Thanks for the great feedback and suggestions, Sara! Hadn’t thought of using hearts, so that’s good for a thumbs-up approach. The only challenge I would see with that more passive implementation though is that a heart is an explicit approval vote, while “no heart” could be too implicit: theoretically meaning disapprove, or just “I’m out to lunch and haven’t seen this message.” It would be nice to capture an explicit yes/no, versus unanswered.
Now as for how I’d use voting in a development workflow: one thing my company implements is a MAP Team, which is compromised of all of the managers of the organization. We have about 120 staff at our location, so we have about 12 managers. We meet monthly to discuss organizational priorities, and for managers to share about their own department’s workload, resource constraints, and so forth, and to celebrate our collective wins, and to support each other on projects that are struggling. Often a manager will come to the table with a request that requires resource from other teams. Rather than having discussions in a silo, that leaves out potentially critical disciplines and having a team caught off guard months later saying, “I wish I’d known you were doing this… that affects my team”, we meet and talk about our projects and each manager has the opportunity to identify the impact on their team. Often that means that projects are presented but a department that’s critical doesn’t have the resources available to get it done. So rather than trying to overwork staff by just piling the work on them anyway, we place several of the “up and coming” projects on the board, and we let managers weigh in. We may rule out some projects because of risk, resource limitations, or whatever. But then we also get to a list of, say, 5 projects that are all doable, but we only have resources to do 3 now, and 2 later. We might push out a vote to let people select which project they feel has the highest benefit or worth to the organization.
Alternatively, we may have 3 or 4 ways to implement a project, all with their own risks and rewards. We might outline those, and then want managers to vote on implementation A, B, C, or D. If we use the heart approach, we’d have to create 4 tasks, one for each implementation, and then create copies for each manager to force an explicit response. Otherwise, we’d have the “did they vote or not?” question come up. In some cases, manager A’s vote might carry more weight than manager B’s vote, because of the nature of the project, and knowing who voted what would also matter.
Having comment “types” (comment vs question) would also mean that questions could be highlighted differently in the communication chain, and rather than seeing the comments in a purely linear timeline, the answers to a question could be grouped with the question. Sure, we could do a subtask, but then we need to drill into the subtask and manually review the answers, rather than just seeing a consolidated view summarized based on a set of pre-set answers.
Anyway, those are just some thoughts!