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Product Prioritization: Dot Voting
Mastering relative value and alignment
Welcome to ‘Product Prioritization’ — a series of tools, tips, and best practices for the skilled Product Manager to determine priorities and get results. Each time, I’ll highlight one of the dozens of popular methodologies and explain how to use it.
What is Dot Voting (5 Dots)?
Dot voting, aka ‘5-Dots’ is a technique that’s intuitive and fast. It will help you evaluate and rank items based on their relative importance so that you can identify and focus on high-value opportunities.
Step 1: Ideas
Compile the ideas that you’d like to prioritize. Review them to ensure that the title and/or description are clear so that you don’t spend half the meeting describing one of the ideas. If you find that this does happen, or a few of the ideas are new or complex, you may want to provide details about the ideas before the meeting as pre-reading material.
Step 2: Gather Stakeholders
Identify who should be in the meeting so that when you gather their votes, it’s the right group to understand priorities from (clients, users, co-workers, leadership, or a mix).
