Give everyone a fixed number of votes to distribute across options. Stack them on your top priorities or spread them wide. Results are instant, visual, and impossible to game.
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Dot voting (also called dotmocracy or multi-voting) is a group decision-making technique that lets teams quickly surface priorities without lengthy debate. Each participant gets a fixed number of votes (the dots) and distributes them across the available options however they choose.
The power is in the constraints. Because everyone has a limited number of votes, they must genuinely commit to what matters most. You can concentrate all your dots on one item if you feel strongly, or spread them across several to signal broader support. The result is a ranking the whole team contributed to.
Everyone gets the same number of votes. The loudest person in the room has no more influence than anyone else.
No lengthy scoring rubrics or criteria weighting. Add items, vote, reveal. Done in minutes.
Limited votes mean people must make trade-offs. Everything cannot be top priority, and the votes make that clear.
Dot counts give an immediate sense of the group's priorities. No ambiguity about which items the team cares about most.
Real scenarios software teams run into every sprint.
Your retro board has 14 improvement ideas and 45 minutes left. Give everyone 5 votes. The 2-3 items that float to the top are the ones the team actually cares about - everything else gets parked.
Engineering listed 9 areas of tech debt: flaky tests, a legacy auth module, missing observability, slow CI pipeline... Dot voting surfaces which ones are causing the most real pain, so you fix what actually slows people down instead of what looks bad on paper.
You have 22 ready stories and capacity for 8. Before estimation starts, a quick dot vote tells you which ones the team values most. Cuts the "should we do X or Y?" debate in half.
Three approaches for the new service are on the table. A dot vote before the deep-dive discussion surfaces where the team actually leans, so you spend time on the real contenders instead of re-litigating options nobody wants.
Your post-mortem generated 11 follow-up actions. Some are quick fixes, some are multi-week projects. Vote to find the 3 the team sees as highest priority before assigning owners.
After a hack day or design sprint, the team has 15 ideas on sticky notes. Dot voting turns that into a ranked shortlist before everyone goes back to their normal work.
Host creates a room and sets how many votes each person gets (typically 3–7).
Everyone joins by entering their name, no account needed.
Host can claim the room to make it permanent and set a password so only invited participants can join.
Team members add items to vote on: topics, features, ideas, anything.
Host opens voting. Each person distributes their votes however they like. Stack multiple votes on one item or spread them.
Votes are hidden from other participants during the voting phase to prevent bias.
Host reveals results. Items are ranked by total votes with a clear visual breakdown.
Discuss the top items and decide on next steps.
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