Giving Feedback That Helps: A Guide for Non-Technical Clients
Strategies for founders to provide clear, actionable feedback to their development team that improves project outcomes.
A guide for engineering teams written by a non-technical founder.
How you give your engineers direction to get the most out of them.
"Move that button 3 pixels to the left. Make this onboarding screen feel premium. Edit that database schema and add a new relation."
These are useless directives. It's not that founders are intentionally unhelpful - it's that trying to dictate how engineers write code can be deeply damaging. I've seen bright startups led by a non-technical founder fall weeks behind deadline simply because the founder was unable to differentiate the what from the how of their application.
When our startup was young, feedback was constant: late-night Slack videos from clients showing their systems and complaining, "this feels clunky." It took engineers hours to decipher what 'clunky' even meant, and subsequent tweaks to the layout eventually led to regressions in backend data processing. It was a complete disaster, a whole engineering sprint lost to subjective aesthetic input.
As a result of this failure, we stopped accepting subjective client inputs. Today, we only use an objective, behavior-based feedback form.
Feedback Quality Checker
📝 Before → After Examples
A client sent: “The app feels slow and the design is off.” After our feedback coaching, they sent: “Dashboard load time is 6s on 4G. The card spacing is 8px but should be 16px per the design file, frame 42.” — Resolution time dropped from 3 days to 2 hours.
The Problem with Prescriptive Inputs
The gravest mistake a non-technical founder can make is trying to tell an engineer how to code the software. Engineers are hired for their system design expertise, not their typing speed. Telling them how to do something injects potential critical flaws, because you're asking them to implement another person's system design, not their own, into working code.
Stop giving engineers precise, prescriptive instructions. Only provide behavioral specifications. An engineer should be given information on what data is being provided to the system, how that data should be transformed by the system, and what should be provided as output after the transformation. Instead of saying, 'my webhook isn't firing, what's wrong?' when leads aren't being added to your custom GoHighLevel fields, send an actual snapshot of the data you're providing.
| Bad prescriptive inputs | Good behavioral inputs |
|---|---|
| "This api call isn't working, when will that server be sped up?" | "This webhook takes 4 seconds to get accepted, and the API itself then takes an additional 4 seconds to respond." |
| "There's too much clutter on this Flutter app. Let's clean up the UI." | "The text is overlapping the main call to action button on the iPhone 13 screen." |
| "Maybe we should host that data somewhere else?" | "Digital Ocean is giving us 504 gateway timeouts on the staging server when uploading a file." |
These look like trivial technical tasks, but fixing them on a staging server will take about 20 minutes of reproduction and analysis per item-far better than the wasted hours spent sifting through Slack messages for a subjective answer. The massive benefit is that engineers can identify and fix actual problems instead of spending days hunting for obscure, unknown issues.
Abandon the Happy-Path Test
When non-technical founders interact with their application, they almost invariably perform a "happy-path" test-they input data that, under ideal network conditions, is supposed to be handled by the application and produce perfect output. While useful, this is only the bare minimum for effective QA.
Instead, you should be actively trying to break the application. Pass an emoji into a numeric field to see if it's handled by validation. Simulate a network error to observe how the application recovers.
Poor Founder Testing: `[Start application] -> pass correct inputs -> application works (engineering problems hidden)`
Intelligent Founder Testing: `[Start application] -> simulate dropped network connection or an edge case -> application handles failure gracefully (runway is safe)`
We had a client who, through trying to put an emoji in a required password field, managed to crash the entire application on an authentication loop. If she'd found that in production, it could have caused a massive data loss.
Closing the Feedback Loop
Wasting a whole startup's time by allowing client suggestions to rewrite production's UI on the fly is not productive when you're trying to build a complex backend system. You need to set limits on feedback. Any changes that are suggested should only be implemented after the sprint is complete, during a final sprint review. Remember: your engineers are system architects, not code typists. Provide them with behavioral specs and let them take ownership of the system. Test their implementation through functional testing on staging!
Are you giving your engineers prescriptive instructions or behavioral specifications?
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