How to manage conflicting feedback as a founder ➡️⬅️
Founders receive lots of feedback, advice, and opinions from customers, investors, well-meaning people. Here are a few tips to manage the information overload especially when its conflicting feedback
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Now on to the topic of today..
Photo by Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash
Have you ever received conflicting feedback?
As a founder it is likely you’ve received feedback from several smart people you admire and they are all saying very different often conflicting things. You find that because of this, you end up overwhelmed, unsure of your self, and not quite sure what to do next?
As a founder building a business, you’ll receive lots of feedback and your success or failure sometimes rests on how well you are able to manage this feedback.
Beyond receiving feedback, perhaps a more important skillset is synthesising the feedback to figure out which is relevant to you. This is a delicate process. Without pruning the feedback, contextualising it, and finally deciding which to apply or outright ignore, you face a situation where the advice makes you indecisive, or when you incorrectly apply, makes things worse.
Your ability to syntehsize feedback will directly impact the quality of the information that will inform your decisions. The quality of your decisions will directly impact the success of your business. So this is a critical skill to have.
Here are a five ways to help you think of feedback in a way that feedback doesn’t end up overwhelming, misleading, or under-utilised.
1. Analyse the messenger and the message
When receiving feedback, beyond thee feedback, try to understand the person who is giving the feedback. What is their context, bias, experience and lens to which might impact the their perspective. A simple pulse check is:
💡If there is no data or evidence to suggest that the person is specifically knowledgable in the area they are giving feedback you probably want to take it with a pinch of salt
Note: Specifically above is in bold for a reason. Just because someone is smart in one area does not mean they are in other areas. Figure out their actual expertise here and anchor on that. Everything else is noise.
We all bring biases to our feedback. Try to pin-point their bias. Figure out what from their background or experience might colour their feedback in a way that may or may impact the quality of the feedback being shared and how relevant it might be to you.
Ironically, sometimes the more experienced they are, this could mean the deeper the bias leaving limited room for flexibility in their thinking. So, do have this in mind.
Finally, try to understand both what they are saying and what they are not. Read in-between the lines, and validate or disprove your hypothesis by asking follow up questions focusing on the “why” over the “what”.
2. Receive feedback from numerous sources
This goes without saying, but might be prudent to get feedback from a few sources before taking it as enough signal to influence your decision.
Yes, there are more experienced folks out there who know more than you do, they also bring biases based on their unique experiences and sometimes these unique experiences don’t apply to you.
Conversely, there is such a thing as too much feedback. Be careful of this. Sometimes you just need wrap up with receiving feedback and actually take action. Don’t be crippled by receiving too much feedback such that the path becomes less clearer than when you started.
3. Interpret the feedback in context of your specific scenario
Feedback is only as useful as your ability to make it make sense in your context. If you are a pre-seed startup, and receiving advice from growth stage investors for your fundraising strategy, that might be ill-advised, even though they probably have “experience”
If you’re receiving go-to-market advice from a founder who built in the 2010’s era, might be worth asking yourself how times have changed and in turn how that might affect the quality of their feedback.
Finally, sometimes you’re literally taking a path that hasn’t quite been taken before.
No feedback could fit exactly with what you’re going through and some could actually be dangerous to apply feedback directly to your situation without contextualising it.
4. Don’t be afraid to experiment to gather data
Treat feedback as a hypothesis to be validated or disproved. If you have decided that you have received quality advice and try to incorporate it into your decision making, an iterative and experimental approach is wise to allow you test the outcome and double down as you see the desired results.
Don’t be afraid to be wrong, and boldly face the data generated by your current decisions. Is your strategy working? What does the data say? Is the advice you’ve received and applied helping? What does the data say? If there’s no data, can you run an experiment to generate data to help you make an informed decision? Doesn’t have to be a complex process.
An experiment is just trying different things.
5. Trust yourself a little more
Being a founder, especially for the first time can be a tough lonely experience. You might be acutely aware of how much you don’t know, and how much you need to learn and it might all be overwhelming because you don’t want to get things wrong.
But here’s the thing, I believe founders are a bit like visionaries, prophets. You see the world you’re trying to create with your solution in it long before we laypeople do, and that clarity of vision is often an expression of a knowledge you carry within.
Trust this knowledge and the fire you carry within you. There is something you know and see that the world hasn’t quite caught on yet. It might not be exact, but it is a pure form of energy, trust it.
You won’t always get things right, in fact expect that you will make many mistakes on the journey, but trust that you will learn what you need to learn and grow where you need to grow.
Finally, remember, indecision worse than making a wrong decision. Why? because even if you make a wrong move at least you can then learn from it. With indecision you’re just frozen. Indecision is dangerous, and fortune favours the bold.
Don’t be afraid to fail, just make sure you’re failing forward.
Till next time👋
Maria
P.s Always looking to make sure i’m sharing relevant and valuable information with you. Got feedback, thoughts, questions or comments? Send them to me here!