Dot voting allocates each participant a fixed number of votes to place on options — stickies, features, ideas, retro items. Count the dots. The highest vote totals win. Five minutes. Clear priorities. Snap it and the results are documented.
Use dot voting whenever a group needs to prioritize a set of options quickly and democratically — retro items, backlog features, ideation outputs, HMW questions, affinity clusters, or impact/effort candidates.
Dot voting works at any session size from two to twenty. It's fastest (2–5 minutes) and most useful when the options are already posted on the board and the group needs to align on priority without a lengthy debate.
All candidate items posted on the board before voting begins. Options can be stickies from a retro, sketches from a crazy eights session, HMW questions from a research debrief, or any set of discrete items the group needs to prioritize. Label each option clearly — vague labels produce unreliable votes.
Each participant receives a fixed number of votes — typically 3–5 for 10–20 options, up to 10 for 40+ options. Votes are represented by dot stickers, marker dots, or tally marks. The number of votes per person should be roughly 25–30% of the total number of options.
Participants can place multiple dots on the same option (bullet voting) or spread them across different options. Specify the rule before voting starts. Allowing bullet voting lets participants express strong preference for one option; requiring spread voting distributes priority more evenly.
Count the dots on each option after all participants have voted. Write the total next to each option. Rank by vote count. The top options — typically the top 3 or top 20% — are the group's prioritized choices.
After counting, a brief (5-minute) discussion period addresses options that nearly made the cut or where the vote count surprised the group. This isn't a debate — it's a sense-check. If the top-voted option is one the group shouldn't pursue for a reason the votes didn't capture, that needs to be said now.
Post all options clearly. Confirm everyone understands each option before voting. Ambiguous options produce unreliable votes.
Give each participant their dot stickers or markers. Announce the rules: how many votes, whether bullet voting is allowed, silent or simultaneous voting.
All participants vote simultaneously. No talking during the voting phase. Simultaneous voting prevents anchoring — the first person to vote shouldn't influence where everyone else places their dots.
Count the dots on each option. Write the total. Sort or identify the top options. Take a photo of the board before discussing — the raw vote counts are the primary output.
Brief discussion of any surprises or concerns about the top-ranked options. Then snap the board with BoardSnap — the AI reads the vote counts and outputs a ranked priority list, preserving the exact vote distribution as documented evidence of the group's decision.
Dot voting's output is visual: a board of stickies with different densities of dots, from bare to clustered. The density pattern tells the story of the group's priorities at a glance — ten dots on one sticky and zero on the adjacent one is a stark signal that a spreadsheet can't convey with the same immediacy.
BoardSnap reads the vote counts from the dot patterns and outputs a ranked list with the exact distribution. The voting session becomes a documented group decision — timestamped, ranked, and shareable — rather than a memory of 'I think we mostly agreed on X.'
A common heuristic: one-quarter to one-third of the total number of options. For 12 options, give each person 3–4 votes. For 30 options, give 8–10 votes. Too few votes and the signal is too sparse; too many and everything gets a dot and the ranking is flat. Adjust based on the spread you want.
Depends on the goal. Allow bullet voting when you want to identify the strongest single preference — it reveals conviction. Restrict to one dot per option when you want to surface the breadth of group support — it identifies what most people think is important. Announce the rule before voting starts.
Use the discussion buffer to surface the reason. A high vote count for an option that has a blocking constraint (legal risk, technical impossibility, resource conflict) should be made visible, not overridden silently. Either remove the constraint, remove the option from the board before voting, or document the reason the top-voted option isn't being pursued.
Yes — dot voting, multi-voting, and the '100-point method' (where each participant distributes 100 points rather than a fixed number of dots) are all variations of the same technique. Dot voting is the most physical and immediate version; the 100-point method is better for ranking options with fine-grained weighting. Use dot voting when you need a decision in under ten minutes.
Use after dot voting to place the top-voted items on an impact/effort grid.
Use dot voting to sort items into MoSCoW buckets when the group can't agree.
Dot voting (heat map) is the Wednesday decision method in the design sprint.
No exporting, no transcription. Snap the board, get the action plan.