After completing the Sprint Questions and Assumptions exercise, the team can now do a round of voting. It’s helpful to remind the team of the sprint challenge, the agreed upon goals and success metrics.

Before voting begins, review the criteria for selecting an idea to prototype. This is a good time to do an Assumptions exercise, where each team member writes down the assumptions that the concepts are based on and the questions that each concept might help them answer. This will help inform what the team decides to prototype.

We recommend using a Heatmap Voting method on a scale of 1 to 5 (see the intructions below). Sometimes a clear consensus can’t be achieved, but you can use the other methods we’ve provided in this section.

Directions:

Time: 3 minutes to present, 10 min to vote
Activity: Group

1. Review the sprint challenge, the goals, and success metrics so everyone knows what the voting criteria is and remind the team this is a deciding vote.
2. Give each team member a sheet of small dots. Explain to them to put their dots on the area of the Solution Sketches they think are the most compelling, on a scale of 1 to 5, indicating dots based on how strongly they feel each concept should be selected.
3. Rules for voting: you can vote on your own and elect up to 3 concepts to apply small dots to.
4. Allow 10 minutes for voting.