All You Need Is Feedback

It's near-essential for growing quickly, and the top blocker for most engineers who cap out at a certain level.

In my 27 years working with teams across Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI, it’s safe to say the number one thing stopping engineers from faster growth is feedback: specifically, the willingness and ability to respond to it. If your growth is slowing or stalled, feedback is likely a key blocker.

Imagine if your manager gave you one useful piece of feedback every week which you implemented by the following week. Anyone who does this would be an astonishingly high performer, improving in 52 ways every year. If this is manifestly true, its opposite follows naturally: a key reason you aren’t growing is either because you aren’t getting feedback or you aren’t implementing it.

You Can Listen as Well as You Hear

In your group of friends, there’s no doubt one person who nobody wants to give feedback to. All the other friends usually agree who this is. It’s like the just-joking / not-really saying:

And like in Rounders:

If you don’t know who in your friend group has difficulty handling feedback, then it’s quite likely you are that person.

Start with the Easy Case

One easy way to get useful feedback is to reflect on your own life — but many people struggle with this.

Fireside True Story™ time: I once needed a hot water heater moved, and took two days off work because the repairman told me it’d take that long. When he finally finished the job on the fourth day, double his original estimate, I asked him what went so wrong. He said to me without skipping a beat, “This happens every time.”

If true, even the slightest self-awareness would have easily corrected him into perfect estimates. But he, like most of us, couldn’t see the obvious when it comes to his own work.

Take the skill of hiring, for example. When someone you hired turns out to be terrible, do you read your original interview feedback to learn how you can make a better decision next time? Do you test for false negatives by checking a year later on people you didn’t offer? I’ve learned a lot from doing both of these.

When you pitch an idea, do you observe how your listener responds to different parts of your pitch? The questions they ask are a window into unaddressed concerns. Do you vary your pitch a bit with different people to gauge what’s more effective?

These are just examples of how you can self-improve all on your own. There are countless other ways you can get increasingly better results by simply observing how specific behaviors lead to certain consequences. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results” — though trite to say, it’s remarkable how many people live exactly this way.

Asking for Feedback

You need to ask the right person for feedback at the right frequency.

Many junior people rush at the chance to be mentored by a VP or senior staff engineer. This is a mistake.

If you’re a novice golfer, lessons from Tiger Woods are unlikely helpful. Tiger was probably five years old when he learned what you’re currently learning, so it’ll be hard to coach you from direct recent experience. Having too great a gap in experience also means many pearls of wisdom will be lost on a mind lacking the context to understand (e.g. MBA programs prefer applicants who’ve had a few years’ experience because it makes the material easier to digest). The ideal person to give feedback is just a step or two better than you at a particular skill.

There’s also a difference between those who do something well versus those who can explain how they do what they do. You need both.

When asking for feedback, be:

• Timely. Ask while the person remembers your performance.

• Open. Focus on understanding the person’s perspective, not on making a judgment about the validity of the feedback. More on this below.

• Specific. “What can I improve?” isn’t as good as, “What did I do this past week that I could do better this week?” It’s far easier to respond to a question like, “Did I pause sufficiently after soliciting questions during my presentation?” than “How did that presentation go?”

When’s the last time you asked for feedback? You should do so regularly, but at a sensible pace. Smaller things can be polled frequently. For instance, if it’s your first time at a batting cage with a friend who plays baseball, you can probably ask for feedback after each of your first swings. If you’re a professional baseball player, you’re likely to ask for feedback less often because:

• Easily-corrected things were shared with you years ago

• It’s harder to be insightful when giving feedback to someone who’s already expert at a task, so it takes longer periods of observation

• Feedback to experts tends to take longer to implement

Don’t burn social capital asking for more feedback from someone when you haven’t implemented their previous feedback. Doing so will quickly make you The Person Nobody Gives Feedback To.

Receiving Feedback

To benefit from feedback, you must first be able to receive it well.

• Ask clarification questions. The better you understand the feedback, the higher your chances of improving.

• Always express gratitude. It takes insightfulness and guts to give helpful feedback. The more appreciated your coworker feels, the more likely they’ll give you more feedback in the future.

• Don’t debate feedback. It can be hard to hear some types of feedback, especially if it touches at something core to us or embarrasses us. A natural response is to become defensive — but you do yourself a disservice by succumbing. Remember the friend of yours with whom nobody wants to share feedback? It’s likely because they bite back when things are pointed out to them. Don’t be that person.

• Demonstrate value. I hate when people ask for mentorship and don’t write anything down when we spend 30 mins discussing tips on how to grow. Write things down. Share your action plan. Loop back once you’ve improved. Reward the feedback giver by proving their effort worthwhile.

A good conversation goes something like:

Bob: I noticed you’re really good at presenting, Alice, and I’d love to learn from your experience. Would you be open to giving me some tips to help me improve?

Alice: Sure. How can I help?

Bob: From my presentation at our team meeting this week, what’s one thing you’d suggest I do differently next time to better communicate technical proposals?

Alice: Hmm. I felt like you did pretty well. Next time, perhaps give one or two counterexamples.

Bob: In the “best practices” portion of my presentation?

Alice: Actually, I was thinking they’d be helpful in the “technical design principles” portion.

Bob: Ah, got it. Next time I’ll try to give some counterexamples when suggesting new tech design principles. Thanks for being willing to share this suggestion with me. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d love to ping you after my next presentation to follow up on whether I’ve improved.

Alice: No problem!

Acting on Feedback

Requesting and understanding feedback are the easy parts. It’s often far harder to act productively on feedback, depending on what it is. The better you are at something, the harder it is to act on incremental feedback because you’ve already tackled the easy stuff. And yet that’s where the most meaningful growth lies.

Feedback is sometimes not accurate (i.e. it may point out something that isn’t true or best), but it’s never invalid, because by definition, it’s another’s opinion of your work. Perceptions matter as much as reality.

You shouldn’t implement all feedback blindly, of course. But if you don’t at least occasionally implement feedback you originally disagree with, you probably didn’t need the feedback in the first place. Sometimes you need to try some changes before passing judgment on their efficacy. Otherwise, you’re just asking a bunch of people to tell you things you already agree with.

Your greatest growth will come from deep work to change your behavior based on helpful feedback. I once had to tell a teammate that the biggest blocker to his growth was the way he’d sometimes lose his temper in meetings. To his credit, he readily acknowledged this was a big problem, one that he had been trying to improve for years. But some things — many things — are far easier said than done.

There’s just no getting around the work. You need to put in the reps.

And as you grow more senior in experience, it’s natural to get feedback less often. The decisions you make start taking months or even years to bear fruit. You act at higher levels of abstraction where insightful, concrete feedback is harder to identify. More of your time is spent on decisions and actions which don’t have clear answers, whose success or failure are subjective. Far fewer people will have the prerequisite experience and perceptiveness needed to helpfully coach you. And your level and influence in the company are likely to intimidate people from giving you honest feedback.

We laugh at the proverbial emperor’s predicament… but what kind of emperor engenders subjects who freely tell the truth about their emperor’s new clothes? When you start in career, be the eager learner who quickly implements advice from those more experienced. Mid-career, be the receptive peer to whom others happily give advice. Late-career, be the leader who welcomes honest feedback from the team — not just in words, as many are wont to do, but in demonstrated action.

Imagine improving one thing in yourself, every month, for the next year. You would be amazing, someone operating on a completely different level in a scant twelve months. This is the underutilized latent potential in all of us to become truly great.

Feedback lights the way.