Welcoming Feedback Culture in the Organization

Agility & Culture | 30 min | Englisch

DO | 11:30 | UWE

We welcome feedback in different stages of our day to day life. Either verbal or written, it should create positive value and help to improve personal and career development. Starting the feedback on a personal and scaling it to the organizational level requires a lot of thought, time, and effort. I propose to talk about how we started our journey with personal feedback starting directly from the onboarding process and scaled it to an organization with the help of the Request for Proposals (RFC) process. I will talk about how the RFC process allowed us to make thoughtful decisions and to not bogged down in endless debates.

How we improved the feedback process in Jimdo?

We start with a mentorship & buddy system, feedback workshop, and recurring feedback sessions during onboarding and even afterward feedback is an important part of our day to day life. This process boosts giving constructive feedback right from the beginning and increases productivity on the individual level.

We hold recurring retrospective meetings to understand our failure and success points. We even take an extra step and train people to moderate these meetings. Retrospectives expand feedbacks into the team level.

As a next step, we focus on the department level. We introduced the RFC process to get valuable feedback on ideas from everyone in the Engineering Department. We collect feedback on proposed ideas with a structured RFC process. It helps us to document every decision and also identify who is accountable.

At each level, we have a failure-friendly culture. There is no blaming for anyone. We encourage people to fail early and make mistakes because we know that the most significant learning comes from mistakes.

PS: I’m open to any feedback on the proposal and the talk as well to adjust it for the conference style.

Candost Dagdeviren

Jimdo GmbH

Candost is a Senior Software Engineer with a background in developing iOS applications and backend services. He has been working at Jimdo for more than 3.5 years. In 2009, while living in Turkey, he started coding. After university and experience in Istanbul, he moved to Germany. He believes that engineers should focus on solving problems instead of sticking with one side of technology.