On Blunt Feedback
Blunt feedback can be life-changing but intent and judgment determine how useful it will be.
Blunt feedback can be life-changing, but only if it comes from someone with:
a) the right intent, and
b) astute judgment in the specific subject matter (e.g. products, leadership, influence, whatever else)
Both fail more often than we admit.
On (a), some people use blunt feedback as a manipulation weapon, or as an outlet for their inner asshole.
But there’s a subtler version that most people miss. In a toxic corporate environment, the real audience of the feedback isn’t you, the recipient. The real audience is the backchannel. The feedback gets delivered to you so that the giver can then tell others (via backchannels) that they delivered such and such feedback to you. It’s a Machiavellian strategy [0] to attach certain labels to you. Labels like: “effective but doesn’t follow process”, or “doesn’t think holistically”, or “good at strategy but not execution”.
On (b), when someone has the right intent but lacks high judgment in the area, their blunt feedback is likely to be wrong — especially when the recipient is already pretty good at their job (say top 10% or better). The giver is pattern-matching from their own level of skill, which sits below the recipient’s.
Later in my PM career (as I got pretty good), I came across many instances of blunt feedback that suffered from (b). In such cases, it takes confidence to ignore the feedback, or significantly adapt it so that it actually works.
Like most things I share here, this is probably bad advice for most people (who should generally be very open to feedback and act on it). But it is useful (and rare) advice for those who’ve reached higher levels of proficiency, where the conventional “feedback is a gift” advice can hurt them more than help them.
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[0] And this strategy works because most people in this backchannel — people who will likely sit in on your performance calibration meetings and promotion committees — have no choice but to believe the feedback. People are busy, don’t have time to interrogate the nuances of the situation, and they love believing labels that fit previous patterns (a common pattern most people — including some very talented people — believe is that if someone is good at execution they cannot be good at strategy, and vice versa).
The AI layer makes it (b) harder to detect.
When the manager or leader uses AI to sharpen their feedback before delivering it with polished language, structured reasoning and confident tone then the recipient PM can’t easily tell whether the judgment behind it is astute or just well-packaged.
Currently we already struggle to distinguish intent from performance and newest challenge is to distinguish judgement from coherence.
The point about judgment being domain-specific: The most damaging blunt feedback I've seen came from people who were genuinely good at the work, just at an earlier stage of it.
They were pattern-matching from a level the recipient had already moved past.