Most organizations struggle with process improvement. They either move too slowly, optimize the wrong things, or fail to create sustainable change. After years of leading engineering and data science teams, including most recently as VP of Engineering & Data Science at HealthRhythms, I’ve discovered that mastering feedback loops is the hidden multiplier that can make teams 10x more effective.
The secret? It’s not about perfect processes—it’s about perfect feedback.
Despite All Your Work, Your Team Isn’t Progressing
Here’s what typically happens: A leader identifies a problem, designs a solution, implements it… and then moves on to the next problem. Sound familiar? This approach misses the most critical element: the feedback loop that enables continuous improvement.
The result? Processes that slowly decay, teams that lose focus, and initiatives that fail to deliver their promised value.
The Foundation: Your Business Thesis
Before diving into system improvement, you need a clear business thesis that unites activities across your organization. While senior leaders often have an intuitive grasp of this thesis, those deeper in the organization frequently lack this context—making it crucial to make it explicit.
Think of your business thesis as your organization’s GPS. Without it, you’re just driving around aimlessly, hoping to reach your destination.
The Most Important Jobs for Leadership
Job #1: Distill the Business Thesis
Your first responsibility is making the business thesis crystal clear for everyone. This means establishing:
- A primary metric that serves as your best leading indicator for business success
- 3-5 key metrics that drive your primary indicator
- A straightforward dashboard that connects everything together
Job #2: Build Organizational Intuition
Creating understanding isn’t a one-time event—it’s an ongoing process:
- Weekly business reviews to track progress and set next week’s hypotheses
- Quarterly reviews to reassess whether your drivers are actually moving the needle
- Annual reviews to validate that your leading indicators truly map to business outcomes
Job #3: Empower Through Alignment
Once everyone understands what drives business value, they become responsible for driving it. This might be an unpopular message, but it’s why we get paid. Clear alignment enables:
- Autonomous decision-making
- Faster execution
- Natural prioritization
Job #4: Foster an Experimentation Mindset
Everything we do is an experiment—a best guess, a first wrong answer. The key is standardizing how we:
- Propose and review experiments
- Share results
- Build institutional knowledge
- Apply learnings across teams
Job #5: Optimize the System
The final job is continuously improving the entire experimentation process itself. Following principles from “The Goal,” focus on:
- Identifying and addressing bottlenecks
- Iterative improvement
- System-level optimization rather than local optimization
The Mindset That Makes It Work
Here’s the counterintuitive truth: It’s okay to be wrong. In fact, you probably will be. The goal isn’t perfect decisions—it’s maintaining momentum while having a clear process for course correction.
Think of it like steering a ship: You’re never perfectly on course, but through constant small adjustments, you reach your destination.
Getting Started
Begin with these steps:
- Start simple
- Focus on quality of evaluation
- Iterate quickly
Remember: The perfect process isn’t the goal. The perfect feedback loop is.
A Final Thought
In my years of leadership, I’ve seen that the organizations that master these feedback loops consistently outperform their peers. They move faster, adapt better, and create more value. The best part? These principles work regardless of your industry or team size.
The question isn’t whether you should implement these feedback loops—it’s how quickly you can start.
What feedback loops are you building in your organization? @ me on X or LinkedIn and let me know!