Brutal Feedback Is a Job Skill

Intel's new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, has made it clear he wants unfiltered input from customers. At Intel Vision he said: "Please be brutally honest with us. This is what I expect of you this week, and I believe harsh feedback is most valuable." For engineers who sit in recurring meetings with hardware vendors, that is an invitation worth taking literally.

The author of this piece, who spent years giving Intel technical direction before joining the company, discovered that tough feedback from the customer side can carry real weight—enough that it factored into a Fellow candidacy later on. But seeing the meetings from the vendor side also revealed how often that feedback fails to land. Customers soften their words, skip the follow-up, or give up when the room doesn't seem to register what they're saying. The result: nobody gets what they need.

Why Good Feedback Dies

Giving useful technical criticism to a large vendor is harder than it looks. The people in the meeting may be new to their roles, may not own the decisions, or may simply be present to be seen. Meeting minutes get watered down. Feedback gets summarized for executives until it is unrecognizable. The engineer who raised a real issue leaves assuming it was heard, and six months later nothing has changed.

It is also socially uncomfortable. Saying a project is misguided or that a team's stated reason for inaction is unacceptable is not something most engineers will do casually—especially when the product team on the call is friendly, enthusiastic, and counting on a kind word. Yet if the customer doesn't say it, the vendor may never hear it.

A Checklist for Vendor Meetings

The author suggests treating vendor meetings as a discipline, with preparation and follow-through at every stage. Key tactics include:

  • Prepare before the call. Review the agenda and look up attendees on LinkedIn—who they are, what they manage, and how many people they oversee.
  • Protect your intellectual property. Decline meetings under agreements that transfer rights to your feedback. Check with legal before signing anything.
  • Demand documented minutes. Make sure your points are recorded in a shared document and not softened. Be explicit about what you know and what you haven't formed an opinion on yet.
  • Keep criticism technical. Frame issues as performance, usability, practicality, or competitiveness problems. Leave insults out of it.
  • Verify the paper trail. Confirm the minutes list who attended and the date, so you can reference them later.
  • Question resource claims. If a team says it lacks the staff to address your feedback, ask how many engineers are on the project. Compare that against industry expectations: one engineer and one month for a task is often a fair reference point.
  • Refuse to freeload. If vendor staff want you to teach them fundamentals they should know, decline. You are the customer, not a training budget.
  • Ask if they've googled it. Some attendees ask questions they could answer themselves with a basic search, wasting everyone's time to look engaged.
  • Request bans on repeat time-wasters. If certain staff or projects consistently deliver nothing, tell the host to take them off the agenda for at least a year. Leave meetings where they show up anyway.
  • Review who is in the room. Are you talking to the people who can act? If you're discussing a silicon change, are any silicon engineers on the call?
  • Resist group pressure. When the whole team believes its product is great, you may be the only person present who can say otherwise. Say it—with better words than the ones you'd use after the call.
  • Ask for updates. Gratitude in the meeting is not a guarantee of action. Check the prior minutes to see what you requested and when.
  • Escalate annually. About once a year, ask for a session with an executive leadership team member or the CEO. Bring the minutes showing your timeline of feedback and ask what they have been told about you—then be ready to correct it.

The Effort Is the Point

None of this is easy. The author notes that from the vendor side, he now sees customers who still hesitate to be direct even when explicitly invited to be harsh. The peer pressure, the warmth of the room, and the fear of consequences make brutal feedback genuinely difficult to deliver. And it takes constant effort to check the minutes, follow up on action items, and push for higher-level meetings.

But the alternative is worse: a meeting where the customer smiles, the vendor files the notes, and nothing improves. If Intel's leadership says it wants the unvarnished version, treating that as a real request—and putting in the work to make sure it is heard—may be the best technical contribution a customer can make.