Voting is a core part of running effective Retrospectives. It lets participants democratically highlight the topics that matter most, so you can focus discussion time where it has the greatest impact.
How Voting Works
During the Vote sub-status, each participant is given a set number of votes. They spend them across the notes on the retro board by clicking the vote control on each note. Once everyone has voted, the notes can be ranked by total votes received.
Configuring Votes Per Participant
When setting up a retro, you can configure how many votes each participant receives. The default is 3, which is plenty for most retros where you want to surface the top few topics. For larger boards you might bump it to five or seven.
Multiple Votes Per Note
By default, each participant can put at most one vote on the same note - this stops a single loud voice dominating the result. If you want to allow vote stacking, turn on Allow multiple votes per note in the retro options. The default for this setting is off.
Vote-Cap Enforcement
The vote-cap is enforced atomically on the server. If a participant clicks quickly or submits two votes at the same moment, only the votes that fit inside their cap are accepted - the rest are rejected. This stops anyone from spending more than their allowance, even on a slow network.
When a participant has spent their last vote, they are automatically marked Done for the Vote phase. The facilitator's all-done pulse fires once everyone has either spent their votes or hit Done manually.
Viewing Vote Counts
Vote counts are displayed directly on each note. When the retro moves into Discuss, the facilitator can sort by votes to walk through the highest-rated notes first.
Using Votes to Prioritise Discussion
The point of voting is to decide what to discuss in detail. With limited meeting time, you cannot cover every note thoroughly. Voting ensures the most important topics get airtime.
After voting, work through the notes in order. For each high-voted note:
- Discuss what happened and why
- Identify what can be improved or continued
- Create actions to capture agreed follow-ups
Lower-voted notes can be acknowledged briefly or carried forward to the next retro if time runs out.
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