😲 How to write great feedback in 360 reviews (every year)

The one principle of good feedback

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.

👍 How to provide positive feedback

Relate to the big projects this person worked on and their individual actions. Reinforce these actions as something you’d want them to continue doing.

Don’t bother about finding the data about the project. It’s not a brag doc for them. Provide a signal about a skill they are good at and they should leverage.

👎 How to provide negative feedback

Don’t blame. Don’t hurt intentionally. Don’t seek vengeance.

If you have a problem with someone, don’t provide the feedback.

Use the SBI framework (Situation, Behavior, Impact)

While you can use it for positive feedback too, it’s a must for negative feedback.

An example:

• Situation → “When a project is in tight timelines,

• Behavior → John shuts down and falls silent in meetings, even if he is the person with the most context.

• Impact → This causes the team to have no direction until someone steps in and gathers context.”

The situation will happen in the future and the impact is just a result of a behavior. The behavior is the part to change.

However, feedback in SBI format doesn’t provide too much value. Someone could just think: “I’m shy, That’s who I am.”

In your feedback, be forward-looking.

Most people won’t do it because it’s easier to push the responsibility of change to the other rather than thinking about how another person can improve.

Act from a growth mindset perspective. People can improve their growth areas. The way to show it is by making recommendations. Regardless if the person takes action like you proposed or not, your message now is forward-looking.

• Recommendation → “I suggest John to lead the conversation when he is the one with the most context. He doesn’t have to provide the solution himself, but ask questions aloud and turn the conversation into an actionable plan. He can gain experience by leading other meetings with less time pressure”

🎯 Conclusion

Feedback is a tool. Learn to use it and you’ll advance faster.

Its purpose is not to boost your ego or destroy your confidence.

It’s all about providing a direction.

If you are writing feedback half-assed, don’t write it. Providing a mixed signal to someone is hurting more than not providing any feedback at all.

The clearest signal is an action-oriented signal. Things to keep doing and things to start doing.

👏 Weekly applause

This week we reached 2k subs! Let’s get to 3k soon!

A couple of articles I found interesting during this week:

• 2024 Guide to Goals for Software Engineers by

  High Growth Engineer
  . In yearly reviews either we plan too many goals or too little. To be accurate, better to break them down by quarters.

• 2023 Year in Review by

  Level up software engineering 🚀
  . I found it inspiring as a fellow engineer writing online. But regardless of the goal, the principle still applies. Get consistent and good on something for a long period of time in order to get results. Find community to support each other and learn from them.

• The Ultimate Guide to Debugging by

  An Engineer's Echo
  . There’s nothing worse than being completely lost and blocked on a bug. This feeling of being lost is reduced if we have a plan to rootcause the issue. A list of tips in this post can give you ideas for your own process.

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