Amplify Feedback

Coaching employees is an important daily practice to ensure they know we are tracking their work and care about their output.

Feedback is the mechanism by which an organization communicates its expectations to the individuals who do the work. In many organizations, feedback is sporadic, informal, and often delivered too late to be actionable. The SADMF principle of Amplify Feedback ensures that feedback is constant, structured, and impossible to ignore. When employees know that their every action is being observed, measured, and reported, they naturally align their behavior with organizational expectations. This is not surveillance; it is coaching at scale.

The primary feedback channel in the SADMF is the daily status interrogation conducted by the Feature Captain. Each morning, every Code Engineer reports what they completed yesterday, what they will complete today, and why they failed to complete what they committed to yesterday. This third question is the most important, because it establishes a daily rhythm of accountability that prevents engineers from quietly falling behind. The Feature Captain records all responses in the status tracking spreadsheet, which feeds into the Chief Signals Officer’s daily Feature Completion Ratio report.

Amplifying feedback also means ensuring that feedback flows upward through the proper channels. The Scrum of Scrum of Scrums ceremony aggregates team-level status into organizational dashboards that give the Commodore and Admiral’s Transformation Office a comprehensive view of who is on track and who is not. This multi-layered feedback architecture ensures that no individual’s performance can escape notice, regardless of how many teams or features are in flight. The feedback signal is amplified at every level of the hierarchy until it reaches the people empowered to act on it.

The framework recognizes several categories of feedback, each with its own amplification mechanism. Performance feedback is amplified through the Lines of Code per Code Engineer and Tasks per Code Engineer metrics, which provide objective, quantitative data that eliminates the ambiguity of subjective assessment. Quality feedback is amplified through Defects per Code Engineer tracking, which ensures that the source of every defect is identified and documented. Process feedback is amplified through the DevOps Process Excellence Assessment, which evaluates each individual’s adherence to the framework on a weekly basis.

It is essential that feedback be amplified, not filtered. Some organizations make the mistake of allowing managers to soften or contextualize feedback before it reaches leadership. This filtering introduces bias and prevents the organization from seeing the unvarnished truth about individual performance. In the SADMF, raw metrics flow directly into the dashboards used by the Admiral’s Transformation Office, ensuring that data-driven decisions are made with data, not narratives. The Tribunal ceremony is the ultimate expression of this principle: a regular forum where amplified feedback is reviewed and acted upon without the distortion of managerial interpretation.

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