How to use the Spike plan template

Start a board from it
Use this template opens a new Freero board with the Spike plan template on it (sign up free first). On a board you already have, open Templates in the toolbar and search for “Spike plan”.
Follow the instruction on the board
“A spike answers a question, it doesn’t ship code. Stop when the timebox ends, even if the answer is “we still don’t know, because…”.”
Fill in each part
- What question must the spike answer?
- Why does it matter now?
- What’s in and out of scope?
- Timebox and who
- What do we hand back at the end?
Bring your team and your agents
Invite people to the board or share a link, and work on it together live. The timer is in the top bar, private mode and voting in the board menu, and Claude or ChatGPT can join through Freero’s MCP server.

Work on it with an AI agent

Connect an assistant once and it works on the board with you, with your permissions: by default it reads and proposes, and people decide.

You ask: “Fill in the Spike plan board from these notes.”
What happens It reads the board, then proposes sticky notes for it. Nothing changes until someone on the board accepts them.
You ask: “Group what we wrote into themes and list the actions.”
What happens It proposes clusters with a title each and task cards for the actions, labelled with its name and yours.

Performance investigation
Work through a slowdown methodically: the symptom, measurements, a hypothesis, one change at a time and proof it helped.
Metric drop investigation
Work out why a key number suddenly changed, step by step: is it real, where is it, when did it start and what caused it.
Bug triage board
A kanban for incoming bugs, from new to fixed, with a severity guide everyone agrees on.
Code review checklist
The questions a reviewer runs through on every change, agreed by the team, with examples of what each one catches.
Dependency upgrade board
Track library and framework upgrades from spotted to shipped, so security fixes and major versions don’t pile up.
Postmortem action tracker
Follow the fixes agreed in incident reviews through to done, so the same failure doesn’t come back next quarter.