How TeamRetro built a planning poker app in days with LiveObjects

TeamRetro is an agile collaboration platform that powers team retrospectives, health checks, and planning poker estimation. Teams use it to reflect on sprints, identify improvements, and estimate work collaboratively – all in realtime with tens to hundreds of concurrent participants.

When a team member adds feedback, votes on an action item, or reveals their estimation card, everyone else needs to see it instantly. High-performance, reliable realtime infrastructure isn't a feature: it's the foundation of the entire experience.

"Our team's primary focus is enabling rich, fluid, and engaging online meeting experiences," explains Brad Ward, Co-founder and CTO of GroupMap Technology. "As a product SaaS company, our focus is on developing compelling meeting experiences – our ideal is to rely on trustworthy partners to provide the backbone to those experiences."

TeamRetro had been using Pusher, but mounting concerns prompted a reevaluation. After MessageBird's acquisition, they told us three issues emerged

1. Product stagnation

 Pusher's direction became unclear, with limited innovation beyond core Channels. For a company building sophisticated collaborative features, this misalignment was problematic.

2. Security uncertainty

SOC2 reports were unavailable and security documentation was sparse. "It was important that the partners we work with have the same level of security robustness, care and reliability that we do," Brad explains

3. Limited flexibility

Beyond basic pub/sub, Pusher offered little for building advanced collaboration features like presence management, synchronised state, and regional compliance.

Evaluating alternatives

When it came to looking at alternatives, TeamRetro considered several options:

AWS API Gateway offered maximum flexibility but would require building message fan-out, subscription management, and all infrastructure logic from scratch. "This is a core building block, but is not our unique value proposition," Brad notes.

AWS AppSync provided more out-of-the-box functionality but introduced new authentication patterns, infrastructure paradigms, and data patterns that would require significant rework.

Ably addressed all three concerns without new risks:

• Product alignment: Roadmap focused on collaborative editing, presence, locking, and synchronization. Direct conversations with Ably's product team gave them confidence their paths aligned

• Clear security posture: SOC2 Type 2 accredited, AWS infrastructure, comprehensive public documentation

• Flexibility: Region-locking, message deduplication, batching, and plugins like LiveObjects for rapid prototyping

"We've had several meetings with Ably product and developer teams who have been genuinely interested in our specific needs and feedback, giving us confidence our paths are aligned," Brad recalls.

The core development work took one week with a single developer – largely a drop-in replacement. Ably's SDKs mapped closely to Pusher's patterns, requiring mainly updates to authentication, channel subscriptions, and connection handling.

Within two months, all traffic migrated to Ably with zero service disruptions. Customers experienced no downtime or broken features.

"The core development work needed to be completed in one week by one developer, and was largely a drop-in replacement," Brad explains. "Within two months all traffic had been migrated to Ably with no service disruptions."

Building with LiveObjects

Shortly after migrating, TeamRetro used LiveObjects to prototype a planning poker estimation tool. Planning poker requires sophisticated realtime state synchronisation – everyone needs to see who's estimated, what values they've chosen, and when to reveal cards.

Traditionally, this requires designing backend state models, implementing synchronisation logic, handling concurrent updates, and managing edge cases – weeks of infrastructure work before starting on user experience.

With LiveObjects, the approach changed completely. LiveObjects provides synchronised, structured data that automatically handles state management and realtime updates. Developers work with familiar objects that transparently sync in the background.

"LiveObjects provided us flexibility to develop the full collaborative app while focusing exclusively on the client-side UI and meeting experience – without developing any new backend storage, synchronisation logic," Brad explains. "This allowed us to focus on what's most valuable for us – designing online experiences."

The team built and deployed a fully functional planning poker app at planning-poker.teamretro.com in days. As early adopters, they had operational object synchronisation with basic authentication set up in a couple of days.

"As very early adopters we were too early to benefit from the new Ably-provided hooks and documentation – I suspect the process would be even faster now," Brad notes.

The planning poker feature is now being integrated into the main TeamRetro application for all users.

Since migrating to Ably, TeamRetro has seen measurable improvements:

30% faster synchronisation. Cross-user sync performance improved significantly after tuning. In collaborative contexts, these milliseconds matter - the difference between "this feels instant" and "there's a bit of lag."

Rock-solid reliability. Zero outages and consistently strong customer connectivity since migration. "Rock solid reliability - in terms of both uptime (no outages) and customer connectivity," Brad emphasises.

Rapid prototyping. Features that would have taken weeks of backend development now take days with LiveObjects. "Fast prototyping of rich collaboration features such as our planning poker application," Brad notes.

When infrastructure work collapses from weeks to days, the economics of feature development change. Features that weren't viable become feasible. Experiments that require significant commitments can be validated quickly.

Team experience

Beyond technical capabilities, TeamRetro values Ably's customer approach. The developer who handled migration reported an extremely positive experience. Brad has found the team responsive, enthusiastic, and genuinely interested in TeamRetro's goals.

"Support was extremely prompt in answering our questions - and it was great being able to have a conversation with the product lead to answer some of our questions," Brad notes. "I've found Ably responsive, enthusiastic and interested in what we are trying to achieve using their platform."

Looking ahead

With reliable realtime infrastructure in place, TeamRetro is exploring additional products in the online meeting space - refining and growing experiences from retrospectives and health checks to estimation meetings and broader brainstorming tools.

The migration reinforced a strategic principle: build on technology providers like Ably for foundational capabilities, enabling the team to focus on unique value propositions.

"It reaffirmed our belief that we continue to be better off building on top of technology providers like Ably for foundational capabilities such as realtime sync, to enable our team to focus on the value propositions that make our products unique," Brad reflects.

Brad confirms that Ably will remain the core backbone of their synchronization infrastructure: "We would describe Ably as best-in-breed for realtime synchronisation, and strongly recommend it as a provider.”

For companies building collaborative experiences where immediate synchronisation matters, TeamRetro's experience offers a clear lesson: infrastructure choice compounds over time. The right foundation enables velocity.

About GroupMap Technology

TeamRetro is built by GroupMap Technology, a company focused on making online meetings more meaningful and less painful. In addition to TeamRetro, the company offers GroupMap, a platform for online brainstorming and decision-making with structured facilitation. Both products rely on the same realtime infrastructure to deliver fluid, engaging experiences for distributed teams.