How to vote on, pin and escalate challenges

A sync rarely has time for every challenge on the list. Voting, pinning and escalating are how a team decides what gets discussed first, and what needs attention from beyond the team.

The Challenges page is always sorted pinned first, then escalated, then by votes. The header keeps a running count: open challenges, how many are escalated, and total votes.

Vote on a challenge

1. Open Challenges under your team (or go to the Challenge Discussion step in a live sync).
2. Click the thumbs-up button on a challenge’s card, or the one under Votes in the details panel.

Each person gets one vote per challenge. The button highlights once you’ve voted, and clicking it again removes your vote. The details panel spells out who has voted, for example “you and 2 others voted”.

Votes are counted per person on the server, so double-clicks or several people voting at once during a sync can’t inflate the count. While a sync is live, the list refreshes every few seconds so everyone sees the same ranking.

A simple way to use votes in a sync

1. At the start of Challenge Discussion, give everyone a minute to vote on the challenges they think matter most.
2. Work down the list from the top.
3. For each one, agree an owner and next steps, add them as action items from the details panel, and click Resolve when it’s settled.

Pin a challenge

Pinning puts a challenge above everything else, whatever its votes. Use it for the one issue the team has agreed must be discussed this week.

• Hover over a card and click the pin icon, or
• Click Pin to Top in the details panel.

Pinned challenges show a Pinned tag. Click Unpin to release one.

Escalate a challenge

Escalate a challenge when your team can’t solve it alone and leaders above you need to see it: a cross-team dependency, a budget decision, a customer at risk.

1. Click the challenge to open Challenge Details.
2. Click Escalate.

The challenge gets a red Escalated tag and sorts above every challenge that isn’t pinned. To undo it, click Remove Escalation.

Where escalated challenges show up

If your team reports to a parent team (see Create teams), the parent team’s Challenges page has a Team Roll-Up section with a card for each team that reports directly to it. Each card shows:

• How many challenges are open, how many are escalated and how many are high priority.
• A health bar based on the share of open challenges that are neither escalated nor high priority.
• Up to three escalated or high-priority challenges, oldest first, with their age in days.

Click View on a card to open that team’s challenge list.

Escalating doesn’t move the challenge to another team or send a notification. It stays with your team and its owner, and becomes visible on the parent team’s roll-up. If it needs to be on the leadership agenda, raise it in their sync too.

Good habits

• Escalate sparingly. If everything is escalated, nothing stands out on the roll-up.
• Remove the escalation once the decision is made, even if the work isn’t finished.
• Keep priority honest. High-priority challenges count against a team’s health bar just as escalated ones do.

For more on keeping the challenge list healthy, read how to solve challenges before they escalate.