lightweight retro tool that scores each team's action item follow-through rate over time, visualizes which problem categories keep recurring (a 'heat map of dysfunction'), and flags when the same complaint appears in three consecutive retros. It targets the gap between retro theater and real process improvement.
Engineering managers and team leads at 5-30 person engineering teams using agile processes who are frustrated that retros don't drive change
Free for 1 team up to 5 members, $12/seat/mo for teams; annual discount at $99/seat
Hacker News: Post-pandemic distributed teams have made retro follow-through worse because there is no physical co-location accountability, and async retro tools like EasyRetro don't track outcomes.
Post-pandemic distributed teams have made retro follow-through worse because there is no physical co-location accountability, and async retro tools like EasyRetro don't track outcomes.
A single-page retro board where each action item gets an owner and due date; after the next retro, the team rates completion, generating a simple follow-through score.
AI clusters recurring complaints across retros into named dysfunction patterns (e.g., 'communication debt,' 'deploy friction') and suggests specific process interventions from engineering literature.
Jira, Linear, and Notion already capture action items — the risk is that teams say 'we'll just use what we have' rather than adopting another tool.
Likely buyers are engineering teams, platform leads, developer-experience teams, and technical founders. Start with Engineering managers and team leads at 5-30 person engineering teams using agile processes who are frustrated that retros don't drive change and look for teams already spending time or money on this workflow.
Find the first 10 users by searching for recent complaints around "developer tools team productivity" in Hacker News, developer communities, GitHub issues, and niche Slack or Discord groups. Offer a concierge version first: manually solve the workflow for a few users, then automate only the repeated steps.
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A medium difficulty app like this typically costs $0-$5,000 for an MVP. Monetization: Free for 1 team up to 5 members, $12/seat/mo for teams; annual discount at $99/seat.
Engineering managers and team leads at 5-30 person engineering teams using agile processes who are frustrated that retros don't drive change