In retrospect, Feedback Week was so simple, that I was shocked to learn that no one had tried it before.

Feedback Week’s mechanism is straightforward: for one week, everyone on the team was randomly assigned another team member, and they would gather one-to-one feedback from everyone else, on behalf of their recipient. At the end of the week, everyone synthesized their feedback and delivered it to their recipient. This is a common practice for engineering managers to perform on behalf of their reports, but why had it never been done within teams?

In this Ignite Talk, I’ll start by briefly highlighting our definition of Good Feedback: feedback should be Timely, Actionable, Specific, and Kind (TASK). I’ll detail how performing feedback collection completely within our team made us not only stronger engineers by virtue of receiving technical feedback (a rarity!); it also made us more empathetic and more attentive to recording meaningful feedback during our regular work cadence.