The Scenario
You're an agile coach and your retrospective is in two hours. The ask from the engineering director was simple: show me a throughput chart — how many cards hit Done each week over the last 12 weeks. You've been staring at the Trello board for 20 minutes and there is no chart. There is no export button. There is a long scrollable list of cards and an action history that shows you everything at once with no way to group it.
The bad version:
- Open the board's action history, scroll back through 90 days of moves, comments, and renames, and manually tally every "moved to Done" event by week into a spreadsheet
- Cross-reference each action against the card name to confirm it was actually a completion and not a revert
- Build the chart after the data is clean, which is now 90 minutes of work before you've done any analysis
The throughput data exists inside Trello. Getting it into a form you can chart is the part that burns the time — and this retrospec doesn't wait.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads your spreadsheet, understands what you're working with, and through its built-in Trello integration it can pull board action history and write structured results back into your sheet. No API calls, no JSON parsing, no pivot tables from scratch.
The prompt to run:
Get all updateCard actions from the Trello board 'Engineering Sprint' where a card was moved to the 'Done' list. Group them by ISO week and write the week start date and card count into columns A and B of this sheet, sorted by week ascending.
What You Get
- Column A: week start date (Monday), one row per week
- Column B: count of cards moved to Done that week
- Rows sorted oldest to newest so a line chart renders immediately
- Any week with zero completions included as a zero row so the chart has no gaps
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The board name changed halfway through the quarter
The Trello board was renamed from 'Sprint Q1' to 'Engineering Sprint' six weeks ago. Fetch card-move-to-Done actions from both board names and combine them into a single weekly count in columns A and B. Note in column C which board the data came from.
You need to break throughput out by list (not just Done)
Get all card-move actions from the Trello board 'Engineering Sprint' for the last 12 weeks. For each week, write the week start date in column A and the count of cards moved to each of these lists — In Review, Staging, Done — in columns B, C, and D respectively.
You want cycle time alongside throughput
Fetch all cards moved to 'Done' on the 'Engineering Sprint' board in the last 90 days. For each card, write the card name, the date it was created, the date it moved to Done, and the number of days between those two dates into this sheet.
Full retrospective data dump with commentary prompt
Get all updateCard and createCard actions from the 'Engineering Sprint' Trello board in the last 28 days. Write the date, action type, card name, source list, and destination list into this sheet. Then add a summary row at the bottom with total cards created, total cards completed, and average days to completion.
One prompt that pulls the raw data and computes the summary in the same operation — so you walk into the retrospective with the chart already built.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Google Sheet where you track sprint metrics. Ask it to pull throughput counts from your Trello board and you'll have a chartable dataset in the time it would have taken to scroll through the action log manually. Also see how to export per-member activity counts and the full Trello integration overview.