This guideline is for every member of FifthTry who talks to outsiders about what we do (doesn’t everyone who works at FifthTry does that?).

This is especially important if you play a role in support, marketing, training, development etc roles in FifthTry.

When you talk to people about stuff we do, especially about fastn stack, they will give pushbacks, objections, feedbacks. You are requested to create discussion thread in fastn discussion forum.

Before creating a new thread see if any existing thread captures the same feedback. If thread exists, add a new comment about the new source of feedback.

Upvote the feedback thread for everytime the feedback is recieved to help us guage which feedbacks are more frequent.

Each feedback should be independent thread.

If at all possible try to get them to create thread.

Once threads are created do share the thread with the person who gave the feedback so they can subscribe to the thread and be notified if we have an update.

Also share the link to feedback with the right team so they can take action.

Try to become champion of feedbacks. Adopt a feedback. See if work is happening on the feedback. With a flurry of feedback things will start to fall through the cracks, so keep the stuff that is important to you somewhere, and keep coming back to it till it is resolved.

Update and curate the threads to end users can get clear understanding of feedback.

We at FifthTry are trying to create an open source company. More and more of our thought process should be public. We want our decision making to happen in public.

The most important factor that affects our decision making is feedback we get from people who are using our products and services or are considering using it.

As employees we will hear these feedback in all sorts of places, meetings, random conversations etc. Based on these feedback we are updating our mental models.

But if these feedbacks are not made publicly available, outsiders, users of our product, potential contributors to our open source projects etc will not be replicate those mental models, and will have a hard time understanding our decision making process.

Few days back we spoke with new FTD learners Saurabh and Suryansh, and they were not too happy.

Then Ajit and Ganesh spoke with them and discussed their feedback in detail. We asked them to post their feedback. Based on that when Ajit spoke next day they were more enthusiastic.

Taking people’s feedback and giving them a place where the feedback is visible, gives people confidence as they are part of our team.

Moral of the story is people will come and they will find things lacking. We are a new technology, it will take us time to atain maturity. What matters is what we do in the interim. How do we make them part of the process and the solution. Collaboratively gathering public feedback is the first step towards this.