15Five

Request Feedback

Overview

Problem

There was no way to request peer feedback in 15Five outside of 360 review cycles, which is often too long to wait to receive the developmental feedback people crave.

Ad-hoc developmental feedback is an important aspect of individual growth and a key component to Best-Self Management, 15Five’s positive management philosophy and biggest differentiator.  

15Five's top competitors offer real time feedback features, making this feature one of the top 3 reasons we lost enterprise deals.

DESIGN CHALLENGEs

Create a feedback feature that gives people the ability to request feedback from their team when they need it most, enabling them to have better development conversations with their manager.

Influenced by positive psychology research, create an increased sense of psychological safety while still satisfying our enterprise customer needs.

COLLABORATORS

I worked with a Product Manager, one Junior Designer I managed, two frontend Engineers and one backend Engineer

Role
UX Design
User REsearch
User REsearch
Year

Released in 2019

A UNIQUE DESIGN METHOD

Positive Product Design

Positive Product Design is the application of positive psychology and science to design products that solve user needs. It’s goal is to minimize harm and help people thrive. We used this method to inform Design decisions throughout this project.

OUR HYPOTHESIS

Can we Design a Feedback feature that preserves psychological safety, while still satisfying enterprise customer needs?

NEUROSCIENCE SAYS...

People hate unsolicited feedback

People might think they hate feedback, but the human brain is actually wired to desire it. We crave feedback, but we tend to have a negative response to it when it’s unsolicited.

Feedback is better when it’s requested

When feedback is requested, both sides feel less threatened and psychologically safe, people get feedback more quickly and frequently, and they can ask many people, reducing bias.
TESTING

We spoke to a dozen HR leaders in large organizations to validate our hypothesis

TESTING METHODOLOGY

Live user testing

A dozen HR Leaders in large organizations were presented a prototype of the request feedback feature and asked to perform certain tasks while thinking out loud.

Regular iterations on the prototype

Changes where made throughout the concept testing phase as common patterns emerged from customer to customer.

Measuring the success of our solution

We asked each participant: “On a scale of 1 to 5, to what degree does this solution address the needs we discussed earlier in this call?” 1 = Poorly, 5 = Greatly
CONCLUSION

10 of 12 participants said they would be greatly satisfied

The majority of participants said they would be satisfied with the request feedback feature based on the prototype they were presented.

We successfully married science, user needs and the business needs of our company

We were able to prove that despite not offering the same functionality as our competitors, enterprise customers would still be eager to adopt our science backed 'Request Feedback' feature.
SOLUTION

A Science Backed Request Feedback feature that helps employees get the developmental feedback they need, when they need it.

Asking for feedback and giving feedback can be hard so we focused on making it feel lightweight and easy. We also prioritized educating people on how to request and give the best quality feedback by embedding educational copy throughout.

SEE PROTOTYPE

Requesting Feedback

Email sent to peers
Email sent to the requesters manager

Giving Feedback

Email sent to the requester
Email sent to the requesters manager

Viewing my feedback

IN THE FLOW OF WORK

Requesting feedback via Slack

In order to increase usage and stickiness, we created a Slack integration that allows people to quickly request feedback directly from the place where the work actually happens, Slack. Our goal was to reduce friction to encourage people to request feedback more frequently.

CONCLUSION

What we accomplished

After the feature was launched, we conducted a deals lost survey to gauge whether or not the the feedback feature was still in the top 3 reasons for deals lost. In Q1 2020, this feature was Always, Often or Occasionally a feature gap 87.5% of the time.

As of Q2 2020, Request Feedback is rarely or never a product gap 73% of the time.

CONTRACT

Dream Career

TRADEWING

Mobile App

TRADEWING

Mobile Log In

MARU CARRION, 2022