Estimate asynchronously

A voting window is the asynchronous alternative to estimating live. A moderator picks a set of queued items and a deadline; everyone else fills in 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 for you, and the meeting — if you still need one — only covers the items where votes genuinely split.

Before you start#

You need to be a moderator in the room. Opening, closing and cancelling a voting window are all moderator-only actions.

Async voting works on every plan, Free included. Two related capabilities are paid: posting window updates to a Slack or Microsoft Teams channel, and the facilitator nudges that go with them. Those are configured in workspace settings under Integrations & notifications, not in the room.

A room has at most one open window at a time. While one is open, the entry point disappears and the window's banner becomes the control surface. The room itself stays usable underneath: a live round can still run on items that are not in the window, and anyone can flip between the live stage and their ballot.

Open a voting window#

1. In the room's queue actions, click Open async voting. The button only appears for moderators, and only when no window is already open.
2. Choose the items. Every queued item that has not been estimated yet is selected by default — clear the ones you do not want in this window.
3. Pick when voting closes. The chips offer 24h, 48h and 72h from now (48h is the default), or choose Custom… for a specific date and time. The deadline has to be in the future, and the preview under the chips shows it in your own local time.
4. Decide whether to keep Hide votes until the window closes on. It is on by default, and it means nobody — moderators included — sees a single vote before the window ends. Turn it off only if you want votes visible as they are cast.
5. Pick a consensus rule: Adjacent deck values (the default), Exact match, or Off. This is what decides which items get accepted for you at close; see what happens when the window closes.
6. Click Open voting · N items.

Everyone in the room gets the open-window banner, which shows a live countdown, how many voters have finished all the items, and a Copy voting link button for people who are not in the room yet.

Vote on the ballot#

While a window is open, everyone gets an Async ballot / Live stage toggle. Everyone lands on the ballot, moderators included — unless a live round is already running on an item outside the window, in which case the room opens on the stage instead. The toggle switches views at any time, and a live round that starts while you are on the ballot offers a jump banner rather than pulling you away.

The ballot lists every item in the window as a collapsed row. Open a row to read the item's description and pick a card. A voted row collapses back to a Voted · <value> receipt with a Change link, and votes stay editable right up until the window closes — as many times as you like.

A sticky bar at the bottom tracks how many items you have left and jumps you to the next unvoted one. The header carries the same countdown as the banner ("Closes in 1d 4h") and says whether votes are hidden or visible.

Two things narrow who votes on what:

• On a room using split Dev/QA voting, an item scoped to a role you do not hold shows as Dev only or QA only and is not yours to vote on.
• Observers can open rows and read the items, but cannot cast votes.

Get a reminder before the deadline#

The ballot offers a Get a reminder before voting closes row. It asks only for an email address — no account, and nothing is stored against your profile beyond this one window.

The reminder goes out once per person per window, about four hours before the deadline, and only to people who still have votes outstanding at that moment. It links straight back to the ballot and carries an unsubscribe link. Once it is set, the row shows Reminder set with Change and Remove; the opt-in ends with the window either way.

If the room's workspace has Slack or Microsoft Teams notifications configured, the same lifecycle is announced in the channel: the window opening, a closing-soon nudge naming how many people have not voted, and a closing summary of what auto-accepted versus what needs discussion.

Close or cancel a window early#

A window closes on its own once its deadline passes — the server checks about every 30 seconds, so a close can lag the stated minute slightly. Moderators have two ways to end one early, both on the banner:

• Close now ends voting immediately and reveals everything, exactly as a deadline close would. Anyone who has not finished does not get more time.
• Cancel window returns the items to the plain queue without revealing or evaluating anything. No consensus is computed and nothing is accepted.

What happens when the window closes#

At close, every item is evaluated against the consensus rule you chose.

Rule	An item auto-accepts when
Off	Never. Every item is revealed and comes back for review.
Exact match	Every cast vote is the identical deck card.
Adjacent deck values	Every cast vote falls on one of at most two neighbouring cards. An exact match qualifies too.

Adjacency is measured by position on the deck, not by number, so it behaves sensibly on a T-shirt deck as well as a Fibonacci one.

Two guards apply to all three rules. An item needs at least two cast votes to auto-accept — one opinion is not a consensus. And a single opt-out card ("?", "∞", "Pass" or "☕") blocks that item from auto-accepting no matter how the other votes landed.

When an item does converge, the accepted value is the most frequent card cast, with ties broken towards the higher card. The item is then completed exactly as a moderator's manual accept would complete it — including story-point write-back to Jira or Linear, if the room has that configured.

Items that do not converge are revealed but stay open. They return to the queue tagged for discussion. On a split Dev/QA item where only one side converged, the item also stays open, so the review board can settle the unresolved side in one click.

Review what diverged#

After a close that leaves anything to discuss, moderators see an Async voting closed — review results banner with a Review results button; everyone else sees a quieter Async voting results are in chip. Both open the same board.

The board opens with a summary strip — items voted, how many auto-accepted, how many need discussion, and how many item-votes were cast — followed by a Needs discussion section sorted widest-spread-first, then a compact Auto-accepted on consensus list.

Each needs-discussion row carries a vote-distribution histogram (one per side on a split item), the spread, and the median. Rows that landed here for a reason other than disagreement say so rather than faking a spread — a single vote, or an item blocked by an opt-out card, is labelled as what it is.

Moderators get two actions per row:

• Discuss live reopens that item on the live stage for a normal round.
• Accept median N accepts the item at its median value in one click, with no live round at all. On a split item where one side already converged, this writes both sides at once.

Everyone sees the same numbers — values are revealed the moment a window closes — participants just do not get the action buttons.