{"id":20191,"title":"What happens to Feedback?","description":"On the top of every page of our platform, there\u2019s a button that enables anyone to submit bugs, improvements and suggestions. They can be categorised and tagged and you can propose your preferred solution if you like. This blog is about what happens next - who looks at them, how the decision is made about what to action when and what to expect from the feedback process. We've even thrown in some tips to help you get what you want, when you want it.","content":"

On the top of every page of our platform, there\u2019s a button that enables anyone to submit bugs, improvements and suggestions. You can propose your preferred solution too if you like. This blog is about what happens next: Who looks at them, how is the decision made on what to action when, what to expect from the feedback process, and some tips to help you get what you want, when you want it.<\/p>

\"\"
<\/p>

Before looking at how feedback is taken forward, we should take a moment to go back to the context. Enabling everyone to feedback on anything - big or small - at all times, anywhere, gives us a powerful opportunity to connect directly with the most important people in the platform: The ones actually using it. It also presents a problem as there will always be more ideas than capacity and therefore decisions to be made about priority. This is not about compromise, it actually hints at the solution: The challenge with feedback is to make the right decisions about what to do, or when. There is a scientific process for this which we use, and it\u2019s called triage.<\/strong><\/p>

The best analogy is a hospital. Anyone can walk in, and most will come with genuine ailments, or at least, ailments that feel genuine to themselves at the time. Let\u2019s imagine three people are in there. One has a broken fingernail, the other has broken their leg, and one has their leg missing. There is a job called a Triage Nurse, and they basically decide who to treat first. The person missing a leg would get immediate treatment, and the person with a broken leg might have to wait a short while. Interestingly, when it comes to the person with the broken fingernail, Triage includes making a decision to not-do something. There's a good reason to not-do stuff.<\/p>

The goal is to optimise our time to make the biggest difference for the most people with the resources and time we have got.<\/p><\/blockquote>

The logic of triage sounds pretty straightforward so far. \"Do now, do later, or No-Do.\" <\/em>Unfortunately, this is where people come in and make it complicated, because as humans we are subject to bias. Would the decision be harder if the person with a broken leg is the Triage Nurses child? How about if the hospital manager had made a point that morning about treating leg breaks promptly? Just two examples, but there's a science to it and a whole list of human biases<\/a>. Recency bias is a common one. It\u2019s the amplification of an idea based on how new and exciting it is. Another example might be authority bias, which causes people to give more weight to an idea if it\u2019s come from a person in authority regardless of the merits or otherwise of the idea itself. <\/p>

So a person who does triage well is someone who can conscientiously debias information. It gets even trickier to be consistent when there are multiple people making decisions - what if two Triage Nurses disagree? On a platform that encourages and enables everyone to contribute, there is a lot of information and multiple people making decisions so it makes sense to have some tools-and-rules to help with that. That\u2019s what we do.<\/p>

How we prioritise feedback<\/h3>

The first step is to assign the feedback to the relevant zone and the relevant impact. For example, it might be an internal issue that affects staff, or an issue with the platform that would impact shoppers. Then based on the potential solution, we score the issue based on Impact, Difficulty and the number of users-and-uses affected. Now we can use maths to generate the triage score as an assessment of this data.<\/p>

Something that only happened once, to one person and didn't really matter gets a low score. Something easy to fix, affects everyone and makes a massive difference gets a big score. We work from high to low.<\/p><\/blockquote>

This allows us to prioritise in a way that is debiased. It orders the pathway ahead in a way that optimises our work to deliver the maximum impact to the maximum number of people - both overall, and within each zone.<\/p>

\"\"
-- This is our triage system that collects, scores and prioritises feedback, and sorts it by zone.<\/em><\/p>

This last point is important. We might, for example, identify that the Christmas season is all about shopping, and so cut the feedback and work through the highest scoring items within the \u201cshopping\u201d and \u201cecommerce<\/a>\u201d improvement data we have. That\u2019s because it enables us to make strategic decisions to focus our efforts in a certain direction, while maintaining the benefits of a debiased and highly efficient process that maximises productivity.<\/p>

So you\u2019ve submitted your feedback, and it\u2019s all been reviewed by a human as part of a well-ordered process which makes sure the best ideas - wherever they came from - get prioritised. After that, the team in each zone incorporate that into their workflow. And we mean that literally. The actual feedback you submitted goes into a program we have called Workflow, which the team work from. It might be product feedback that the product team work on, or a software tweak that the software team work on. Here's Timbo in engineering, and his workflow - he's turning feedback into change.<\/p>

\"\"
\"\"
Generally, given the volume of feedback, we cannot reply to everyone so part of the reason for writing this piece is to let you know that<\/p>