Let the votes decide what you talk about
2026-10-20 · The Scrums team
In many meetings, the topic that gets discussed is the one raised first or loudest. Dot voting is a simple fix, as long as the votes stay hidden until everyone has cast theirs.
Think about the last retro that ran out of time. Which topics got discussed? Usually the ones raised first, or by the most confident person, or the ones the facilitator found interesting. The topic most of the room cared about may never have come up.
Dot voting fixes this. It started in workshops, with sticky dots on flip charts: each person gets a few dots to place on the topics they think matter most, and the discussion follows the dots.
Doing it well
- Group first, then vote. If three people wrote "deploys are slow" in three different ways, those cards should be one topic with all their votes, not three topics splitting them.
- Give everyone the same budget. Three to five votes each is typical. Let people put more than one dot on a topic they care about, up to a limit, so strong feelings count without one person deciding.
- Hide the tallies until everyone has voted. This is the step most teams miss. When people can see the votes piling up on one topic, many add theirs to it. Psychologists call it the bandwagon effect, and it turns a vote into a popularity contest.
- Then talk, in order. Start at the top and go down until time runs out. Whatever's left over was, by the team's own reckoning, the least important.
Dot voting in Scrums
In a Scrums retro, the Group step comes before voting. Drag cards together, or let Auto-group cluster similar cards for you. It runs on our own server; no outside AI service reads your cards.
Then the Vote step gives everyone the same number of votes, with a cap on how many one person can put on a single topic, both chosen when the retro starts. Tallies stay hidden until voting closes, so nobody follows the crowd. Then the Discuss step lists the topics ranked by votes, with one thread for each, where the conversation and its action items live together.
Group, then vote, then talk about what matters most.
Try it in your browser with our sample team: group the cards, cast your votes, and see the ranking.
More on running retrospectives in Scrums.