Retro · 60 minutes
Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Microsoft, Google, or Zoom. This is an independent satirical simulator. Nothing here connects to a real meeting service, no call is joined, and nothing is recorded.
An hour of structured reflection, rendered accurately: a shared whiteboard stuck at eighty-one percent loaded, three columns headed What Went Well, What Did Not, and Action Items, and a distribution of sticky notes that is nine, six, and one respectively. Somebody has written 'communication' in the middle column. They write it every sprint.
The retrospective is the meeting that agrees to improve things. It is scheduled for an hour, spends forty minutes on the first column because praise is easy and safe, then compresses the difficult conversation into eleven minutes and the action items into four. Everything gets a plus-one. Nothing gets an owner. Three weeks later somebody writes 'communication' again and there is a brief, polite silence in which everyone recognises the note and nobody says so.
The preset loads all of it. The gallery of nine. The board that will not render. A facilitator who has prepared an icebreaker and can feel, in real time, that it was a mistake. A timer that was set for five minutes per column and abandoned at column one. Sticky notes in four colours where the colour coding was explained once, at the start, by someone who has since left the company.
It runs as a background gag for anyone who has ever facilitated one of these, and it runs perfectly well as an ambient screen: lots of gentle motion, nothing that demands to be read. The whiteboard never finishes loading. This is not a bug in the simulation. It is the single most researched detail in it.
The Teams look shares a whiteboard that hangs on a spinner while the presenter says 'it's loading on my end' three times at ninety-second intervals. The chat fills with polite typing indicators. Someone suggests everyone add their notes offline and bring them back, which is a proposal to hold a second retro about the first retro.
The Meet look has a board link pasted into the chat that four people have opened and nobody has edited. Captions run underneath and render 'retrospective' correctly but 'blameless' as 'nameless', which is a more honest description of how the last one went. A breakout suggestion is floated and quietly ignored.
The Zoom look puts nine tiles in a grid and a board in a second window, so the facilitator is visibly alt-tabbing between the two for the entire hour. Reactions fire: eleven thumbs-up, two hearts, and one clap that arrives four minutes after the thing it was clapping for.
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