Throughout my own life, I’ve been great at avoiding difficult conversations. They probably didn’t mean to do that or I’m sure that’s not how they intended to come across. My own inability to give and receive feedback is one of the areas that has been most difficult to develop.

As my team grows at work, I’ve found myself having to relay what has been taught to me. After feeling the I’m not qualified to discuss such things! bite of Imposter Syndrome, I’m deciding to put together this blog post series.

Hopefully by putting together this series, you too can get better at giving feedback. You’re likely a software engineer if you are reading this. The ability to gracefully give and receive feedback will help your professional relationships and your career. It will result in better software and better products.

We’ll dive into this in the following blog posts:

These will draw from my own experience plus workshops that I’ve participated in at Gusto. If you’re looking to get serious about this stuff at your own company, I highly recommend working with LifeLabs.

If you find better ways of discussing these topics, please let me know via email or Twitter.


Special thanks to Justin Duke, Emily Field, and Omri Ben Shitrit for providing feedback on this series.

Illustration by Ash Jin.