Build the norms your team actually commits to. Everyone proposes, everyone votes, and only agreements with genuine majority support get adopted.
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Working agreements are the explicit commitments a team makes about how they will collaborate. They cover things like communication norms, meeting etiquette, coding standards, and decision-making processes. The best working agreements are specific, actionable, and created together rather than handed down from above.
When a team builds its own norms, people actually follow them. This tool makes that process fast, inclusive, and democratic: everyone proposes, everyone votes, and the team sees exactly which agreements have genuine buy-in.
Agreements built by the team are owned by the team. When people vote yes on a norm, they are making a genuine commitment.
Votes are hidden until the host reveals results. No social pressure to agree with the loudest voice in the room.
You set the adoption bar. Require unanimous agreement for high-stakes norms, or a simple majority for lighter guidelines.
Propose, vote, reveal. No facilitation training required. Run it at the start of a new project or after a team reset.
Real scenarios software teams run into.
One team does mob programming and async standups. The other does daily syncs and solo ownership. Neither is wrong - but without explicit agreements, the merged team will have low-grade friction for months. One session surfaces the differences and lets the group vote on a shared approach.
Every three sprints someone raises PR reviews in the retro: too slow, too nitpicky, or too lax. Stop relitigating it and formalise the agreement. "PRs are reviewed within one business day." "Nit comments are non-blocking." "Approvals require at least two reviewers." Vote, adopt, move on.
Distributed teams inherit office norms that do not translate: tapping someone on the shoulder, 9am standups across timezones, expecting instant Slack replies. A working agreements session replaces those implicit expectations with explicit ones the whole team voted on.
Before a new on-call rota goes live, agree on what actually warrants a 3am page, how long before escalating, and what is in scope for the on-call engineer. Written down and voted on means no arguments during an incident.
A new principal engineer joins with firm views on coding standards, architecture decisions, and testing strategy. Run a working agreements session to surface where the team is aligned and where there is real disagreement - before those opinions become unspoken friction.
Crunched for two months to hit a launch. Retrospectives have been skipped. Morale is low. A working agreements session is a clean reset: it signals that the team has a voice in how it operates going forward, not just what it ships.
Host creates a session and sets the adoption threshold (e.g. 75% means at least 3 out of 4 people must vote yes).
Everyone joins by entering their name, no account needed.
Host can claim the room to make it permanent and add a password for private sessions.
Anyone can propose agreements: write them clearly and concisely, as if posting them on a wall.
Host opens voting. Every participant votes yes or no on each proposal independently.
Votes are hidden from everyone until the host reveals results, preventing social pressure from influencing votes.
Host reveals results. Proposals above the threshold are marked as adopted with a clear green indicator.
Review the adopted agreements together, discuss any surprises, and commit to living by them.
Create a free session in seconds and invite your team with a code. No account, no setup.
Start a free Working Agreements session