Feedback Protocol

My team was working on a landing page for a product we’re building. They published a draft of the page, and then opened it up for feedback from stakeholders.

I watched as the feedback poured in—a flurry of thoughts, questions, and ideas. None of it was organized, prioritized, or centralized. It was in a single Slack channel, but Slack is not conducive to orderly communication, even when practicing proper hygiene like threaded conversations (still a good practice).

The feedback was great, but overwhelming. It required a lot of mental parsing, investigating, and follow-up questions. Feedback is a conversation. It’s never a one-way equation. It requires multiple parties to engage in dialogue to achieve its goal: improvement.

Feedback is the fuel of iteration and continuous improvement.

But it needs to be managed. If you let it come in as a firehose of information, it becomes noise. If you mindfully tend to it, it can produce a signal.

But how? Follow the Feedback Protocol:

1. Funnel the feedback into a single place.
2. Filter it to create priority and direction.
3. Follow up to close the feedback loop.

Funnel

Start with defining the mechanism by which feedback flows—how you collect it.

This is the funnel.

A funnel concentrates a large quantity of data through a single location, which creates the central pipeline of information flow.

You don’t want feedback spread out. The objective is to centralize it, to keep it in one place as much as you can.

When the feedback was flowing in Slack for the landing page, I created a Basecamp project to keep it:

• Centralized: It kept all the feedback in one place, a single source of truth that was easier to manage than Slack.
• Formalized: It introduced helpful friction to maintain quality. Too easy to add feedback and the noise goes up; too hard to add and you miss the signal. It’s a balance.
• Organized: Leveraging a system for organizing the feedback forced better organization than free-flowing messages.

Basecamp was just one option. The tool matters far less than the principles. Find a place where you can funnel the feedback into one place, introduce useful friction, and organize the feedback for the next step.

Filter

All the feedback is in a single source of truth, but how do you determine priority?

Not all feedback is created equal. Even with healthy friction in place, trivial and highly subjective feedback will come in. Blindly reacting to all feedback creates an end product without a clear identity. These are the Frankenstein products that reflect an inability to say no and maintain focus.

You need a filter, a mechanism by which feedback is translated into actionable priorities to work on. It creates focus.

There are three ways I filter feedback:

1. Intuitive Filter: Use taste, intuition, and product knowledge to discern priority to pass it through or discard it early.
2. Priority Filter: Assess urgency, impact, and effort to determine if feedback should be acted on now, next, or later.
3. Category Filter: Categorize the feedback into the appropriate bucket so you can act on it at the right time. This is the unique taxonomy for how you want to organize your feedback: tags, labels, etc.

Each layer of filtration strengthens the priority list. Then you can move each piece of work through the stages of execution, from collection until completion.

• Triage for work you need to filter.
• Queue for work you’ve prioritized.
• In Progress for work in flight.
• In Review for work being reviewed.
• Completed for feedback that’s resolved.

Follow Up

The final, and often forgotten, step in the process is to follow up on the feedback. If someone takes the time to review your work and provide feedback, you should return the favor. If feedback is a gift, then this part of the process is the thank-you note.

You need to:

1. Close the loop and let them know what you did with their feedback.
2. Share the context to give details on the decisions made based on their feedback.
3. Invite more collaboration to turn the conversation into a relationship.

This does more than follow up and close the loop—it opens a new loop, invites collaboration, and drives continuous improvement. Each iteration improves from the last one. This is a Feedback Loop (Issue #23). And feedback loops, executed well, get stronger with each pass.

Iteration is the connective tissue between speed and quality.

The more feedback you receive and the faster you iterate, the better the end result. And if you’re building a software product, this is how you create raving fans. If they report something that doesn’t work (a bug), it’s an opportunity to create a fan. You engage in conversation, establish shared context, and create a collaboration.

Don’t forget this step. When you mindfully curate feedback, you succeed or you learn.

Use the Gift

Feedback is a gift. Like all gifts, it holds special value and should be treated well.

Don’t squander it.

Funnel feedback into a single source of truth, filter it into a clear list of priorities to focus on, and follow up to create collaborators that drive continuous improvement.