Flashtags

A ritual to help convey your conviction when giving feedback.

I was at a dinner this week and sitting next to my friend Yuhki, who runs product at Figma. We were talking about rituals and he mentioned one from HubSpot CEO Dharmesh Shah.

It starts from a common problem. As a leader, you’re constantly asked for feedback. But, it’s far too easy to have teams mis-interpret the weight of your feedback, or hesitate to regularly share work because they’re unsure how to handle the feedback. This problem gets multiplied when you have an opinionated product or executive team. And who doesn’t have that.. :)

So Dharmesh created a ritual called Flashtags. The basic idea is to ensure you’re conveying how strongly you feel about the feedback you’re giving. In this case, you use a pre-defined schema of hashtags. Dharmesh uses the test of — ‘would you die on this hill?’ and then gives four classes of feedback:

• #fyi — had a thought, no real hill to die on.

• #suggestion — there’s a hill, I’m not going to die on it. But this is what I would do if I were you.

• #recommendation — I’m climbing the hill, I won’t die on it. But I’ve thought about this a lot, and don’t ignore the feedback.

• #plea — I don’t like dying on hills and that’s not really what we do, but this is a good candidate for it. You should trust me on this one, the same way I trust you on many other ones.

I love this ritual because one of the hardest parts about being a product leader is giving feedback that is timely, appropriate given the situation, clearly communicated, and ultimately understood. This simple ritual gives one tactical way to do that on a daily basis across all different kinds of artifacts. If you want to learn more, you can read Dharmesh’s original post here.

Would love to hear about any feedback rituals you have in the comments!

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