A moderator opens a voting window on queued items with a deadline; each participant votes on their own ballot before it closes. Items the team agrees on are accepted automatically — only genuine disagreements come back for a live discussion.
Async estimation is an alternative to voting live in a meeting: a moderator opens a voting window on a set of queued items with a deadline, and each participant fills out their own ballot whenever it suits them over the following hours or days.
When the window closes, items the team already agrees on are accepted automatically — the meeting, if you still have one, only needs to cover the items where votes actually diverged.
Async estimation is a Pro feature. On the Free plan, the "Open async voting" entry point is still visible to moderators, but opens to an upgrade prompt instead of the form.
How it works
A voting window belongs to one room at a time — a room can't have two open windows at once. It carries a deadline, a set of queued items, and a consensus rule that decides what counts as "agreement" when it closes.
While the window is open, the room stays usable: a live round can still run on items outside the window, and the moderator can switch between the live stage and their own ballot at any time.
Opening a voting window
Only a moderator can open a voting window, from the queue's "Open async voting" button (hidden while another window is already open). By default every queued, not-yet-estimated item is selected — clear the ones you don't want in this window.
Click "Open async voting" above the queue.
Choose which queued items to include (all unestimated items are selected by default).
Pick a deadline: quick-pick chips for 24h, 48h, or 72h from now, or "Custom…" for a specific date and time.
Leave "Hide votes until the window closes" on (the default) to stop anchoring — nobody, including moderators, sees any vote until the window ends. Turn it off to let votes show as they're cast.
Choose a consensus rule: "Off" (no auto-accept — every item comes back for review), "Exact match" (every vote must be identical), or "Adjacent deck values" (votes may span at most two neighboring cards on the deck).
Click "Open voting · N items" to start the window.
Voting on a ballot
Once a window is open, every participant gets a segmented "Async ballot" / live-stage toggle to switch into their ballot view. Non-moderators land there by default; moderators can flip back to the live stage at any time.
The ballot lists every item in the window as a collapsed row. Opening a row shows its description and an estimate hand to cast a vote; voted items collapse back to a "Voted · <value>" receipt with a "Change" link. Votes can be changed as many times as you like until the window closes.
A sticky bar at the bottom shows how many items are left and jumps you to the next unvoted one. Items scoped to a role you don't hold (a Dev-only or QA-only item, on a room using Split Dev/QA voting) show as "<role> only" and aren't voted on by anyone outside that role.
Observers can open the ballot to read item descriptions but can't cast votes.
When the window closes
A window closes on its own once the deadline passes (checked roughly every 30 seconds), or a moderator can end it early from the banner's "Close now" button — which reveals votes for everyone immediately, whether or not everyone has finished.
At close, every item in the window is evaluated against the chosen consensus rule:
Consensus rule "Off": nothing auto-accepts. Every item is revealed and returned for review, regardless of how the votes landed.
"Exact match": an item auto-accepts only if every cast vote is the identical deck value.
"Adjacent deck values": an item auto-accepts if every cast vote falls within two neighboring positions on the deck (an exact match also qualifies). This works for T-shirt decks as well as numeric ones, since it compares deck position, not numeric value.
Auto-accepted items are completed the same way a moderator's manual accept is: the accepted value is written to the round, and if the room has Jira story-point write-back configured, the write-back fires automatically, just as it would for a manual accept.
An item needs at least 2 votes to ever auto-accept — a single vote never converges on its own — and a stray "?" (no-estimate) vote blocks that item from auto-accepting no matter what else was cast.
On a room using Split Dev/QA voting, Dev and QA are evaluated separately. If only one side converges, that item is revealed but stays open (not accepted) so the divergence board can offer a one-click accept for the side that's still unresolved.
Items that don't fully converge are revealed (so votes become visible) but stay uncompleted — they land back in the queue, tagged as needing discussion.
After a window closes with anything left to discuss, moderators see a "Async voting closed — review results" banner with a "Review results" button; participants see a quieter "Async voting results are in" chip. Both open the same results board.
The board opens with a summary strip (items voted, how many auto-accepted, how many need discussion, total item-votes cast), then a "Needs discussion" section sorted with the widest spread first, then a compact "Auto-accepted on consensus" list.
Each needs-discussion row shows a vote-distribution histogram (per Dev/QA side on a split round), the median, and — when a split round has one side already converged — a note like "Dev split · QA converged on 3".
Moderators get two actions per row: "Discuss live" reopens that item on the live stage for a normal round, or "Accept median <N>" accepts the item at its median value in one click without a live round at all. Once a window has no items left needing discussion, the board just shows the all-consensus message instead.
Reminders & deadlines
While voting, a participant can opt in to a one-time email reminder from a row on their ballot ("Get a reminder before voting closes") — this only asks for an email address, not an account.
The reminder is sent once per person per window, around 4 hours before the deadline, and only to participants who haven't finished voting yet by the time it goes out. It links straight back to the ballot and includes an unsubscribe link; opting out (or the window closing) removes the reminder.
The room-level banner and the ballot header both show a live countdown ("closes in 1d 4h") while the window is open.
From the async banner, a moderator can end voting immediately with "Close now" (reveals everything right away, same as a normal deadline close) or cancel the window entirely with "Cancel window".
Cancelling detaches the items back into the plain queue without revealing or evaluating anything — no consensus is computed and nothing is accepted. Votes already cast are kept on the items, so they're still there if you open a window on those items again or estimate them live later.
FAQ
Can I change my vote after I've cast it? Yes, as many times as you like, until the window closes.
What happens if someone doesn't vote? They're simply not counted — an item can still auto-accept on the votes that were cast (as long as at least 2 came in and the consensus rule is satisfied). A non-voter just shows as not having finished in the banner's "N of M voters have finished" count.
Is async estimation Pro-only? Yes. Free-plan moderators still see the "Open async voting" button, but it opens to an upgrade prompt instead of the form.
Can two voting windows be open at once in the same room? No — a room has at most one open window at a time. The entry point is hidden while one is already open; the banner is the control surface until it closes.
Can I still run a live round while a window is open? Yes — a live round can run on items outside the window at the same time.
Docs · Estimating
Estimate on your team's own time
Open a voting window on your next batch of items and only meet on the ones that need it.
