The Vote phase
Vote is the phase that turns a full board into an agenda. Everyone spends a fixed budget of dot votes, and the totals decide the order of the discussion in Review.
It’s the middle of the three guided phases — Feedback → Vote → Review.
How the budget works
Section titled “How the budget works”Every participant gets the same number of votes. The default is five, and the facilitator can change it from Settings → Votes per person at any point, up to 99.
Votes are spent by selecting the ▲ control on a card. There’s no rule of one per card: someone who cares about a single issue can put three votes on it. The ▬ control beside a card you’ve voted on takes one back.
Your remaining budget shows as a pill in the top bar — one dot per vote, filled for remaining and dimmed for spent, with the count beside it. Budgets over ten drop the dots and show the count alone. The pill only appears while votes can actually be cast.
Why a budget at all
Section titled “Why a budget at all”Unlimited voting is just a second round of opinions. A budget forces a trade: putting a vote here means not putting it there, so what surfaces is what people are willing to spend scarcity on rather than what they’d merely nod along to.
The size of the budget is the lever. Too many votes and everything ties; too few and a large board fragments into a flat pile of ones. A rough guide is around a third of the number of distinct issues on the board — five suits a typical fifteen-to-twenty-card board, and a board with forty cards on it usually wants more, or wants clustering first.
Totals become visible here
Section titled “Totals become visible here”Vote counts are withheld during guided Feedback and appear when the board reaches Vote. That’s the point at which everyone is looking at the same complete board, so a running total is information rather than an anchor.
On an anonymous board the totals are all anyone sees — who voted for what never reaches other participants’ clients.
Clustering before the vote
Section titled “Clustering before the vote”If the board arrives in Vote with six or more un-clustered cards, the facilitator sees a strip offering to merge duplicates into themes first.
This matters more than it looks. Five cards saying the same thing in five ways split the votes five ways, and a genuinely important issue can lose to a snappier single card. Clustering before the vote is how you stop the board’s phrasing from deciding its priorities. It’s a paid capability — see AI theme clustering.
Nudging a stalled vote
Section titled “Nudging a stalled vote”A facilitator on a board with un-voted cards sees a chip above the dock — “7 cards have no votes yet” — with a Give it a minute action that simply dismisses it. It’s a prompt to you, not a prod to the room: some cards genuinely don’t deserve a vote, and a board where every card has one usually means people are spreading rather than choosing.
How long it should take
Section titled “How long it should take”Two or three minutes. Voting is a reflex, not a deliberation — people already know what they care about from reading the board.
If the room needs longer than that, the problem is usually upstream: too many cards, or duplicates that haven’t been merged.
Moving on
Section titled “Moving on”Advance to Review when the budgets are mostly spent. You don’t need everyone at zero — people who hold votes back are making a statement too, and waiting for a full spend just teaches the room that the phase ends when the slowest person finishes.