hello everyone I’m coming straight to you from Berlin Germany and we’re here to talk about feedback today yeah we did we are here to talk about feedback and uh like I was telling you before we started recording I want to divide feedbacking in two big chunks if there is such a way to do it one is about product feedback feedback that you get about your product and that’s it and the other one is more General feedback even relationship feedback team member to team member teams in between teams and Etc so that’s that’s how I would like to break those things apart if you are good with that yeah let’s do it okay so let’s talk about product feedback um question that I get all the time Q how do we incorporate feedback in the backlog and I normally ask people oh I’m funny that you’re asking that right because you’re getting feedback all the time I mean as we release the product and we feel good at what we’re doing if our teams are mature enough or probably releasing pretty often sometimes even multiple times during the Sprint and ideal situation even daily we always having incremental changes in the product and that’s it and that’s going to bring feedback to us as you put a product on a service out in the market right you’re gonna hear from people I hope you hear from people and I hope you pay a lot of attention to what people have to say right and then what we do with all that bunch of information that we get that’s when things get a bit tricky that’s where there is a little bit of art mixed with science what do we do with this feedback right and um I don’t know about you my friend but I normally treat feedback product in three big categories so I hear from my customer my client my stakeholder or the above multiple times so but what do we do with this well I imagine one thing is okay you have a wish

it’s my product right now is does it meet your wishes right let’s say your new users say oh what about your products and Etc would like your product or service to provide this yeah we actually do so at that point is this gonna bring me that person in I’m gonna acquire that person I’m gonna sell something to them or it’s gonna help retain one that I already had so that’s one category then I go to the second one and I’m gonna be talking a little bit longer than usually here now you get feedback from other people that may not be your customers may not be your clients maybe your stakeholders but did you think about this these people who are providing us feedback are they in the target market that I’m in because if they are I better do something about it because I can grab these people right what I can do with this is I can penetrate to the market more in depth get more people in that particular Market and the Third Kind of feedback for me is the people who are not my customers yet I would like them to be but they are not yet or they are not in that particular Market so at that point what you do with all that stuff well there’s actually two options you either ignore it because they’re not in my target market I don’t think they’re going to be my customers anyway or you can say you know what I need to think about it because perhaps there is another Market segment that maybe we should be addressed so that’s what I tell my product owners and my product managers about the three chunks of feedback and how to classify them and take action based on what you really want to do with them so thoughts about it my friend it’s very interesting that you’re talking about three things because I actually more like when I talk about feedback I also closer classify it into into the three C’s and so for me um what usually needs to happen first is it needs to be captured right because yes we say the product owner needs to be out there with the customers yes we say we have the Sprint review and ideally we have a lot of customers in there that give us feedback but what often happens in organizations is that um the feedback isn’t really captured right there’s some anecdotal feedback um there might be even like some form on the website there might be some more structured ways but often they’re not capturing all the feedback that they could be getting and so a lot of stuff just falls off the table right and so that’s the first seed for me and the second one is actually centralized but now that I’ve listened to you I actually will change it to class classify it right because that actually makes even more sense and that means yes you have to pick it up you know like a Raider you have to you have to pick up on it but then what do you do with the data you need to centralize it somewhere to then classify it right because it doesn’t help us that one person is running around with some kind of feedback and another one somewhere else in the organization with some other feedback you need to I like structure it in the in some of the same format and centralize it somewhere so that you can then classify and work on it like you just described and then the third C is to communicate that right because the insights that are getting um that you’re getting out of that they need to be communicated somewhere and usually and I think organizations tend to be very bad at all three C’s of them is that they don’t pick up on the stuff right it just falls down even if they pick up on it it just reads rests in somebody’s head or in some system that’s not being looked at right so it’s not being centralized and so people can’t work with it but even if they do that they don’t communicate it out to everyone that needs to make decisions and guess what in scrum that means basically everyone right and so I think a lot of organizations are liking in that and then they don’t get to do what you’re what you’re describing right the classification and thinking about okay so is there maybe a new market opportunity there yeah and uh the classification is key because you know as well as I do right it leads to prioritization prioritization is a huge issue as well it’s probably issue number one right people have trouble prioritizing so if I if I understand where the feedback is coming from it becomes a lot easier to prioritize because if my priority is to deepen the market fit and I’m getting feedback from somebody that’s not in that market okay you know what uh great thank you hey but we that we need to classify things in order to help prioritization because otherwise we end up with a very bloated product right everybody wants everything and I’m gonna put everything on my product or service I I try I use the product a product as a generic name for product or service right and they’re gonna end up with a bloated product so what happens is in order when you classify things you have the opportunity to say you know I have this I had this I have this perhaps I can create a single solution that gets me like these three big groups of people in there right and there is also the opportunity to say no I’m not gonna do that because that’s not in the market I see us going right now right so you have to also be able to say no no the idea is regardless of what you do with the feedback if you ignore it if we if you group it if you decide to do something about it you should be always listening to the current customers that you have but also the prospected because Market shifts really quick right how many people were caught with their pants down with the whole shot GPT thing right so if you’re not paying a t-shirt you’re gonna end up in a lot of trouble but I like the idea of classification to help prioritize yeah very good very interesting and the other thing that just came up for me while you were talking is [Music] um that there’s of course and this might be super obvious but there’s of course like different kinds of feedback right some is more quantitative and might even be worrying veering over into metrics almost right and then there’s more qualitative stuff and I was just reminded of that when I read an article this morning about um how Western Arms manufacturers are using the one Ukraine to test their weapons right because what’s actually going on is that all the ukrainians that have been trained in the west by American German uh UK military Trainers for example they all stay in contact right now I’ve seen this pop up several times and so they all have the numbers of let’s say the German trainers right and so if they’re having a problem with the system they call them right and this is some form of qualitative feedback and then I’ll say Okay so this doesn’t work as expected or we’re running into trouble if we’re using it this way and so on and this is super helpful and it needs to be captured somewhere but then there’s also more quantitative feedback right so apparently NATO has some kind of database where like all the systems that break down and have to be maintained repaired and so on are being tracked so they have this huge database of like basically every piece of larger military equipment that they can then say okay so I don’t know the German artillery is breaking down more often than the French one or something like this right which would be an example of more quantitative um feedback like almost metrics almost stats right and I think it’s very important that you actually capture both because if you just use one of them you’re probably missing some part of a picture absolutely absolutely and uh I think in one of the writings he says the people who only look at numbers are the worst of them all right because you are missing you’re missing a lot of the picture right there are some things that are hard to quantify yeah right but the qualitative feedback it’s very important right and uh I think a point that I also make all the time is there will never ever ever have a product you’re never gonna have a product that doesn’t have gaps the thing that you have to try to do is to make the gaps small enough without bloating the product so it can be the best option for someone all right so for instance if you’re gonna talk in military terms let’s say if you you created a certain kind of rifle right so the round may not be the most powerful but you can have more rounds because a smaller rather than other things so yeah I may need to shoot more times but it’s not as heavy the end was cheaper and Etc right so that without bloating to the point that no I’m gonna create a caliber that works for every single situation first it’s not gonna happen second if you do that it’s probably gonna be a monstrosity that nobody can carry this right again the bloated product so we have to be very careful in interpreting feedback right uh go ahead yeah actually this is a very important point it’s not that easy to interpret feedback right because if we think of you know we have a small team like a startup and we’re um creating a SAS solution for example and then we talk to the customers we get some feedback fine but what happens if you have a massive platform let’s say you’re running Twitter or you’re running you know something that have a has a that generates a lot of data for example Tick Tock generates an enormous amount of data right and how do you make sense of that that data right this is actually its own um its own science right you it’s not enough to say okay let’s put the feedback into a team’s Channel because there’s just so much data so much quantitative feedback that it’s very difficult to actually make sense out of it right and so if you’re in that situation you absolutely have to invest in the people that can can do that right some data scientists for example um some Market researchers and so on because um there’s a real danger that for example if you don’t know your statistics well enough that you’ll actually come to the wrong conclusions because you don’t know how to handle the data right and this is even more dangerous because now you’ve set up the system systems to capture the data and you have centralized the data and you’re trying to make sense out of it and then you know classify prototype is the backlog but if you’re not doing that right because you don’t know statistics very well you could be in a world effort yeah and uh we also have to be careful with buyers good point when you are talking when you are talking to a customer right you may be asking questions informally it doesn’t need to be a survey or anything but just informally right and you normally when you ask questions the way you formulate the question may be biased right because you are trying to formulate the question in a way that they’re going to answer what you want to hear yes and this happens quite a bit right and this happens quite a bit and the second one a lot of people may not be familiar with this is square it’s called the query effect it’s a funny thing the way our brains work if you ask somebody something they may not even have an opinion about it but the moment you ask they’re gonna tell you something they don’t want not to answer the question and that creates a lot of problems when you are trying to gauge product on Market penetration and wishes and that set but one tip I would give to people is if you are asking somebody something or multiple questions on out of the blank donation something that you didn’t ask that is the kind of stuff you have to take point to unprompted feedback is the one that you have been paying attention to because it’s something you didn’t ask but it’s something that’s very important to them otherwise they didn’t drop that Bond at that particular moment right so that’s what I mentioned there’s lots of things you can do with Statistics with data science and etc etc but there is the art part of it right there’s there’s the sensitivity of how to formulate the questions how to gather the stuff and be very careful buyers because a lot of times like answer surveys and Etc and I said well they’re masking this and this but that’s not how I think it there is another answer to that right but there’s no place in there for me to say I disagree with A and B and I think it should be Z right because the unprompted feedback is often the most important one yes and this is actually very true in marketing right so for example if you you go on a website and you sign up for a service or you want to have an initial call right with some service provider in the B2B space right A lot of them will give you a structured choice to tell them like how did you hear about them right and it might say oh the podcast or I saw some ads on on Google or something like that but this is the case in point if you’re smart you’re not going to do that you’re just going to leave it as an open form field right and see what people will tell you because first of all they’ll come up with options that you didn’t think about and didn’t put in your list to to choose from and then usually they’ll go a little bit further right and they’ll say oh I’ve listened to the podcast on this platform or I’ve heard it from this person right and so they’re going to give you more information that you can then zoom in on and actually get a much richer data set from exactly exactly and that again helps the prioritization which is the key element so we do not bloat products right and you’re without putting the most valuable thing to the market and I think one of the things that happens you scrum is we we tend to think too much and we have a backlog and we have to service that backlog create the product or service based on that backlog and Etc but often times the teams don’t pay much attention how that mythical better talk backlog was created right and even at leadership level I think we get a bit of car wash mentality especially in the it workspace okay let’s let’s get this out of the door let’s get this let’s get that let’s get that let’s get that but are we getting the right stuff out of the door getting stuff out of the door is relatively easy especially if you don’t care quality is even easier right but getting the right stuff at the right moment that’s key to have good returning Investments and that again comes from the feedback and comes from the proper prioritization yeah so cute what do you think are the sources of why people don’t work with feedback as well and as much as they should I think it’s bias it’s a big thing I’ve seen that to work a lot I recently have been helping people develop surveys and Etc and I can see how the questions are rated they expect people to us in a particular way the second this the tendency to more is better bigger is better right let’s put as many features there as possible and uh there is no actually analytics or studies of any kind to see do people actually use this stuff and how many people are using this right and uh that starts to skew things a little bit it’s like oh we have to be everything for everybody

I’ll give you an example many years ago when I was working on a Healthcare Company we as a chief product owner who wanted a certain thing on the product I can’t say much so not identify the company owns right and somebody told me one day and said Q I don’t get why this stuff is in there right I really don’t I said well I’ll talk to the chief product owner you know he said whatever I did and pretty much I got ignored and then I got killers and they start talking to a bunch of people right anyway to make a long story short we would spend this was eight or nine years ago maybe more and brought a bit over a million dollars to develop that right and we found out by just talking to people without bias that only three clients wanted that particular thing and would probably bring twenty thousand dollars that year in Revenue yeah so a lot of that is personal buyer so I think people need this he said why is that oh because I heard that I heard from how many people again is that the market we want to go are we gonna deepen the fit is this covered somewhere else in the product right maybe there is something that almost does that and it’s good an offer Peak so I think there’s the personal bias that comes to play and there is that thing that I know what the customer wants without actually knowing what the customer works whatever I don’t know if there’s a name for that right but those are the things that I see moveless that yeah which I think we cover the product part and off which brings me to the second part how do we give feedback for instance to team members between team members and Leadership or with feedback in general no we are always getting and giving feedback right so forget the product part how should we go about to say hey you know what I really don’t agree with that but I’m not gonna say anything because that person is gonna be upset so in your opinion how do we go about providing feedback in general about things not necessarily product well this is probably the key question right especially if you think of a um of the political climate right you have like very opposing camps that find it difficult to even talk to each other and so like finding a way to um make your point without pushing the other person away is even broader than giving feedback I think it’s it’s a very critical skill that a lot of people are lacking and and I’m not saying I have it I think it’s a very difficult task um so there’s a couple points that I would make the first one is I’ll try to always think if this person is willing um to even listen to the feedback and if right now is the right moment right and there might be some situations where the person isn’t willing and it might not be the right moment but that person still has to hear it right so you can’t always like um totally respect that but in general it’s a good idea to think about if this is really the best situation to do it right now um and then go from there then there’s of course the issue if if it’s critical feedback you know you’re criticizing the person can you do it in private right do you need to do it in front of everyone sometimes that’s actually necessary right especially as a leader but usually it’s best if you give critical feedback if um people are alone if you’re alone with them and then I also think it’s very helpful to if you have data back it up with data but often it’s more subjective right and then make clear that it’s subjective right you might say well I have the impression or um it seems to me right so I make clear that it is my perception and my perception might be wrong and I’ll even say that right so I might say so I’ve been having this perception and I might be totally wrong about it that so and so is happening right and so I’m not going in and say it’s obvious that you’re doing this right I’m saying well it’s my perception and I might be wrong can we talk about it and so then this is a different way of talking to each other than just coming in and acting like I like like I am the Arbiter of Truth and there’s no way that I could be wrong in this and you know immediately that person’s defenses are coming up that’s very true and uh I think the one of the ways that you explained so well is is to approach a I this made me feel like this app right from Life Point of View that’s how this impacted me right and it’s a very difficult thing again it’s more art than science because different people take feedback in different ways right I am the kind of person say just say it I you know if I got hurt I get hurt but I Wanna Know and what you guys think about this and I want very clear and direct feedback now what I want to know also is why do you think about this way right what made you provide this kind of feedback where’s the reasoning right again it’s my yogurt this a thousand times I think I feel and I know right so it is something that you just have a feeling about it you think about it or you know about it because if you know I want to understand the data and understand what what is solid about it let’s just get feeling right but there are other people who are very sensitive when you have to approach in a more sometimes even oblique indirect way right so it’s important to know the person that you are providing feedback to right and uh I think anybody can provide feedback now when it comes to Performance feedback which can be an issue in teams and Etc I think you have to speak for not a seat of authority from a position of authority you are actually pretty good at that you know the subject very well and Etc right or you are in a position in leadership and Etc but I I normally go between overall feedback and performance feedback which is something Instagram muscles have to deal with leadership has to deal with I think there are different ways to approach it depending on the kind of feedback that is required for a particular situation

yeah um but what’s most interesting to me is actually like turning the table right because um there’s always this discussion about how do I give feedback in you know and this comes up all the time but what’s actually more interesting to me is like how do I take the feedback right because we all get feedback if we want it or not and it’s actually not that easy um to always deal with it you just said well you just tell me right and and that’s true that’s how you are right you’ll just come out and say well just tell me the feedback right um but it’s actually not that easy for a lot of people right and so actually the best advice that I’ve ever heard on this and this is actually from our friend Kim she taught me this is to just say thank you for the feedback right and not react further to it which is quite difficult to do so if you have never done this this is a good exercise to do somebody gives you feedback and you might agree with it you might totally disagree with it but you don’t react to it you just say thank you for the feedback right and you say it in a way like you mean it and you should try to mean it and I think this was very powerful advice because how often do you totally disagree with the feedback and the other person’s intention might be pure they might be manipulative right but if you just thank them for the feedback that gives you some time to think about it later on right you don’t have to react right now you don’t have to quiz that person on like yeah why do you say that and and I think there’s an extremely powerful tool um and there is actually an interesting Corner case some people have real trouble getting compliments right and so they don’t know what to do with it right and so somebody is giving them positive feedback and they get super nervous and they don’t know what to do right and then they’ll say oh no but I didn’t do that much and so on right they’ll they like diminish their own contribution right and so just saying thank you for your feedback is also very helpful there because even if it’s positive it’s a very good solution yeah it is I I think it’s actually a terrific idea because he you may not agree with the feedback or you may even be offended by the feedback but the best thing to do is to diffuse it immediately depersonalize right say oh thank you appreciate your point right internally you may say oh my God you know I hated this person right but you know sometimes like you mentioned the Press actually has the best of the intentions right even though you may not agree with that sometimes they’re malicious sometimes you’re manipulative but most of the time people say well he was for feedback and now you heard what you didn’t like right I mean and I I said I said last week and a I said guys we have to be careful with feedback when you ask for feedback you have to be prepared to actually receive the feedback because it may not turn out the way you wanted and sometimes we get defensive because I don’t know we spent 10 months doing this it’s my baby I put hours and hours and hours and people look at that I said yeah not easy yeah right so it hurts but I’d rather receive that now then when I make that thing broad to most people and then everybody has the same reaction and that is even worse right but I think we have to develop a very tactful way to provide feedback but we also have to develop the the the capacity to take the feedback is not personal which in the majority of the cases it’s not yeah artificial okay three to the same way too I mean it why why engage into an argument I mean there’s no reason for it exactly and it’s probably impossible to just get you know very well formulated well-intentioned feedback right so you’re gonna take some bad with the good but you can’t just cut yourself off from feedback totally right so we have to get feedback as agile as but in general you have to get feedback and there’s gonna be some bad feedback not only bad in that it’s critical of you but that people don’t know how to formulate it well or maybe they want to manipulate you with it and but that just goes for the territory right and that’s no reason not to get the feedback and I think yep and I think um saying this phrase thank you for the feedback really decouples you from the emotions of that situation right because then you can always Circle back back here right and you can say oh Q is such an idiot why why was he criticizing me but instead I’ll just say thank you for the feedback and maybe after some time I think well maybe he has a point or maybe I don’t quite understand what he’s been trying to tell me let’s Circle back back and say hey Q he gave me that feedback I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about it right and now the emotion has already subsided and I’m not in some kind of fight flight mode right and we can just talk about it maybe you make a good point maybe you don’t but now I’m able to actually listen to it instead of like the blood rushing through my ears and I’m like wow how does he dare to criticize me on this exactly and uh somebody taught me a long time ago said Q another thing that’s a good idea is um to ask for permission to provide feedback hey would you like my opinion about this right because nobody wants when you go there and say well I think this is awful well hold on I didn’t have to ask her it may actually be the start of a fight right there right now we say you know to mind if I tell you something about what I just saw and Etc right um did you consider this and this and that and that you have to try to de-personalize feedback so it’s we we tend to take things personally especially when you invest a lot of time in doing something so you have to be very careful how you formulated so it doesn’t come like a personal attack you know it’s just your opinion so asking for permission say hey do you want to hear what I think about that right and say no thank you I look or yeah please you know and then apply what you said thank you for your feedback and then inside you can say right but that’s how we have to it it’s a very tough thing it’s something you have to be trained constantly to deal with I think you’re making a great point and I actually it resonated very well with me because so for example like when I trained my martial arts sometimes you know the masses going around and like giving you notes and then there might be some other senior students right and suddenly you have three four teachers running around among let’s say 15 students right and so what sometimes happens is that you make a movement and somebody will come and say well do it like this right and then you just like move for like one second and the next one will be I will say well don’t do this to do that and so on right and at some point of time you cannot absorb the feedback anymore because it’s just too much right and you cannot integrate the feedback anymore and then um and I think this is probably another skill as well if somebody asks you if you want feedback feel free to say no it doesn’t mean that you don’t want feedback it doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person it just might mean that you know you’ve had it you’ve had you’ve received like 20 pieces of feedback in the last 10 minutes and your ability to absorb it is not there anymore or maybe you were having a really bad day right and you’re feeling kind of sensitive right your nerves are really raw and then absolutely feel free to say thank you um maybe again tomorrow I I’ve had my fill for today yeah which is actually something I teach in product managing all the time sometimes you have to say no to a customer to a client or stakeholder right because that’s the best thing to do and you’re absolutely right sometimes okay I heard I heard 20 people giving me stuff I can only absorb this much right and even if I write everything down then do I need that much feedback because that can lead to product build right ever maybe these people never thought about this the query effect and they start telling me stuff just because I happen to ask right or they think that everybody else mentions something so let me see what they didn’t mention so I can add so there is a saturation point for everything right and uh it’s a very delicate situation but product feedback we have the advantage that we can categorize we have a bunch of techniques that we can use personal feedback in general about daily things and Etc it’s a bit more complicated it’s a bit more open to interpretation right

all right I think that’s about it do you have anything else no I am good for this I think I have to thank everybody for watching the podcast like us fingers give us suggestions and that’s it for this month from Dallas I am q and I’m not being full of the spot for the first time ever so this is actually putting me on the spot to be not put on a spot

all right guys thank you very much for watching us and I hope you subscribe to the podcast on the platforms that you usually subscribe podcast uh on and talk to you next time bye bye [Music]

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