Decido - The new online group decision making app

Decido is Mindiply's new web app for making group decisions using the dot-voting method. We’ve built it to help you make less biased decisions, maximise people’s involvement and make fairer, faster decisions. Voting is anonymous, there is no need to create an account and you can involve remote team members easily.

Using it is straightforward:

1. You define the decision
2. You write down all the options and add your email address
3. You can send a link to all the participants and invite them to vote.

Here are five cases where Decido could help make great group decisions.

Eric, CEO of a distributed company

Eric owns a small distributed tech company. Recently he and his team have thought of lots of different ways they could advertise their new app, but he’s struggling to find a good way to decide what to focus on.

He wants to be fair and listen to all the voices on the team, but not spend too much time emailing and Skyping back and forth. He’s read about the benefits of the dot voting method and decides to use Decido so having remote team members won’t be a problem - and it’s free.

He creates a decision on Decido, “Which of the following channels will bring us more users in the next quarter?” and adds the six options they generated during the brainstorming session. He then sends the unique link generated by Decido through Slack to his teammates. They can quickly collect everyone's individual preferences and use the results to reach consensus. It’s a good way to keep a sense of engagement especially when they don’t work physically together.

Michelle, Sales Director

Michelle is the sales director of a small furniture company. The last few team meetings haven’t been very successful and she’s noticing a slight resentment towards attending weekly hour-long meetings when they have tough targets to reach this quarter.

Michelle wants a way to focus on the issues her team really cares about, and move some items into a weekly email so she can shorten the meet. She writes down all the items on the agenda in Decido decision, “What’s the most important issue to focus on in the meeting this Friday?”. She sends the link to her team by email Thursday after lunch and watches as the results stream in for the next 24 hours. In the next meeting, they discuss 3 important issues and still finish in half the time they normally do.

Thomas, Product Manager

Sprint retrospectives are a great tool for continuous improvement in an Agile/Scrum development team. Thomas and his team, however, usually come up with many more ideas and potential changes than they can realistically do in the next iteration.

They often waste time in long inconclusive discussions, so Thomas uses Decido to help his team prioritize and choose what to work on next. He writes down all the options in a new decision, “What changes can we implement for our next sprint?” and puts the link on Confluence. A couple of clicks later and the team has access to the prioritised list of features.

Fast, clean, and documented: the perfect tool for agile development teams!

Patricia, Mother of young children

Twice a year, Patricia and the other members of the ‘School Parents’ Whatsapp group have a meal out, but it’s always a bit stressful deciding where to go. Dozens of messages get lost on Whatsapp and a few people flood the conversation with their choices, obliterating everything else.

This time Patricia has a better idea. She creates a list of 10 different restaurants on Decido, and sends the link to vote to the group on Whatsapp. A few minutes later and almost all of the members have voted and there is a clear winner, a great little Italian place in town. No more wasted time with endless messages and no more loud voices!

Sally, startup founder

Sally and her teammates are about to launch a new app, and they are thinking to create a mascot for it - a nice animal companion that will greet the users and show them how to use some advanced features. They have already thought some cool names, but they don’t know which one will resonate with their audience.

Sally creates and new decision in Decido, with the cool names they thought about as options, and publishes the link to it in their newsletter and social media channels. In a couple of days, they have collected 100 votes, and can easily see which name was most liked by their users. It was a good tool to use for a public decision, because no one is required to sign up and voting is anonymous.

Have you used Decido for a different type of decision? We’d love to hear what you’ve accomplished with it!

Cover picture by Freepik