Engineers will answer a poll if it takes ten seconds and replaces a meeting. They will ignore one that reads like an HR form. The polls that stick in engineering channels are short, tied to the sprint, and end in a decision someone acts on.
These are the ones worth running, with the exact /poll text to paste.
Paste any of these into the message box in Slack.
Survey (3 questions). Retro questions collected the day before, so the meeting starts at the themes.
/poll "Sprint retro" "Three questions, anonymous. Closes before the retro meeting." anonymous close after 1 day --- "What went well?" short text --- "What slowed us down?" short text --- "One thing to try next sprint" short text optional
Premium: surveys (several questions), closing automatically
AnonymousClose automatically: after 1 day
Short text with voting. Async standup. Teammates react with fire to blockers they share, so common problems rise.
/poll "What is blocking you today?" short text :fire: order-results-by-votes
Free
Order results: by most votes
Ranked poll. Ranked debt list, closed in time for sprint planning.
/poll "Which tech debt should we pay down next?" "Flaky checkout tests" "Slow CI on main" "Legacy auth library" "Unowned cron jobs" ranked close after 2 days
Premium: closing automatically
Close automatically: after 2 days
Scale from 1 to 5. A one-question workload check during a crunch week.
/poll "How is your load this sprint?" "Way too light" "A bit light" "About right" "Stretched" "Underwater" scale anonymous
Free
Anonymous
Run the retro questions as an anonymous survey (Premium) a day before the retro meeting. People write more honestly when they are not saying it out loud in front of the tech lead, and you walk into the meeting with the themes already visible instead of spending twenty minutes on sticky notes.
Keep it to three questions. "What went well, what did not, what should we try" covers it. A fourth question gets skipped. In the meeting, group the answers, pick one change and write down who owns it. The sprint retrospective template has a quick version and a full version.
If half the team is asleep during standup, a short text poll posted each morning works
better than a call. Ask one question that surfaces blockers, not a status report. "What is
blocking you?" gets useful answers. "What did you do yesterday?" gets a list of ticket
numbers nobody reads.
Set it up as a recurring poll in Slack (Premium) so it posts itself every weekday. The daily standup check-in has wording that works.
Every team has more debt than sprints. A ranked poll forces an order, which a thumbs-up vote never does: everyone upvotes everything. Limit the list to items that are actually scoped. "Rewrite the monolith" next to "fix the flaky checkout test" is not a fair comparison.
Voters on a ranked poll see results only once it closes, so nobody anchors on the early
leader. Add close after (Premium) so it ends before sprint planning.
For a choice between two or three tools, post a limit 1 poll (Premium) after the
evaluation, not before. A vote on tools nobody has tried measures familiarity. Link the
comparison doc in the question and give it a day. See the
tool evaluation template.
Ask about load anonymously during crunch weeks, not just in the retro. A single scale question takes seconds and tells you who is underwater before someone says it in a 1:1. The workload check template is built for this.
At the end of every sprint, before the retro meeting, so people can answer honestly and you walk in with the themes already on the table.
/poll "How did this sprint go?" "Rough" "Below par" "OK" "Good" "Great" scale anonymous
Free
When your team is spread across time zones or calendars and a live standup costs more than it returns, but you still want a daily read on progress and blockers.
/poll "Status today?" "On track" "At risk" "Blocked" limit 1
Premium: vote limits
Before planning the next sprint or quarter, during a crunch, or any time you suspect some of the team is carrying more than they say.
/poll "How was your workload over the last two weeks?" "Way too much" "A bit too much" "About right" "Room for more" anonymous limit 1
Premium: vote limits
When your team is choosing between software tools and the people who will use it every day should have a say.
/poll "Which project trackers are worth a two-week trial?" "Tracker A" "Tracker B" "Tracker C" "Keep what we have"
Free
When you are running an internal hackathon and need a fair, quick way to pick a theme, a people's choice winner and judges' scores.
/poll "Which theme should the spring hackathon have? Add your own." "Internal tools" "Customer delight" "AI experiments" allow-options close after 3 days
Premium: closing automatically
For the written part, yes. Anonymous answers surface the things people will not say in the meeting. Keep the discussion itself in the open, where you agree on the actions.
Yes, on Premium. Set it up as a recurring poll in Slack; the /poll text cannot repeat a poll on its
own. See recurring polls.
Reactions cannot rank, cannot be anonymous and do not close. For a quick gut check they are fine. For anything you will act on, use a poll.
At the end of every sprint, before the retro meeting, so people can answer honestly and you walk in with the themes already on the table.
When your team is spread across time zones or calendars and a live standup costs more than it returns, but you still want a daily read on progress and blockers.
A retrospective is a meeting at the end of a piece of work where the team looks at how it worked, not what it built, and picks changes to try next time. In Scrum it closes every sprint.
In a ranked choice poll, each person puts the options in order of preference instead of picking one. Simple Poll counts the result with instant-runoff voting, so the winner is the option with the broadest support, not just the most first choices. Ranked polls work on every plan.
Product managers spend a lot of time getting a room to agree. A well-built poll does part of that work in Slack: it shows where people actually stand before the meeting, so the meeting can be about the disagreement instead of discovering it.
Simple Poll is the #1 polls and surveys app for Slack. 945,000+ teams use it. Free to start: type /poll and your first poll is live.