Taking feedback - so essential for AWS every other tech company or startups
There’s a reason for this post: Last week I gave feedback to a good friend. It was something around “this thing doesn’t work for me, can you fix this?”
Within hours, meet and the whole week is about exactly this: giving feedback.
It’s a week where we get to talk and discuss in person with the teams we work with (mainly behind the scenes) through the whole year. We share - and openly fight with each other - on current and future AWS services and capabilities.
Feedback helps to shape what the next wave of things are going to be. Feedback for startups can mean to survive or to run out of money. Feedback for builders in 2026 means to kill your PoCs, your next generation SaaS or your newest feature if it doesn’t get good feedback.
As a content creator, feedback is the difference between success and “waste of time”. If you get good feedback, you know that your audience is interested in this type of content. If you get negative feedback, you know what better to avoid. If you get nothing, you don’t know what to do.
You’re blind and you continue to experiment. Which is never good.
…but listening and taking action is the hard part
Giving feedback if the easy part - and still a lot of us don’t do it. It’s even harder to listen - many of us don’t do that.
Listening requires you to pay attention in the “noise”, to ask questions if you do not understand the feedback. It requires you to pause and think before you move on.
In a world that feels like a german “Autobahn” with only race cars on it this is the hardest part: slow down, pause, listen. Ask. Understand. And then use your brain to translate the feedback into actionable items.
This is nearly as tirering as running more than five coding agent sessions in parallel :-)
The mindset of giving feedback - DOs and DON’ts
Many of us are forgetting how to give good feedback. A lot of us are also falling into the trap of “giving feedback to gain attention”. It’s simpler to get a viral post on social media with negative feedback than with a simple “thanks” or “well done” on social media.
Stories that attack are unfortunately more likely to get views, clicks, likes and comments.
This is the mindest I try to have when giving feedback in your day to day life:
- be positive
- give actionable things to do
- ask yourself: does this feedback personally attack someone or point fingers?
- share positive and not only negative things
- explain the “why” of your feedback
- ask yourself: what’s my motivation when giving feedback?
The bigger the audience, the more you should think.
My approach has always been to give negative feedback in private, ideally in a 1on1 - if I can’t meet someone in person, with a video call. I try to not take criticism into public, but sometimes I give hints or share hard(er) feedback in public. Before I do, I give the same feedback in private. There’s posts (like above - when I approached him with a request last week, he directly asked for the reasoning behind it and acted on it.
I’ve written about a recent good example in . When giving feedback in that role I represent an enterprise customer with a bunch of spendings on AWS and usage patterns that are “enterprise grade”. We’re building an enterprise decisioning and AI platform at FICO!
This is not comparable to my “solo enterpreneur” and “AWS Community” feedback, where my interests are completely different. In that role I do have other type of feedback. :-)
In my “content creator” role - writing I do create about any type of feedback.
Adjusting the path
As a content creator, I’ve been getting some feedback - positive and negative - and that made me change the way that I write blog posts, it made me adjust my social media posts (sometimes even delete them) and it made me adjust the way that I create and edit my videos.
This takes energy but makes things better - not always, but often!
My ask for you
Take time to give feedback.
This can be a simple “like” or “dislike”. It can be adding a comment on a blog post, a video or a social media post.
Contribute - and actively approach creators with feedback!
If you use open source software, take time to raise an issue on the Github repository if you want have feedback.
Thank you for contributing and for making the world a better place!
Reach out to me on if you have any feedback for this post!
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