How to Use Claude Whiteboards for Team Retros

Retros are useful, but the part after the meeting is boring. Someone has to read forty sticky notes, group them, and write the action items. Usually that someone is me. Since yesterday, Claude can do that part. This post shows how to use Claude Whiteboards for a team retro, and where it still falls short.

What is new in Claude Whiteboards

On November 10, Anthropic launched Claude Whiteboards and Claude Sheets in beta. A whiteboard is a shared board inside Claude. Your team adds notes in real time, and Claude can group the notes by theme and draft action items for each person.

A few other things it can do:

1. You talk through a messy plan, and Claude turns it into a board with a timeline, owners and dates.
2. You drag a box around one part of the board and ask Claude questions about only that part.
3. When you are done, Claude can turn the board into a doc or a slide deck, or you can move it to Miro, Lucid or Vani by Zoho.

It works on web, desktop and mobile, on all paid Claude plans. The announcement does not mention any region limit, so it should work for us in Germany too. Free users do not get it.

Who it helps

Engineering team leads. You run a retro every two weeks. The meeting is fine, the follow-up is where things get lost. With the board, the grouping and the first draft of action items happen right after the last note, while people are still in the call.

Freelancers and small agency owners. You start a new client project and the plan lives in your head and in five emails. Talk it through once, and you get a timeline with owners that you can show the client.

How people use it so far

To be honest: the feature is one day old. I could not find real user stories yet, only the launch coverage. The two examples Anthropic itself gives are planning a project out loud and synthesizing retro notes. So the steps below are my suggestion, built on those two cases.

How to run a retro with Claude Whiteboards

1. Open Claude, start a new chat and ask for a whiteboard for your retro.
2. Share it with the team and give everyone five minutes to add notes. Keep one idea per note.
3. Ask Claude to group the notes and draft action items.
4. Select only the "what went wrong" area and ask follow-up questions.
5. Turn the result into a short doc for the team page.

A prompt you can copy for step 3:

Group all notes on this board by theme. For each theme, write one sentence about the real problem, not the symptom. Then draft at most five action items, each with one owner from the names on the board and a due date before the next retro. Mark anything you are unsure about.

The catch

It is a beta. On Enterprise plans an admin must turn Whiteboards on first, under Organization settings, Artifacts. On Team plans it is on by default. Also, the action items are a draft. Claude does not know which problem your team actually cares about, so read them together before anybody commits to them.

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Sources

1. Anthropic: Introducing Claude Whiteboards, Claude Sheets, and Claude Data
2. Anthropic: More ways to work with Claude: Sheets, Whiteboards, and Interactive Connectors
3. Engadget: Anthropic takes on Google and Microsoft with Claude Sheets
4. Gizmodo: Anthropic goes for Microsoft's crown with new Claude-powered office tools