A person I know recently told me of a promotion at work. While I was happy for the good news, I couldn’t help but notice that this business analyst with more than ten years of experience was celebrating a new role where he’d be replacing another BA who graduated less than three years ago from college!
This got me thinking how often I see inexperienced business analysts and product managers beating the norm and delivering such good results that they quickly ride past more experienced professionals. And more often than not, what I see these top talented BAs do differently than the more experienced but less successful ones is how aggressively they seek immediate feedback for their work.
During most of the 20th century, psychologists argued about feedback intervention on behavior and performance. While some studies showed that such interventions improved learning, others “proved” that feedback has negative effects in performance.
In 1996, researchers Avrahan N. Kluger and Angelo DeNisi looked at a hundred years of studies about feedback and found something interesting: much feedback indeed didn’t help people improve their performance, and often made things worse. However, some feedback was extremely helpful to boosting performance. The key findings? Feedback interventions that work:
- are used in combination with clear goals;
- focus the attention on the task rather than the person.
Kluger and DeNisi found that the closer feedback moves our attention to ourselves, the worse it is for us. The key, then, when receiving negative feedback, is to separate ourselves from the perceived failure and turn our experiences into objective experiments.
And this is precisely what makes programs like Crafting Better Requirements so effective in developing both skills and confidence in business analysts. First, we start from a clear goal (developing requirements documentation and communication skills). Second, rather than seeing their mistakes as failures (something that implies finality), participants are trained to see those mistakes as simply feedback (something that can be used to improve). The program accomplishes three things to accelerate the participants’ growth:
1) It gives them rapid feedback;
2) it depersonalizes the feedback (it’s about your requirement statements, not you);
3) it lowers the stakes and pressure, so students take risks that force them to improve.
Compare that with the delayed feedback received by this BA:
If you think about it, that’s how most projects go. Even when working in an agile environment, it’s commonf for a BA or product owner to spend weeks fine-tuning a series of user stories and accompanying acceptance criteria, building up to one critical moment: the requirements walkthrough with business and technical stakeholders. On that day, the requirements artifacts are either a success or a failure.
In Crafting Better Requirements, on the other hand, participants are getting feedback for their work-in-progress every week (if not every day). During the program learners are put in a succession of situations where the idea is to fail in front of a “safe audience”: your instructor. By allowing themselves to embrace all these tiny failures, there is no actual failure. This is why in a short period of about 6-8 weeks they develop an exit portfolio full of evidence of the integrated mastery required for success as producers of high-quality software requirements.
Even if you’re not interested in Crafting Better Requirements, there’s a powerful lesson to be learned here.
Constructive criticism is a key lever for achieving mastery in any area of performance faster. In Talk Like TED: The 9 Public Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds Carmine Gallo describes how asking for and receiving early feedback for their presentations is a common approach successful presenters use to make a lasting impression with their TED talks. In Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World Cal Newport describes how feedback is a core component of deliberate practice, a critical approach for quickly mastering hard (cognitive) skills.
When you’re preparing for a presentation or demo at work, or starting to write the requirements for a new project, look for opportunities to get feedback for your early work from skilled colleagues or mentors. Remember, the timing of feedback affects how effective it is to help you get better, so don’t wait until you’re about to complete the work to seek feedback.
To remove the fear of embarrassment that may come from soliciting feedback for early material-in-progress, practice turning off the part of your ego that takes legitimate feedback personally when it comes to your craft. Think of yourself as a scientist, treating constructive criticism as an objective experience–a commentary on a piece of work in progress you’re intent in improving, not on the author. When you do that, feedback becomes much more powerful.
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