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A retrospective has two states: Draft and Published. Draft is the working document — responders edit, regenerate AI blocks, and collaborate in real time. Publishing marks the retrospective as final, records a publish timestamp, and unlocks a public shareable URL for stakeholders who don’t have a Rootly account.
Publishing is separate from completing the retrospective process. The process moves through progress statuses (not_started → active → completed) as steps get done. Publishing is the document-level action that locks the retrospective content and makes it externally shareable.

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Publish a Retrospective

Publish from the retrospective document view once the write-up is ready.
1

Open the retrospective

Navigate to the incident, then open the retrospective document from the incident sidebar or the Retrospectives section.
2

Review the draft

Confirm every AI-drafted section has been reviewed, comments have been resolved, and the timeline reflects the final sequence of events. Publishing does not prevent further edits, but the published timestamp marks the moment of first publication.
3

Click Publish

The Publish action moves the document from draft to published, records published_at, and — depending on your workflow configuration — triggers subscriber notifications.
Automate publish-time notifications with a Retrospective Updated workflow filtered on progress_status = completed or a status change to published. See Retrospective Workflows.

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Unpublishing

Unpublishing reverts the retrospective to draft. The published_at timestamp is cleared. Use unpublish when a retrospective needs corrections after external distribution.
Unpublish does not delete the retrospective — the content stays exactly as it was. Republishing reissues the same slug URL.

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Exporting to External Documents

Beyond the public URL, Rootly supports exporting the retrospective to external document systems via retrospective workflows. Pre-built workflow templates ship for:
  • Google Docs
  • Confluence
  • Notion
  • Coda
  • Dropbox Paper
  • Quip
  • SharePoint / Word
Configure these under Retrospective Workflows and choose the template that matches your integration. See Configuring Templates → Apply Templates Through Integrations.

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Troubleshooting

Publish-time notifications run through Retrospective Updated workflows. Confirm you have a workflow filtered on the appropriate condition (progress_status or publish state) and that the workflow is enabled for the team owning the incident.

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Frequently Asked Questions

No. Publishing marks the retrospective as final for external distribution but does not prevent further edits. Republishing updates the public view.
Approval is not built in as a separate state. Common patterns: require a Reviewer role on the retrospective process to complete a step named “Sign-off”, or gate the publish action with a workflow condition. See Configuring Retrospective Processes.