The F Word: Great Feedback in Dev Teams

After presenting my session “Eight Ways to Ruin Your 1-on-1s” at Stareast and SQuADCon in 2019, attendees told me one particular area of discussion needed more attention: feedback. This session will be the session everyone knows they should attend but would like to avoid! Providing feedback is a necessary skill for individuals, teams, and organizations to grow, yet studies suggest 69% of managers are uncomfortable communicating with their employees and 37% of business leaders are afraid to give performance feedback. Although these numbers only address managers, we all need to show leadership by providing feedback to those around us in all directions. This talk will first define feedback, the different types of feedback, the market numbers around feedback, and why feedback is a necessary part of growth. Additionally, there are several studies to draw from that show how important receiving feedback is to people, particularly younger professionals. Next this talk will put feedback in different contexts of our work and explain why it is important in each context: 1-on-1 relationships, code bases and code reviews, bug writing quality, product design input from a user perspective. Lastly, this talk will provide specific tactical approaches to improve on a mindset averse to giving feedback, citing professional works and involving group exercises for those with the courage to participate!