For Scrum Teams, all Feedback is an offer to continue a Conversation | by Paddy Corry | Serious Scrum | Aug, 2020

I have thought about this conversation a lot since.

Scrum provides a way for teams to introspect and make small, incremental improvements every Sprint and that’s awesome. It’s one of the best parts of working in a Scrum Team.

Sometimes though, through the use of voting systems or working on the top priorities only, feedback can get overlooked.

Something that comes up in a retro might still need attention, even if it isn’t hitting the top three after the dot-voting finishes…

With well-intentioned feedback from a Scrum Team in a retrospective, sometimes what really counts is the conversation that starts afterwards.

Not all feedback needs to generate change: in the story above, my position was actually pretty weak, because I had not even responded to my team-mate’s feedback before that point. I had not deemed it a priority, because that issue had not bubbled to the top of the retrospective voting: it still hadn’t! Perhaps though, that was adding to my team-mate’s frustration this time.

I believe my team-mate was not frustrated about a lack of change: she was annoyed because nothing had happened since she mentioned the issue. Not even a follow-up conversation.

Receiving feedback is a lot to do with demonstrating listening skills. You can demonstrate those listening skills even better by responding appropriately, and that can start with something as simple as a conversation.