$100 Voting for Prioritization
Give everyone $100 to allocate across options and surface the elephant in the room.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 85%
A lightweight planning ritual where participants distribute a fixed $100 budget across a set of problems, solutions, or themes. Forcing a scarce allocation exposes where the group agrees, and where a big spread reveals hidden disagreement that needs to be discussed — turning ambiguity into clarity.
Origin
Shared by Lane Shackleton as a favorite planning ritual at Coda; a common facilitation technique he uses heavily in planning and brainstorming sessions, easy enough for a brand-new PM to run.
Core principles
- 01A fixed budget forces real trade-offs, unlike unlimited voting
- 02A large spread on one item surfaces a disagreement worth discussing
- 03It gets the elephant in the room out into the open
- 04It's easy to adopt, so even a new PM can run it and earn credibility
How to run it
- 1
Lay out the options in a table
Put the set of problems, solutions, or themes you want input on into a table.
Pro tip Works for problems to solve, solutions to pick, or themes to prioritize.
Watch out Keep the list bounded; too many rows dilutes the signal.
- 2
Hand everyone $100 to allocate
Each participant distributes exactly $100 across the rows — e.g. $10 here, $20 there, $50 to the one they think matters most.
Pro tip The fixed total is what forces genuine prioritization.
Watch out Don't allow unlimited spend, or the exercise loses its forcing function.
- 3
Read the spread and discuss the disagreements
Look for items with a huge spread — where one person allocated heavily and another gave nothing — and open a discussion there to make the ambiguity clear.
Pro tip The spread, not just the totals, is the most valuable signal.
Watch out Don't just tally and move on; the divergent items are the point.
In the wild
In a Coda planning session the $100 vote showed a huge spread on one problem — some people funded it heavily as a huge problem while others gave it nothing — prompting the group to say 'let's talk about it.'
→ A hidden disagreement (the elephant in the room) was surfaced and discussed, moving ambiguous input toward clarity.
Common mistakes
Only reading the totals
Averaging the allocations hides the disagreement; the divergent, high-spread items are exactly where the valuable conversation lives.
Allowing unbounded voting
Without a fixed $100 budget people fund everything, so no real prioritization or trade-off is forced.
Is it for you?
Best for
Facilitators and PMs running planning or brainstorm sessions who need to prioritize and surface disagreement fast
Not ideal for
Decisions that require deep individual expertise rather than group sentiment
From the transcript
“and so people will go through and say like I want to allocate $10 to this”
“great at at kind of like getting the elephant in the room out”
From the episode
What sets great teams apart
Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda)