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Countable Ops Manual

Feedback Loops

Table of Contents

Purpose

To cover one of our core principles at Countable: shortening feedback loops.

Scope

Identifies the importance of feedback loops at Countable, some of the primary sources of feedback, and how to regularly connect with others in pursuit of useful feedback.

Feedback Loops on Your Work

One of our core principles at Countable is to shorten feedback loops. There is overwhelming evidence of the benefits of this.

One example is the biggest predictor of happiness in the YCombinator Startup School program was that startups who talked to users were 12.8% happier.

Feedback Sources

This is a list of the different places you can get feedback from, depending on what’s most helpful.

You don’t need them all for every project, but you should use at least one of them each day, ideally several times per day.

Clients

  • Where possible, talk or email with clients directly rather than getting your manager to relay information.
  • Provide screenshots and a report discussing your work to your clients at least once per week, and as often as once per day in between. If you don’t have access to the client, send this to your manager instead.
  • Ship your work every sprint (usually 2 weeks), and show them a link to your changes.

Metrics

  • What can you measure that captures the value of your work. Ask your team and manager to figure this out.
  • Use your “key results” from our OKR spreadsheet. Your job is to get a score of “1” on these, and by estimating your score, you can get feedback by yourself.

End-users

  • These people are often your client’s customers. It’s whoever actually uses the product you’re working on.
  • Talk to them. Connect with them any way you can so they can tell you about their experience and thoughts. Send them a video, screenshot or update on new features they’ve asked about, and ask them what they think.

Testing

  • Use the software yourself and pretend to be a user. The goal is to get inside your persona’s head.
  • Write automated tests.
  • Use this sparingly as it’s less reliable as outside feedback.

Your Team

  • Discuss all the above results with your team, and show them your work, asking for how to improve.
  • Send your team screenshots, videos, code reviews and other artefacts of what you did.

Your Manager

  • Your manager can give you feedback sometimes, but their more important job is to help you get feedback from the real word (see those sources above)

Forward Feedback (Status Reporting)

You should update your team and clients each day with what you’ve been working on via Slack, Email and Trello. For the latter 2, these are some guidelines to help ensure effective reporting.

  • Make sure the business goal under discussion is clear, mention it directly.
  • Indicate what steps you’ve taken.
  • It’s great to provide an example (stage site link, screenshot, video, etc) of your work.
  • Ask any questions you have, or anything you’re unsure about.
  • Indicate your assumptions about the questions, and how you’ll proceed by default because this way you make it easy for the person reading the update to respond. (They can say “That’s right”, or “Yes, except…” or “No, I meant this other thing.” or “No, let’s have a quick chat on the phone, something’s been missed.”)
  • Use the language of your user (user stories) in the update.

For example, updating a client:

Hi Merlin (client name);

I worked on helping increasing customer signups (business goal) today, and fixed a number of small usability issues (steps taken). See stage.countable.ca and let me know how it looks (example of work)!

I assume it's ok in the signup form to ask for a phone number after they've already given an email, so we don't lose the customer, right (question with default assumption)?

As always, let me know if you have any questions!

Nervous? Just send it to your team first and they’ll tell you if it sounds good for the client.

Example of updating your team:

Hey team,

Signup flow UX fixes are staged, I hope it will help us improve signup metrics (business goal), any feedback much appreciated! See stage.countable.ca (work example)

What do you guys think of moving the phone number after the initial signup form? I'm assuming it's better and will go ahead if no one objects.

Providing Feedback to Our Team

If you’re not sure where to add your thoughts, put them here.

Captured feedback from employees on how we can improve. Discuss these in team meetings.

  1. Better requirements clarity. - being addressed by Scrum
  2. Allocate resources to train new staff. - Survey on what training is desired at this point? On Reddit?
  3. Implement some engineering as marketing projects. - __
  4. Sometimes I wish we had more documentation regarding each project, something stating the project’s scope, deadlines, contacts, useful links (to the project or client’s website), list of emails (stakeholders), that kind of stuff. I usually have to take notes right after a meeting so I won’t forget what we discussed.
  5. Clearer goals (OKRs)
  6. Keep tone respectful / in dialog. Don’t create negative tension in meetings and leave it unresolved.
  7. task assignment that can be done asynchronously outside of a meeting.
  8. In my opinion we must open EVERY meeting with last week reports over our KPIs. It shouldnt be an option since we feel that progress is being made