Why we believe 360 feedback is broken, and how we want it to help people bring their best selves to work, and organizations grow.
Author: Aaron Ward, CEO and Co-founder
In the Old West, when someone said "I'm your Huckleberry," they were declaring themselves the right person for the job. No resume. No credentials check. Just a reputation built on what people knew about how you showed up. We've somehow spent the next 150 years making it harder to prove that.
I spent a decade in the feedback business. As CEO of AskNicely, I helped build what became a market leader in customer feedback for service businesses - companies that rely on frontline staff to make every customer experience count. We enabled millions of real-time customer conversations.
It worked. Really worked. Our clients used instant, lightweight feedback to recognize frontline workers, celebrate service excellence, and build genuine appreciation for the people who served customers well. We watched recognition change behavior, improve retention, and make work more meaningful for people who'd previously been invisible.
So naturally, we thought: if this works so well for customer feedback, let's apply the same approach internally. Let's help our own people grow through feedback from their peers.
We tried. Multiple times. Different 360 tools. Different approaches. Different consultants with different frameworks.
It failed. Every time.
Response rates were poor. Everyone hated the process. The output was either so sanitized it was useless or so blunt it damaged people. Our high-performers resented the generic output. Our struggling performers felt attacked rather than supported. And HR spent weeks chasing responses rather than actually helping anyone develop.
Here I was, running a feedback company, unable to make feedback work for my own team.
That failure haunted me. And eventually, it became the founding insight for Huckleberry.
Let me be direct about what's wrong. This isn't a list of minor annoyances - these are structural failures baked into the design.
Traditional 360 feedback is reserved for leaders and "high potentials." It's triggered by HR cycles, not individual need. It depends on manager permission and organizational rollout. The result? Early and mid-career professionals are excluded. Ambitious individuals can't proactively seek feedback. Growth is rationed instead of democratized.
If feedback really mattered, everyone would have access to it, all the time.
Ask people what their last 360 report felt like: vague, over-sanitized, politically coded, emotionally flat, hard to act on. Most outputs consist of ratings, averages, spider charts, and safe language stripped of real meaning.
People don't grow from charts. They grow from specific examples, real moments, and human language.
Traditional 360s require long written surveys, dozens of repetitive questions, and significant time from busy colleagues. So response rates drop. People rush their answers. Feedback quality collapses. HR chases completions instead of insight. According to Gartner, the average manager spends 210 hours per year on reviews, that’s insane for what they get in return.
The more "rigorous" the process becomes, the worse the output gets. This is friction masquerading as rigor.
Perhaps the most broken part. Traditional 360 feedback lives inside HR systems, locked behind permissions. It disappears when you change jobs. It can't be reused, shared, or built upon.
Your career spans companies. Your feedback should too.
Here's what nobody in HR wants to admit: employees don't look forward to 360 feedback. They dread it. Not because they don't want to grow, but because they've learned that 360s are often where organizational politics get laundered into "development feedback." In one study, 22% of employees admitted to calling in sick to avoid a review meeting!
Anonymous feedback can be weaponized. Vague criticism without context causes anxiety. No wonder "constructive feedback" has become a phrase people brace for.
AI isn't just a feature in Huckleberry. It's the reason Huckleberry can exist - and the reason it must.
When ChatGPT can write your code, draft your strategy document, and analyze your data, what's left? How you work with others. Collaboration, communication, influence, trust-building. The human skills that AI can't replicate have become the skills that matter most.
And yet these skills are harder to verify than ever. You can't see them on a resume. You can't measure them in an interview. You can't assess them from a LinkedIn profile. The very capabilities that now define professional value are invisible to traditional evaluation.
When everyone uses AI to polish their resume, craft their cover letter, and prepare their interview answers, everyone starts to sound the same. Recruiters are drowning in applications that all hit the same keywords. Hiring managers can't distinguish genuine capability from AI-generated presentation.
There are fewer roles and more applicants. Standing out has never been harder. And the thing that would actually differentiate candidates - evidence of how they collaborate, how they show up for teammates, how they navigate conflict and build consensus - is locked away in the heads of people who've worked with them.
But here's the thing: AI is also the solution.
Until 2025, a better approach to feedback wasn't technically possible. Voice AI can now enable a 5 minute conversation with the AI equivalent of an executive coach instead of 30-minutes of typing through a painful survey. AI synthesis can turn hundreds of feedback moments into coherent, actionable insights - work that would take a human analyst weeks. AI delivery means employees get their feedback directly, without waiting for a manager to schedule a meeting.
Huckleberry doesn't try to improve traditional 360 feedback. It replaces the assumptions that made it broken in the first place.
Instead of asking how should companies evaluate people?, it asks: how should people grow?
Grow their impact, grow their reputation, grow their career.
That single shift changes everything.
We call it Growth Feedback. It flips every broken convention on its head:
This isn't a feature upgrade. It's a philosophical reset.
Here's what needs to change - and why each shift feels obvious once you see it:
The future is clear. Traditional 360 feedback was built for organizations, control, evaluation, and risk management. Growth Feedback is built for individuals, learning, momentum, and career ownership.
Here's where this gets interesting.
Imagine a world where your professional reputation isn't just your resume (which you wrote). Imagine it's built on what the people who've actually worked with you say about you.
Not vague reference calls where everyone plays nice. Real, accumulated evidence of how you show up. Patterns that emerge over years of collaboration. Verified strengths from multiple colleagues. A reputation that follows you - that you own - and that speaks for you in ways a resume never could.
When you're applying for that next role, you're not just another AI-polished application in a stack of hundreds. You're someone whose collaborative impact is visible and verified. You walk in being able to say, with evidence: "I'm your Huckleberry."
With Huckleberry, now you can prove it.
I've spent most of my career in the feedback space. I've seen what works and what doesn't. I've experienced the failure of traditional 360s firsthand - at my own company, despite having every resource and motivation to make it succeed.
And I've seen the alternative. I've watched what happens when feedback is lightweight, timely, and human. When it drives recognition rather than anxiety. When it builds people up rather than catching them out.
Traditional 360 feedback was designed to measure people. Growth Feedback is designed to help people grow.
One is about control. The other is about momentum.
One belongs to companies. The other belongs to you.
If you're an HR leader who's tired of apologizing for your 360 process, who knows there has to be a better way that gives your people something that actually helps them grow: Huckleberry is for you.
If you're a professional ready to build a reputation based on what others say about you, Huckleberry is for you.
I'm your Huckleberry.
- Aaron
360 feedback (also called 360-degree feedback or multi-rater feedback) collects input about an employee from multiple sources: peers, managers, direct reports, and sometimes external contacts. The premise is sound - you get a fuller picture of how someone works than from a single manager's perspective. The execution in traditional tools, however, is fundamentally broken.
Traditional 360s fail because they were designed for organizational evaluation, not individual growth. They're annual (growth isn't), anonymous (which removes accountability), survey-based (which creates fatigue), and locked in HR systems (which means your feedback disappears when you change jobs). The result: low response rates, vague output, and employees who dread rather than value the process.
Growth Feedback is a new approach that replaces traditional 360 feedback. It's continuous rather than annual, uses voice conversations rather than lengthy surveys, provides named feedback rather than anonymous ratings, and creates a portable profile owned by the employee. The focus shifts from evaluation to development - from measuring people to helping them grow.
AI transforms feedback in three ways: (1) Voice AI conducts natural 5-minute conversations instead of requiring 30-45 minute surveys, dramatically improving response rates and feedback quality; (2) AI synthesis turns unstructured feedback into actionable insights, identifying patterns and themes a human analyst would take weeks to surface; (3) AI delivery means employees receive feedback directly, without waiting for manager availability or filtering.
Look for: continuous feedback (not annual cycles), voice-based collection (not long surveys), named feedback with context (not anonymous ratings), AI-powered synthesis and delivery, employee-owned portable profiles, strengths-based insights (not just deficit identification), and minimal admin burden. If your 360 tool requires weeks of HR effort to run, it's solving for the wrong problem.
When feedback belongs to the employee and travels with them across jobs, two things happen: candidates can demonstrate how they work (not just what they've done), and employers get verified signals about collaboration skills that interviews can't reveal. In an era where AI makes every resume look the same, peer-verified reputation becomes the differentiator.
