A wheel for who picks up the next task

The room was quiet, just the hum of the projector and the soft clack of a keyboard. We had a list of small, leftover tasks from the last sprint planning, and everyone was looking at me, the scrum master, to figure out who should take what. I didn't want to assign them.

When the list is fair but the choice isn't

We'd just finished mapping out the big pieces. The energy was good, but there's always that handful of things—updating the confluence page, cleaning up the backlog, running the demo script check. They're all necessary, but no one's hand shoots up for them.Assigning them feels too much like being a manager, not a facilitator. It creates a subtle pressure, a debt. I wanted a method that felt neutral, almost playful, to distribute the load without any one person feeling singled out.

The quiet spin before we began

I pulled up the wheel on the shared screen while people were still settling in, getting coffee. No fanfare, just a simple circle with our names on it. The items weren't punishments; they were just the next logical steps that needed an owner.Someone chuckled. "Oh, the wheel of fortune." It broke the slight tension. The spin itself was quick, a blur of color that landed on a name. There was a nod, a "yep, I can do that," and we moved on.It removed the deliberation, the unspoken negotiation. The result just was. It wasn't about me deciding; it was about the wheel, this impartial little tool, making the call for us.

What ended up on the wheel

It wasn't just names. We spun for who would take notes, who would timebox the retro, who would follow up with the design team on that one pending asset. Small coordination things that otherwise linger.