At Circuit, we want to remain a small company even as our products’ impact grows. This means we must find a way to consistently increase our rate of progress over time without resorting to adding management layers or hiring more people.
Due to the way we structure work at Circuit, your manager is very likely not directly responsible for reviewing or approving your work. Because of this, it’s much harder for managers to find opportunities to give consistent tactical feedback than it is at other companies because they generally aren’t close enough to your work.
Given this difference in work style, the best way for our specific company to accomplish this goal is to increase our rate of progress by learning from those you collaborate with directly, aiming to eliminate waste and unnecessary work, and, as a result, getting more meaningful work done each week.
Learning from those you collaborate with happens most quickly when you receive direct, tactical feedback on your work from those in a similar context to you.
We know that providing and receiving this type of feedback from your colleagues can be difficult. The goal of this framework is to bring structure to the process, making it easier to give and receive feedback to anyone you work with.
The Feedback Framework is designed to help us get more comfortable with giving - and receiving - feedback by outlining a few steps that both the giver and receiver of the feedback should follow.
The primary goal of the framework is to reframe feedback around simply sharing your opinion rather than expecting specific change and needing to reach a consensus or argue the point with the person providing the feedback.
This significantly reduces the overhead of providing feedback because there is no need for it to turn into a debate, and the worst outcome is that your feedback is disregarded.
The 5 steps of the Feedback Framework can be broken down as follows: