I'm one of two accounts at The Lab (a branding, spatial, and communication design studio of 30 people). For many years, I was the only one. In that time, we grew our team, our business, and launched successful and creative projects for ourselves and multinational clients. I believe managing effective feedback flow is critical in our ability to outperform—without pitching, without working nights and weekends, without compromising business or creative results.

But first: these approaches don't work well (from painful experience.)

1. Avoiding feedback because you don’t want to hurt creative egos. You should learn to give the right feedback, at the right stage, on the right issues, while understanding the technical process. Creatives should learn to receive feedback (this is another guide for another day by someone else from The Lab!)
2. Sitting next to creatives and telling them what to do. They'll soon quit. You'll be frustrated. Clients will devalue your team. The projects will suffer.
3. Wasting your time to find creative solutions for the design team. You'll almost always be less informed than them about trends, tools, and creative approaches. You can be lucky sometimes, but your time is almost certainly more effective elsewhere.

The following worked well for our team and me:

Focus on your expertise, and trust theirs.

When being presented with creative work, people feel pressured to contribute feedback. So they do, often at things they don't have a strong grasp of, like design.

Feedback can come from many angles. I focus on those I'm confident about.

Examples:

• Accounts should feedback on whether the work addresses the needs of the client, brief, timeline, and budget.

• Producers understand suppliers (feasibility, material, production cost) and should share their knowledge.

• Clients understand their brands, their customers, their products, and their business objectives. And should feedback from these POVs.

  

  That's not to say you can't have a personal opinion on the creative work, but read the room and understand whether your subjective feedback will help or hurt the process. (See my next point.)

Different stages require different feedback.

Our projects usually contain 3 phases. Our goal is to deliver the project on time and on quality, avoid feedback that should have been given and addressed in the previous phase.

1. Concept Top-line feedback are most effective here to see if the team is heading in the right direction, like whether it's on brief, etc.

2. Creative Development From the top-line approval, we move forward to design development with detailed proposals. Here, we can give specific feedback to finalize the design.

3. Execution/Production Once everybody is both aligned on concept and design, we start talking to 3rd parties to execute the design.

   

   Accounts should set the context and feedback expectations in each stage to help clients navigate the process.

An example from our interior architecture project: