Accelerated Innovation

Improving EDD Practices Through Stakeholder Feedback

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Improving EDD Practices Through Stakeholder Feedback

Description

This capability focuses on incorporating feedback from key stakeholders-such as users, reviewers, product leads, and compliance teams-into Evaluation-Driven Development (EDD) processes. It includes gathering input on what should be tested, how evaluation results are interpreted, and how improvements are prioritized across GenAI use cases.

Why it's Important

EDD cannot succeed in isolation. If stakeholder voices are not included, evaluation criteria may be misaligned, test coverage may miss key risks, and results may lack context. Engaging stakeholders helps ensure that EDD practices reflect real-world needs, expectations, and concerns. This builds trust, enhances solution quality, and increases the relevance and value of evaluation results.

Why it's Challenging @ Scale

  • Stakeholders are unclear on what EDD is: Teams may not understand how to engage or why their input matters.
  • Feedback loops are informal or inconsistent: Input is often collected ad hoc, if at all.
  • Different stakeholders want different things: It can be hard to reconcile diverse goals across product, risk, and engineering.
  • No process to track or act on feedback: Valuable suggestions may go unlogged, unreviewed, or unaddressed.
  • Lack of feedback maturity: Stakeholders may focus on surface-level comments rather than testable quality signals.

Complexity

High: Maturing this capability requires stakeholder education, structured intake channels, prioritization processes, and integration of feedback into test planning, evaluation scoring, and iteration decisions.

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Taking Action

Though most organizations begin their GenAI journey with significant knowledge gaps, there are targeted actions that can be taken to accelerate the process. Select your group’s current maturity, based on your assessment results, and act today.

The most important part of any journey is starting… To move from “Exploring” to “Experimenting”, focus on the following key actions:
  • Explore Key Concepts & Best Practices: Complete the Evaluation Driven Development for High-Impact GenAI Solutions workshop (2 hrs.) to understand foundational key concepts and explore applied best practices
  • Framing the Role of Evaluation in GenAI Development
  • Understanding Key EDD Concepts and Benefits
  • Linking EDD to Risk Mitigation and Solution Quality
  • Identifying Where and When to Use EDD
  • Planning Your EDD Implementation Strategy
  • Define Your Action Plan: Outline concrete, prioritized steps your organization will take to implement GenAI Strategy.
  • Align on your Current State and define your Target State
  • Create an actionable enablement plan
  • Define target timeline and measures of success
  • Deliver Quick Wins: Small, high-impact GenAI projects that can demonstrate tangible value in a short time frame.
  • Gather Initial Feedback from Key Stakeholders: Ask product owners, reviewers, and users what success looks like and what risks concern them most.
  • Update One Evaluation Plan Based on Feedback: Revise an existing test suite or metric definition to reflect stakeholder priorities.
  • Run an Evaluation with a Stakeholder Review: Share results in a simple format and ask for reactions or suggestions.
To move from Experimentation to “Lifting-Off”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Complete one or more of our Deep Dive Courses: Begin exploring key concepts and best practices, including:
  • Selecting Your EDD Methodology
  • Defining Your EDD Action Plan & DoR Measures
  • Curating Your EDD Data
  • Configuring Your EDD Solution
  • Executing & Analyzing Your EDD Results
  • Optimizing Iterating Your Results
  • Leveraging EDD to Monitor & Govern Your GenAI Solution
  • Nail It Before You Scale It: Assess and optimize your solution or process before adopting it at scale
  • Assess Your Proposed Solution or Process: Evaluate how stakeholder feedback is currently gathered and used in EDD decisions.
  • Define in-scope Processes and Guardrails: Create guidelines for when and how different types of stakeholders are engaged.
  • Close any Data or Measurement Gaps: Ensure feedback loops are structured, repeatable, and linked to evaluation artifacts.
  • Define Your Adoption & Scaling Plan: Create a structured roadmap for how GenAI solutions will be rolled out across teams, workflows, or business units
  • Define Your Phased Implementation Plan: Introduce stakeholder feedback reviews across all key GenAI use cases.
  • Build Awareness and Finalize Enablers: Train teams on how to solicit and incorporate feedback into evaluation design.
  • Operationalize Your Comms Plan: Share updates on how feedback is improving GenAI quality, trust, and business alignment.
To move from Lifting-Off to “Accelerating”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Formalize Your Best Practices: Document and standardize what’s working to ensure consistent, scalable success across teams and use cases
  • Publish Stakeholder Engagement Guidelines: Define when and how to involve key roles in evaluation planning and review.
  • Create Feedback Intake Templates: Make it easy for stakeholders to submit ideas, risks, or concerns in a structured way.
  • Include Stakeholder Review in Evaluation Workflows: Add checkpoints for stakeholder sign-off on scoring rubrics, test coverage, or success criteria.
  • Accelerate Your Adoption: Intensify efforts to embed GenAI across your organization by expanding use cases, increasing user engagement, and removing adoption barriers
  • Use Stakeholder Feedback to Identify New Use Cases: Let real-world needs guide your evaluation and development roadmap.
  • Empower Teams to Respond to Feedback Efficiently: Provide tooling and playbooks to help teams translate feedback into test improvements.
  • Track Feedback Integration Across Projects: Report on how often stakeholder input shapes EDD plans or outcomes.
  • Celebrate Your Wins: Publicly acknowledge team accomplishments to build and sustain adoption momentum
  • Share Stories of Stakeholder-Driven Improvements: Highlight where GenAI solutions were significantly improved by outside input.
  • Recognize Collaborative Evaluation Teams: Celebrate teams that build bridges between product, engineering, and risk.
  • Publish Before-and-After Examples: Show how stakeholder input led to clearer, more accurate, or more helpful outputs.
The “Accelerating” stage represents “Target State” for many capabilities. “Breaking Away”, on the other hand, suggests that the specific Capability represents a clear competitive advantage for your business.
  • Streamline & Embed: Integrate GenAI into core workflows while eliminating friction points to make usage seamless and routine
  • Make Stakeholder Feedback a Default EDD Input: Ensure every evaluation plan includes input from product, QA, and end-user teams.
  • Integrate Feedback Tools into GenAI Platforms: Allow reviewers to flag issues, comment on outputs, or suggest improvements directly within GenAI solutions.
  • Establish Role-Based Feedback Channels: Create tailored feedback flows for legal, risk, design, and other stakeholder types.
  • Leverage Automation: Using GenAI-powered tools and workflows to streamline repetitive tasks, enhance operational efficiency, and reduce manual effort
  • Auto-Tag Common Feedback Themes: Use LLMs to cluster comments and identify trends across multiple GenAI reviews.
  • Summarize Stakeholder Input with GenAI: Convert raw feedback into structured evaluation insights.
  • Flag Feedback That Suggests Evaluation Gaps: Detect when comments reveal missing or ineffective test cases.
  • Evolve & Further Accelerate: Continuously refine GenAI strategies based on insights and outcomes, while expanding into more complex or high-impact use cases
  • Build Feedback Analysis into Post-Evaluation Reviews: Make stakeholder voice part of iteration planning.
  • Benchmark Feedback Quality and Utilization: Measure how useful and actionable feedback is across projects.
  • Evolve Evaluation Practices Based on Feedback Trends: Adjust scoring criteria, prompts, or test coverage to reflect evolving stakeholder needs.

Key "Watchouts"

As you take action you’ll want to avoid:

  • Collecting feedback without acting on it: Stakeholder trust drops quickly when input is ignored.
  • Letting feedback derail evaluation priorities: Not all suggestions should become test cases-be selective and aligned.
  • Assuming all feedback is equal: Weight input based on role, expertise, and relevance.
  • Failing to close the loop: Always follow up so stakeholders know how their input was used.
  • Overcomplicating feedback processes: Keep it simple and lightweight to encourage engagement.

Targeted Benefits

While Improving EDD Practices Through Stakeholder Feedback can be challenging, its benefits are clear and compelling, including:

  • Better alignment with user and business needs: Evaluations reflect real expectations and risks.
  • Improved GenAI solution quality: Broader input leads to stronger test coverage and relevance.
  • Faster iteration with more confidence: Stakeholders support changes they helped shape.
  • Higher engagement across functions: Everyone feels heard and invested in solution success.
  • Scalable, human-centered EDD practices: Feedback loops become a driver of continuous improvement.

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Eddie
Accelerated Innovation

Hi, I'm Eddie 👋

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