Dot Voting is a great activity for time management and prioritization. It is typically used for focusing the conversation on fewer items with highest interest by the group.

Running the activity:

  1. Instruct participants on the voting rules:
    * Each participant is entitled to five votes (each vote will be represented by a dot on the sticky note).
    * Participants can place more than one vote on a card.
  2. Go vote!
    “Please, vote on the items that you want to debate. The items with most votes will be picked up first.”
  3. Engage on a group conversation following the group’s interest rank (most voted items first).

This is a simple way to prioritize items for discussion. In retrospectives, it is common to generate a lot of insights. While all of them are valuable, time is limited, and therefore you need to make choices on what to discuss. Dot voting gives a chance for all participants to vote on what they consider most important to talk about.

 

Remote-team advice: If the remote board of your choice supports voting, use that feature. If it does not, you can ask participants to add “+1” or another mark of your choice in the sticky notes.