Engineering Honest Feedback
People withhold feedback because it's risky — your job is to make it safe and rewarding.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 94%
Jules Walter treats feedback as something you must actively engineer, because giving you honest feedback is a risk the other person takes. The protocol has three moving parts: ask in a narrow, specific way rather than 'how did it go?'; self-critique first to give them permission to agree; and react with genuine, external enthusiasm and gratitude even while your ego is bleeding internally. The prize is the subjective feedback — how you make people feel, how you come across — which is what gets said in calibration rooms and never to your face.
Origin
Jules Walter's own practice across Slack and Google, built partly on techniques from Matt Mochary (executive coach, previously a guest on Lenny's Podcast), whom Walter credits for several of the feedback-solicitation techniques.
Core principles
- 01Giving constructive feedback is a risk; unless the giver feels safe, they will not take it.
- 02Specific questions get specific feedback; 'how did it go?' gets 'fine'.
- 03Your visible reaction to feedback determines whether you ever get more of it.
- 04The most valuable feedback is subjective — how you come across — and is the hardest to obtain.
- 05Vulnerability is reciprocal: be vulnerable first and people will be honest back.
- 06Feedback becomes signal when you look for patterns across many instances, not single data points.
How to run it
- 1
Build the safety foundation first
Go out of your way to make people comfortable giving you feedback. Be vulnerable with them so they know they can be vulnerable with you, and signal explicitly that you want to hear things the way they experienced them.
Pro tip Tell people you want the untranslated version — most feedback arrives pre-softened to the point of uselessness.
Watch out Underrepresented people often have less default rapport with colleagues, which further suppresses feedback flow; the foundation work matters more, not less.
- 2
Ask narrow, not broad
Anchor the request on one dimension of one artifact: 'I did this presentation, I'm working on executive presence — to what extent did you feel I showed it?' rather than 'how did it go?'
Pro tip Name the specific skill you are developing; it converts a social pleasantry into a targeted evaluation.
- 3
Self-critique first
Offer your own critical read before they speak, then let them agree or disagree: 'I feel like this presentation didn't go well for this reason — what do you think?' It gives them a low-risk entry point.
Pro tip Often they will disagree with your self-criticism and volunteer the real issue instead.
- 4
Reward the risk, visibly
When someone takes the risk, respond with enthusiastic, sincere gratitude — externally, regardless of how it lands internally. This is what makes people willing to do it again, and it spreads: colleagues learn that you actually like feedback.
Pro tip Mean it. Walter is explicit that his heart may be melting inside, but the gratitude is genuine because the information is genuinely valuable.
Watch out A single defensive reaction teaches everyone watching that you are not a safe person to be honest with.
- 5
Chase the subjective feedback
Explicitly ask for the part that cannot be proved: how you make people feel, how you come across, the thing they would not want repeated out of context. This is the feedback that determines whether you plateau.
Pro tip Probe for scenarios when you hear it ('really? in what scenario?') so you can locate the behaviour.
Watch out You can go an entire career without anyone ever telling you this, while it is said about you in calibration rooms.
- 6
Look for patterns, not verdicts
Collect feedback over time and look for repeated themes rather than reacting to any single comment. Walter identified his tendency to write long sentences only after seeing enough instances of the same note.
In the wild
A colleague at Slack told Walter that his questions made him sound junior. Because he had spent years building trust and reacting gratefully, this person trusted that Walter would read the intent rather than the sting, and delivered the feedback untranslated. Walter probed it and realised he asked questions bluntly, without first establishing the context he already understood.
→ He changed how he frames questions — establishing understanding first, then asking the follow-up — a fix he says he would never have found alone, because nobody volunteers that kind of observation.
Someone told Walter that he came across as angry in conversation. Rather than defending, he asked in what scenario — and realised that his intense focus while listening was being read as hostility.
→ A career-limiting perception that would otherwise only ever have surfaced in a calibration room was surfaced and corrected.
Common mistakes
Asking 'how did it go?'
An open, low-stakes question invites a polite, useless answer. Feedback needs a specific target to attach to.
Reacting defensively or flatly
The giver took a risk. If the reward is discomfort, they never do it again — and neither does anyone who hears about it.
Only accepting provable, objective feedback
The feedback that ends careers is subjective ('they lack emotional intelligence'). If you only accept feedback that can be proved, the important stuff stays in the calibration room.
Is it for you?
Best for
Operators approaching a career plateau who suspect they have blind spots nobody is naming.
Not ideal for
Low-trust or actively hostile environments where honest feedback would be weaponised against you.
From the transcript
“The feedback piece, it's something that I had to get better at over time like asking for it because what I realized is if people…”
“Other thing you can do sometimes is you give yourself critical feedback in front of them and then you give them a chance to agree…”
“the other thing I'll say that is very very important if you're asking people for feedback is if you manage to get them to take…”
“And that's also why it's harder to develop and why a lot of people like reach like terminal levels in product because people are like,…”
From the episode
Leveraging mentors to uplevel your career
Jules Walter (YouTube, Slack)