Guide to Effective Feedback
Giving feedback is one of the core tools in every founder’s toolbox. Founders typically need to start practicing this skill as soon as they’ve started working with a cofounder. (Yes! You can and should be giving your cofounder feedback too! It’s healthy relationship hygiene to talk about how you can both improve, and provides you with good practice on learning this skill before go-time when you hire employees.)
Below are my criteria for what effective feedback looks like, examples from my work, and a simple framework you can use to craft effective feedback.
Let's go through what each of these bullet points means one-by-one.
Effective feedback is explicit, specific, respectful and considered.
Effective feedback is explicit. This means that the words you use are direct, on-topic, and clear.
Effective feedback is also specific. This means that the words you use describe and identify specific examples or patterns in the other person's performance, output, execution, speed, quality, decision-making, prioritization, etc.
When feedback is both explicit and specific, it effectively focuses your audience's attention on the exact problem you're aiming to discuss. You are aligning your reality with theirs by efficiently locating the topic of discussion.
When feedback is both explicit and specific, it has the highest chance of being perceived as respectful and considered. If you are perceived as respectful and considered, you minimize the chances that your feedback will evoke a strong emotional reaction in your audience and you maximize the likelihood that your conversation will stay focused on the work at-hand.
The most common failure point I've seen is that founders think they're communicating explicitly and specifically when they are actually not using words that describe what they intend to talk about at all. If you feel frustrated that your teammate "isn't listening to you" or "keeps doing the wrong thing even after I've told them to change" - check to make sure your feedback was specific and explicit.
If your feedback is unclear and leaves your audience confused or frustrated, you're forcing them to bear the burden of decoding what they're doing wrong, and leaving it to chance that they'll magically know how to correct themselves. If they knew they were doing something wrong, they likely would not be doing it. Ambiguous, nonspecific feedback does not show respectfulness or consideration of your colleague - and disregards their desire to do good work for you.
The TLDR here is that the words that come out of your mouth (or your fingers) need to actually say what you want to say.
Here are some examples of what this looks like in practice:
"How we approach problems and how quickly we overcome them is a good trait for success at [company]." This is not explicit or specific. Explicit and specific looks like, "I've noticed that you've gotten blocked a few times in executing on [task], and that you went dark instead of reaching out for help."
"Having time blocked off for lunch every day is really important to me" is not explicit or specific. Explicit and specific looks like, "I noticed that you've been adding meetings to my calendar over my lunch break."
"You're focusing on the wrong things" is explicit but not specific (and doesn't check a number of other criteria, but we'll get to those). Explicit and specific looks like, "I've noticed that you've prioritized some things this week and deprioritized others."
"We need a product roadmap" is explicit but not specific. Explicit and specific is: "I'm noticing that you're a few weeks late in finalizing our Q2 roadmap."
"Senior-level devs at [company] are able to break down ambiguous, complex problems into a list of tasks" is specific but not explicit. Explicit and specific looks like, "I've noticed that when I give you ambiguous, complex problems, you still need me to break that down into a list of tasks you can execute on." This brings the person's awareness to the fact that we're talking about them, and not just 'our team' in a general way they may or may not care about.
Read through the examples I listed above, and put yourself in the shoes of the receiver. How does it feel to hear the "feedback" above? It's... confusing. Maybe you can imagine yourself feeling frustrated or defensive if you were given that feedback. Maybe you can't tell whether the speaker is actually even talking about you, or just stating their own broad preference. Maybe it feels like the speaker is implying that you take some action or do something differently... but they're certainly leaving it up to you to do a fair amount of demystifying and intuiting about what they want you to change.
Effective feedback is about the task, not the person.
Effective feedback is morally neutral. It is not a character assassination. Effective feedback it is not about a person, their character or personality, their motivations or mental state, or anything else that is effectively just your guess. Instead, effective feedback focuses on the person's tasks and their ability to execute on their tasks (or not). Effective feedback could discuss the skills they're using to execute (or may need to build), the speed or quality of their execution (or lack thereof), how they're prioritizing their workload (or not), or perhaps what they're optimizing for their decision-making process.
If you notice your audience reacting defensively to your feedback, that is because they feel attacked. Your feedback may have inadvertently edged (or barged) into feeling personal for them. When someone gets defensive they harden. They're no longer open to having the conversation you wanted and you first need to resolve their defensiveness before you can move on. Instead of hardening in response to them, remain soft. Don't be recruited by their defensiveness into escalating the conversation. Pause, apologize for potentially misspeaking, and then ask if you can restart the conversation from a blank slate - now or sometime in the future. Take a minute to review your script and revise anything that could have been interpreted as about the person and not the task - then try again.
Feedback is a skill that takes practice and you're not always going to get it right. 'Getting it right' isn't the goal anyway - the goal is to become an effective communicator so giving yourself more chances can be a helpful thing.
Let's go through the examples I've already provided to see which meets this criteria:
"How we approach problems and how quickly we overcome them is a good trait for success at [company]." This is not about the task. It's about what "we" do while implying that "we" does not include "you." This borders on being about the person, and I can imagine it easily resulting in confusion and defensiveness.
"Having time blocked off for lunch every day is really important to me" is not about a task or a person. It's just a preference.
"You're focusing on the wrong things" is a direct attack on a person. Even worse, it's a statement saying that the person is wrong. This "feedback" will result in defensiveness, and conflict will likely ensue which will leak time and energy away from getting actual work done.
"We need a product roadmap" is about a task and not a person. This criteria is technically checked but would need additional sentences to clarify who owns the roadmap.
"Senior-level devs at [company] are able to break ambiguous, complex problems down into a list of tasks." This is not about a task or a person. This is about a skill that the speaker believes senior devs possess.
Effective feedback describes the impact of the the person's actions (or lack of action) on the company's milestones, the team, or you.
This criteria answers the question, "Why are we talking about this?" It helps your audience understand that their work (or mistake) is important. It also links that person's individual contribution to the greater team as a whole by describing the bigger picture that you can see, which they might not understand or have access to. Describing the impact of the task (or mistake) will also help motivate that person to change or improve, and should help them prioritize the task in their workstream.
Let's take reworked versions of the examples we've been using and add an impact statement (in this color):
I've noticed that you've gotten blocked a few times in executing on your work, and that you went dark instead of reaching out for help during our pre-launch prep. This means you missed a few deadlines and engineering wasn't able to launch [the feature] on-time last week. What's more, because we didn't know what was going on, the rest of us felt lost too. We weren't able to help you regain speed or hit target.
I noticed that you've been adding meetings to my calendar over my lunch break, which means I don't have enough time to eat or prep for my afternoon meetings, so I've been really disorganized for the rest of the team this week.
I've noticed that you've prioritized some things this week and deprioritized others, so I'm concerned that your [main metric] isn't tracking where we need it to be at this point in the quarter.
I'm noticing that you're a few weeks late in finalizing our Q2 roadmap which means our engineering and product teams haven't had what they need to execute, sales is at a standstill, and I will need to delay our fundraise by another quarter - which we don't have the runway to do.
I've noticed that when I give you ambiguous, complex problems, you still need me to break that down into a list of tasks you can execute on. This pulls my time and focus away from the other mission-critical work that's on my plate.
Effective feedback contains only observable facts.
Effective feedback contains fact-based observations - not your judgments, opinions, assumptions, guesses, or subjective, "squishy" thoughts that someone could easily disagree with. Effective feedback is about things that did (or didn't) happen in the real, tangible world that we all share. Both people should be able to point to the actions your feedback describes and unambiguously declare, "Yes Founder. There is no possible way I could disagree with your statement that those actions did or did not happen in exactly the manner you describe."
If your feedback is about subjective material, you run the strong risk of roping your audience into a 'right vs. wrong' opinion-based argument about what did or didn't happen. You will be stuck (and will have stuck your cofounder) in an uncomfortable, energetically expensive ouroboros of reality vs. reality. This cycle will waste time and energy, accrue more relationship debt, and worst of all, will never actually resolve the work that needs to be done.****
Stick to your observations - of a success or failure, or of a pattern of behavior that is based in objective reality.
Effective feedback re-establishes accountability.
The reason you hired a team is because you couldn't do all the work required to grow your startup. Keep this in mind when you deliver feedback: You're talking about someone else's work, not your own. Do not allow yourself to reclaim ownership of the task or its successful execution. Leave the opportunity to grow, change, and succeed squarely in the court of the person you're speaking with.
You are the indirect object of your team's success, and your feedback should re-establish your position in that supporting role. Your role is to provide guardrails (information, clarity, direction, timeline, resources, prioritization) while the other person drives the car.
When founders forget this and muddy ownership or take back responsibility when giving feedback, it can be demoralizing and disempowering for their direct report. Un-delegating effectively robs your team of the opportunity to learn, gain confidence, and grow into or expand their role. It nurtures anger and stifles motivation. It also kills accountability. If you don't allow your team to fail (sometimes quickly, sometimes repeatedly), you disabuse your management layer of firing quickly and re-hiring a better fit.
Effective feedback uses emotion as a data point (if relevant).
Effective feedback sometimes contains phrases like, "I find myself frustrated because..." or, "I'm concerned because..." when that emotion is relevant and provides context for the broader conversation. Emotion can be a useful data point that underscores the importance or impact of the feedback being delivered.
Naming the emotion also often diffuses it, which then allows for a productive conversation to take place. It can also put the other person at ease by allowing them to 'find' your emotion in the conversation, so they don't have to guess at what it could be (which is often anxiety-inducing for other people).
The most common antipattern I've noticed is when founders' emotion is intense, unnamed, irrelevant, and/or pervasive. For example, they're angry that something wasn't done properly and they show their anger by speaking loudly, using terse sentences or personal attacks, displaying no curiosity or openness to mutual problem-solving. They never actually saying the words, "I'm angry because..." and instead, it's reflected in their behavior. This antipattern can feel scary to other people and can shut down both productive conversation and effective work. The emotion is unmanaged and unnamed, and it often inspires intense emotions in other people which all will need to be resolved before effective work can take place again.
Effective feedback redefines expectations (success criteria, timeline, etc).
Effective feedback doesn't just tell someone they're off-course. It also tells them how they can get back on-track. You do this by defining (or redefining) your expectation of them and providing them with clear success criteria, as well as a timeline for when the task will need to be completed by. You are literally telling people how they can be successful. When done expertly, you are working in collaboration with your direct report every step of the way to make sure the expectations that you're providing them are ambitious but also achievable, and that they have everything they need to succeed.
Effective feedback has a follow-up (e.g. 'let's check back on this next week').
If you've decided to give someone else feedback, the onus is on you to check back in on how they're doing with the plan you've created together. This next meeting will provide you with another accountability checkpoint. Throughout this process, you've clearly defined what isn't working, articulated why this task is so important, defined what 'success' looks like, and set a timeline for successful completion. You've crossed your management t's and dotted all the i's you can - now it's up to the other person to do the work.
Checking back in gives you the opportunity to provide your audience with positive praise on a job well-done (hopefully). If they still weren't successful however, this check-in lends you the chance to share more context, clarity, or direction. If nothing else, another failure may provide you with important information on whether they're a good fit for their role.
A Framework for Effective Feedback
Effective feedback doesn’t have to be more than 4 sentences long, and once you've got the basics down it shouldn’t usually take that much time to think through. Here’s my general construction for giving effective feedback - your script is in blue:
The first sentence is, "When you did, or didn’t do [x]..." where x is the explicit, specific, observable, and inarguable task/behavior. This incorporates #s 1, 2, and 3 from the criteria above.
The second sentence describes the impact of [x]: "The impact of [x] was [y]." This is where you can sometimes add in your emotion as a data point. Sometimes the biggest impact of a failure is that it makes you worried or concerned! That data can often be relevant for the other person, and it can be plugged in here.
The next sentence explicitly names the new behavior that you want to see: "My new expectations of you are [z]." You’re telling the person exactly how they can be successful. You’re giving them a clear path forward.
And then you’re ending with some version of this question: "How can we solve this going forward?" Or: "What will you need from me in order to hit this new goal?" This last question is important. It’s you explicitly supporting them, and positioning yourself as a someone whose role is to help them be successful. This gets both of your brains engaged in talking together about how they need to be unblocked or resourced, or skilled up in order to meet your new expectation.
This last question makes feedback collaborative instead of a criticism. Feedback then becomes a helpful conversation that brings you both together by aligning their success with yours and your startup’s.
Everyone's capacity to tolerate tension in a relationship is different. Some founders can hardly tolerate a sliver - so they'll likely want more touchpoints with the people they work with, will deliver more feedback more frequently, and will expect the same of their colleagues. Other founders can seemingly tolerate mountains of tension. They can absorb years' worth of it without ever feeling called to discuss their tension with others. There's no right or wrong here - just differences that play out differently in each relationship.
Kudos to Semira Rahemtulla (YC S15) who shared the original feedback-delivery script in a workshop she gave through her YC company Innerspace. It served as a foundation that I have built on.
