How to write great feedback in 360 reviews (every year)
The one principle of good feedback
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The other day I received good feedback about writing good feedback. 🙃
I guess I got good at something I like.
Feedback season is my favorite season.
Not only because I have a salary review after receiving the feedback.
But mainly because I receive information tailored to me
I won’t be reading generic advice from a book.
People pay a lot of money for a coach/mentor to work with you.
Here, our companies offer it for free.
But to have useful feedback, people have to write it well.
And most people write fluffy blurbs with zero information.
Let’s put an end to it with this post.
In this post, you’ll learn
The single best principle to write feedback. Positive and negative. About yourself and others.
How I write my self-reflection
The framework that is a MUST for negative feedback
The structure of the 360 review
I have only worked at Amazon, but the 360 review is a general concept in the corporate world, independent of company or role family.
The feedback is structured as positive and negative.
Of course, companies add fluffy words around it like “Strenghts and growth areas”. But the principles are the same.
You’ll provide feedback to your peers, and do a self-reflection about yourself. The only is that for the self-reflection we have more data than for other people.
And well have some freedom to choose who to request feedback from. Here we want strong signals. Someone who worked a few weeks with us doesn’t have enough data.
As a rule of thumb, request feedback from people you interact with periodically (“every other week I interact with <> in <> meeting”) and not temporarily (“a small 1-month project with interaction with <>”)
Written feedback 101
Focus on the actions and skills of this person.
You want to highlight their actions, not the overall impact of the team.
Group those actions into a skill, whether it’s a strength or a growth area.
The skill is a bigger concept covering many actions. Actions are the evidence of the skill.
Here’s the single, best writing tip: Stop using weasel words. Don’t write like your company writes its PR texts.
🛑 Don’t write:
“I played a critical role in a time-sensitive project which contributed a significant business impact”
✅ Write instead
“I put strong writing communication into practice when I led project <> writing the technical design, breaking down into tasks, and monitoring the tasks until completion (on time). I aligned with dependency <> and sought a review from the principal engineer in our org.
I balanced engineering best practices with delivering business value when I implemented <> part, which unblocked the implementation of <>. The project resulted in <quantified business impact>.”
The self-reflection
In your positive feedback, showcase your biggest accomplishments (actions) and group them into a few skills you want to highlight. You already demonstrated these behaviors and you intend to keep showing them.
In your negative feedback, use it to validate your growth plan for the next year. You can share actions that you are not happy about from this year, your plan to improve, and your desired outcome the next time they happen.
You can also use the negative feedback to request opportunities to grow in an area. This helps managers allocate work in the team
People may identify different strengths and gaps than yourself. The 360 is an exercise of finding the truth, not what you perceive about yourself.
When I do my self-reflection, I always look at a rubric. At Amazon, we have clear role guidelines. I go through the criteria and rate myself as strong/medium/weak. I treat these as the “skills”.
Then I relate these skills to the actions and projects I worked on during the year and write my reflection blurb.