Taking feedback - so essential for AWS every other tech company or startups

There’s a reason for this post: Last week I gave feedback to a good friend. It was something around “this thing doesn’t work for me, can you fix this?”

Within hours, Ran had taken my feedback and incorporated it into his website.

This little story motivated me to write this blog as in our industry we start to forget the importance of human interactions and the power of feedback.

Feedback: A gift and a curse

Feedback is a gift. Every content creator and startup developer will agree: Any piece of feedback you can get helps to shape your future as a creator or builder.

It’s a gift that too many of us have stopped giving in 2026 - either because we’re busy building our own SaaS or because we’re too distracted by AI in our day to day job.

The gift of feedback has made AWS one of the biggest cloud vendors and has helped Google Cloud to quickly win shares of the cloud market: by making things simpler that AWS made too complicated in the past years.

The gift of feedback can be a rant or a viral post where you expressed your problems or concerns that you faced when you were building something. Feedback is a gift if it is clear enough to help you change something.

Feedback can be a curse if it is given in the wrong format or tone. It can be a curse if it becomes or is taken personal and when it negatively impacts the work. Feedback is a curse when it is given with wrong intentions. It is a curse when it is being ignored.

Feedback makes a difference

This week, a bunch of AWS Heroes meet and the whole week is about exactly this: giving feedback.

It’s a week where we get to talk and discuss in person with the teams we work with (mainly behind the scenes) through the whole year. We share - and openly fight with each other - on current and future AWS services and capabilities.

Feedback helps to shape what the next wave of things are going to be. Feedback for startups can mean to survive or to run out of money. Feedback for builders in 2026 means to kill your PoCs, your next generation SaaS or your newest feature if it doesn’t get good feedback.

As a content creator, feedback is the difference between success and “waste of time”. If you get good feedback, you know that your audience is interested in this type of content. If you get negative feedback, you know what better to avoid. If you get nothing, you don’t know what to do.

You’re blind and you continue to experiment. Which is never good.

…but listening and taking action is the hard part

Giving feedback if the easy part - and still a lot of us don’t do it. It’s even harder to listen - many of us don’t do that.

Listening requires you to pay attention in the “noise”, to ask questions if you do not understand the feedback. It requires you to pause and think before you move on.

In a world that feels like a german “Autobahn” with only race cars on it this is the hardest part: slow down, pause, listen. Ask. Understand. And then use your brain to translate the feedback into actionable items.

This is nearly as tirering as running more than five coding agent sessions in parallel :-)

The mindset of giving feedback - DOs and DON’ts

Many of us are forgetting how to give good feedback. A lot of us are also falling into the trap of “giving feedback to gain attention”. It’s simpler to get a viral post on social media with negative feedback than with a simple “thanks” or “well done” on social media.

Stories that attack are unfortunately more likely to get views, clicks, likes and comments.

This is the mindest I try to have when giving feedback in your day to day life:

be positive
give actionable things to do
ask yourself: does this feedback personally attack someone or point fingers?
share positive and not only negative things
explain the “why” of your feedback
ask yourself: what’s my motivation when giving feedback?

The bigger the audience, the more you should think.

My approach has always been to give negative feedback in private, ideally in a 1on1 - if I can’t meet someone in person, with a video call. I try to not take criticism into public, but sometimes I give hints or share hard(er) feedback in public. Before I do, I give the same feedback in private. There’s posts (like this one) that I share with friends before publishing them to ensure that they are “fair”.

AWS Heroes in general are really good at giving feedback and still respecting simple things like the ones mentioned above. In fact I believe that this is one of the core aspects of being an AWS Hero: challenge AWS in private, but be fair with the teams in public. This is what builds up relationships and friendships that are longer lasting than projects.

Good examples of taking feedback

I already mentioned Ran above - when I approached him with a request last week, he directly asked for the reasoning behind it and acted on it.

I’ve written about a recent good example in my post about Kiro on iOS. Here I had actively worked with the team myself to make a difference. Similarly the team behind Kiro Web has received a ton of (negative and positive) feedback and adjusted quickly to make things better.

Another good example is the OpenTelemetry instrumentation for Lambda that is currently in Alpha - this was majorly influenced by someone else in the AWS Heroes group.

I could dig out a few more - from Lambda MicroVMs to EKS Capabilities where I’ve personally experience how excellent AWS Service Teams react on feedback. This is what makes a difference!

How feeback has shaped things I do - the DOs of receiving feedback

I already wrote above that I find “receiving feedback” and acting on feedback harder than giving feedback. But also for people receiving feedback there are things you should do.

I’ll encourage you to

ask questions
don’t take things personally
understand the “why” and the intention
never fight against it: feedback is often subjective by the one giving feedback

When I give feedback to AWS teams, I often remind them that I represent more than “one” persona: for once I’m an Enterprise Architect for FICO. When giving feedback in that role I represent an enterprise customer with a bunch of spendings on AWS and usage patterns that are “enterprise grade”. We’re building an enterprise decisioning and AI platform at FICO!

This is not comparable to my “solo enterpreneur” and “AWS Community” feedback, where my interests are completely different. In that role I do have other type of feedback. :-)

In my “content creator” role - writing my blog, creating videos I do create about any type of feedback.

Adjusting the path

As a content creator, I’ve been getting some feedback - positive and negative - and that made me change the way that I write blog posts, it made me adjust my social media posts (sometimes even delete them) and it made me adjust the way that I create and edit my videos.

This takes energy but makes things better - not always, but often!

My ask for you

Take time to give feedback.

This can be a simple “like” or “dislike”. It can be adding a comment on a blog post, a video or a social media post.

Contribute - and actively approach creators with feedback!

If you use open source software, take time to raise an issue on the Github repository if you want have feedback.

Thank you for contributing and for making the world a better place!

Reach out to me on LinkedIn or through my contact form if you have any feedback for this post!