Do You Consume Enough Feedback in Your Process Diet?

Frequent product feedback is a central element of modern development processes. But there’s a wide gap between theory and reality.

Getting various kinds of feedback should be simple: you have sprint demos, user testing, peer reviews, and automated testing. The goal is also simple: teams can deliver better results sooner.

That’s usually understood if the team is focused on research or innovation. But most teams, instead, need to make specific deliverables with clear scope and timelines. Their customers, stakeholders, managers, and board all expect them to. They want to know what they’ll get and when.

So, how do teams factor feedback into their plans?

Realistically? Most don’t.

If they get feedback from demos or user testing, it seems to have little impact on their time commitments. In effect, teams (including their product people) often act as if they know all the answers upfront. Sometimes, it’s because they feel subtle pressure to act confident.

But what if they don’t actually have the right answers upfront? What if they deliver the wrong solution, or solve the wrong problem entirely?

It’s not that they don’t aspire to adapt and pivot when needed. Rather, the real world makes that difficult. Why?

For one, it’s hard to accept how much a team doesn’t know at the start of a project. Also, subjective problems may have multiple acceptable solutions, but it’s hard to know which one is best (and unsafe to voice doubts). Gathering useful feedback is difficult, as it requires time, attention, clear communication, and a representative user base. Pivoting or adding work to the backlog always has a cost and is never politically easy.

This boils down to the level of certainty people should have regarding their product choices. If it’s low, they should make fewer promises and invest more in finding out what’s right. Yet businesses don’t act this way. This is visible in their prioritizing of predictability over adaptation and learning.

If this pattern is present in your organization, break it. Shine a light on it, cultivate humility, and pose critical “how do we know” questions. Look into assumptions and validate choices. Involve more people in these conversations, not just managers and experts. Over time, all this will lead to better habits and results.