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Retrospectives are how teams learn from incidents. Rootly treats them as first-class incident artifacts, not a checkbox — every incident can trigger a retrospective process that lists the steps, owners, and deadlines that follow resolution. Not every incident deserves the same process. Rootly lets you define multiple processes and route each incident to the right one based on severity, type, or team, so a SEV0 gets full formal treatment while a SEV3 gets a lightweight review.
Rootly ships with a Default Retrospective Process that runs on any incident not matched by a custom process. New workspaces can rely on it out of the box.

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In This Section

Retrospective Workflows

Trigger retrospective creation, reminders, and document generation automatically.

Configuring Processes

Create, condition, and reorder processes under Configuration → Retrospectives.

Configuring Process Steps

Step attributes, phases with Custom Statuses, and reminder configuration.

Configuring Templates

Reusable document structures — plain sections, Liquid variables, AI blocks, and the AI Starter Templates gallery.

Rootly AI in Retrospectives

Auto-draft Summary, Impact, Root Cause, Mitigation, Resolution, and Timeline sections with Rootly AI.

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Draft Retrospectives with Rootly AI

The heaviest lift in most retrospectives is the writing itself. Rootly AI in Retrospectives takes on the blank-page problem: sections like Summary, Impact, Root Cause, Mitigation, Resolution, and Curated Timeline get drafted automatically from the incident’s data, Slack channel, and bridge-call transcripts. Owners edit, regenerate, or convert to plain text — nothing is frozen.
Most teams see the biggest lift from adding an AI-powered starter template to their default process. See Building AI Templates for the four starter templates that ship with Rootly.

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How It Works, Briefly

A retrospective process is a named, ordered set of steps Rootly creates on an incident after resolution. When an incident is created or updated, Rootly evaluates the conditions on each process, picks the one that matches, and creates the process on the incident. Retrospectives can be mandatory, auto-skipped, or optional based on incident context — configured separately from the process itself under Retrospectives → Preferences. For the full picture, see configuring processes for routing and preferences, configuring process steps for step attributes and phases, and incident variables for the retrospective variables.

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Best Practices

  • Start with the default process. Fastest way to see the flow end-to-end. Add custom processes only when a specific severity or team needs something different.
  • Add AI blocks to the template your default process uses. Even one Summary block cuts retrospective time noticeably.
  • Assign by role, not by user. A step assigned to “Commander” auto-routes to whoever ran the incident. Named-user assignments go stale.
  • Reserve required steps for the outputs that actually block the process from closing. Retros with too many mandatory steps get abandoned.
  • Audit process conditions quarterly. Severity definitions and team boundaries drift.

Collaborative Retrospectives

Real-time co-authoring, comments, exports, and Liquid variables in the editor.

Retrospective Workflows

Automate retrospective creation, notifications, and external document generation.

Action Items

Follow-ups created from a retrospective — track, assign, and close them.

Incident Variables

Liquid variables for referencing the retrospective from workflows and templates.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Rootly creates the retrospective when the incident is resolved. From that point, Retrospective Created and Retrospective Updated workflow triggers fire on lifecycle events.
On resolution, Rootly evaluates each process’s conditions. All matching processes are candidates; if more than one matches, the most recently created wins. If none match, the Default Retrospective Process runs. Full match logic is in configuring processes.
Yes — the mechanism is separate from the process. Whether a retrospective is mandatory, auto-skipped, or optional is configured under Retrospectives → Preferences with its own conditions on severity, type, or team.
Retrospective processes (this section) define when and how to run a retrospective — steps, owners, deadlines, routing. Collaborative Retrospectives is the editor experience for the retrospective document: real-time co-authoring, comments, exports, Liquid variables.
Rootly renamed Postmortem to Retrospective. Older workflows, integrations, and Liquid variables that use postmortem_* continue to resolve — see incident variables on the Reference page.