Engineering teams that prioritize continuous feedback

Feedback is a gift.

At Indent, our focus is on human-centric problem solving. Whether it’s an engineer who needs access to a cloud storage bucket for 30 minutes – or the admin on the other end who needs to make sure the right people have access for the correct amount of time – our goal is to package different data privacy solutions to meet our clients’ specific needs. We want to be able to scale to the largest Fortune 500 companies and eventually also meet the needs of smaller companies like your local dental office. That’s why regular and open feedback about our product and business is so crucial to our growth. We view all forms of feedback from teammates, customers and the market, as a gift that both leads and motivates us to improve.

We’re looking for team-members who focus on the evolution of an idea to the final product, and can easily share their thoughts in real-time. In return, we promise to give consistent, candid feedback as well.

Trade-offs: We’d rather get raw feedback at the earliest stage of a project than wait to present an entirely polished end result. When receiving difficult feedback, we try to look for the productive takeaways and lessons learned for next time.

Everyone at Sparrow is a strong communicator.

Not only is communicating critical to succeed at Sparrow, but it is required for our business to succeed as a whole. As a remote-first team, we focus a lot of attention on giving and receiving feedback. In fact, our onboarding process includes dedicated training on feedback. Nearly all of our ~100-person team has joined remotely since the start of COVID-19, which makes open and transparent communication fundamental to our culture.

Engineers are constantly collaborating with the rest of the product team and our customer-facing Leave Specialist team to create the best solutions for our end users. For this reason, we look for folks who are good at seeing other people’s points of view and are extremely self-aware. It’s important for anyone who joins our team to be able to confidently share what they know, what they don’t know, and what they need help with. This is in part why our onboarding process includes training on giving and receiving feedback. We know this one training won’t make you a pro, but we’ve found this gives everyone on our team a solid foundation and shared vocabulary. It helps us see where common problems might arise and acts as a starting point for effective communication. Continuous feedback requires constant effort, so we look for naturally strong communicators to join us at Sparrow. It makes us stronger as a team, but it also just makes life at Sparrow better!

We aspire to the lean methodology of continuous feedback.

Every member of our team has a unique perspective and can contribute in valuable ways to both our product and our processes. We have formal weekly retrospectives as well as at the end of big projects. We don’t take these for granted since they are the best times to reflect on what we did well and where we can make improvements. The feedback we give one another is always specific, direct, and honest, and most importantly, it always comes from the desire to make the product better for our customers. We also do weekly demos to solicit in-the-moment feedback for work that is in progress and design reviews to critique upcoming feature work.

Informally, we give shoutouts to each other whenever someone is doing a great job or embodying one of our company’s core values. This includes transparency, supporting teammates and our users, or finding innovative, simple ways to make our user experience more delightful or approachable.

We’re obsessed with the process and love learning from our customers and our team members.

Our design and development process is centered around two-week sprints where we deploy rapidly, learn from our users, and continually iterate. Time is everything to us – and we like to work efficiently and optimally. That means team members need to feel comfortable stating their opinions and openly debating any decision we make that they might disagree with. Everyone has a voice in this company. (It’s just a matter of surfacing what you believe to be true in a constructive and positive manner!)

We gather feedback from our partners, end users, and analytics tools, and we’re focused on having researched business cases behind every decision we make. We want to hire people who have expertise in areas where our current team members do not. As our engineering team has grown, we’ve organically started to pair more. We’re not dogmatic about pairing in any way, and wouldn’t even say that we’ve cultivated a pairing culture, but our engineers naturally come together to review each other’s pull requests and work through problems together. As we continue to grow, we hope to move further and further away from silos.

Feedback is an integral part of how we improve.

At Remix, there are several ways we practice continuous feedback. It starts internally with wanting to help ourselves continue to get better everyday. We ship code as often as we can and it’s a team effort. We get input from other engineers before a change gets pushed to production. We value learning and collaborating with each other and believe giving feedback shouldn’t be tough. There’s a deep level of trust and respect for one another, which enables us to provide feedback that’s direct, honest, quick, and genuine. We do our best to take into consideration how team members prefer to receive feedback (something you can share in your user guide), whether that’s via direct message in Slack, in the moment, or a shared channel.

Creating tighter feedback loops also extends to how we interact with our customers. Before starting new projects we have a user discovery call to understand where we can help our customers improve their workflows. Whether customers share feedback in emails, calls, or in-person, we make sure to document it in a Slack channel so the entire company has visibility. This helps us define our roadmap, quickly squash bugs, and iterate on features. We also give a subset of our customers early access so they can beta test our new tools and help us develop the final product before it is released to General Access.

Our customers’ wins are our wins. Placing a large emphasis on open lines of communication with each other and with our customers ensures what we’re building has the intended effect and is the strongest product possible.

We praise those who give feedback early and often.

Feedback is essential for effective communication and psychological safety. However, we recognize giving effective feedback can be difficult to do – it can be uncomfortable and there's always a risk of triggering defensiveness if not done thoughtfully. As a result, feedback loops close and collaboration suffers on most teams as they grow. We care deeply about giving and receiving feedback in a way that makes others feel cared about and not targeted.

Whether it’s informally in meetings, via manager 1:1s or during all-hands, we put a lot of energy into developing good practices for giving feedback. For example, we have quarterly reviews since this allows us to check in with each other more frequently, and address what’s working well (so we can continue) and what needs to be improved. We also hold workshops on giving and receiving feedback and apply those skills in our everyday interactions. You can learn more about how we connect through feedback here.

We dogfood our own product and look to our customers to inform our roadmap.

While we’re still a small engineering team, we pride ourselves on our ability to bring products to market quickly and we do so by adopting an “MVP” mindset. In other words, we make smart initial investments – releasing a basic feature set quickly – and then we rely on the insights and feedback of our users before we determine a long-term direction.

We have a tight feedback loop with our customers through our customer success team and we regularly dogfood our products to get early feedback from internal users. We encourage all of our product team to take this results-oriented approach and we look for product-minded engineers who are skillful at incorporating real-world feedback into their work. This is how we stay nimble, continue to innovate, and outmaneuver our competitors.

Inherent in our collaborative nature is both giving and receiving feedback continuously.

You’ll never be in the dark about how you’re doing. All engineers have weekly 1:1 meetings with their manager, and everyone has the opportunity to give regular feedback to managers and senior staff.

Even as we've grown (and more recently made the shift to being fully remote), we’ve all taken time to pause and help each other out with constructive criticism and guidance. We pride ourselves on having an engineering team that is both focused and fully engaged, and we emphasize giving and accepting feedback with grace and maturity. That combination empowers the rest of the team to go forth and do their best work.