Free tool · no account · nothing saved
A free tool for asking
in a way that gets answered.
“Do you have any feedback for me?” reliably produces nothing, and it isn't because people are dishonest — an open invitation is the easiest thing in the world to answer with a compliment. This walks you through one request that isn't: the moment, your own read on it, and the question you actually want answered.
It takes about three minutes. Nobody is invited and nothing is sent to anyone — you get the words, and you send them yourself.
It will also tell you when a request cannot work, rather than helping you polish one that can't. Nothing is saved and nothing leaves your browser, so copy it before you close the tab.
The tool
Nothing saved
- 01 Who and when
- 02 What's possible
- 03 Your words
- 04 The ask
Reference
What it checks for
Six patterns that turn a request into a compliment, drawn from the guides on asking for feedback. Nothing is generated for you — you write it, and each note points at the words in your own text that set it off, so you can look at it and decide it's fine.
The question with no subject
“Any feedback for me?”, “how am I doing?” — answerable with a compliment, so that is what comes back.
A question about who you are
People can tell you what they saw. They struggle to tell you who they think you are, so a question about your character gets an interpretation.
Asking for a list
Ask for three things and they will invent two. You get one real answer and two of filler, and the filler dilutes the real one.
The exit hatch
“Let me know if anything else comes to mind” reads as an invitation and works as permission to stop.
A period instead of a moment
“How did I do last quarter?” gets an opinion assembled after the fact. Naming a quarter is fine; asking somebody to grade one is not.
Apologising for asking
“Sorry to bother you, no pressure” — the softener answers the question for them.
One more comes from the shape of the situation rather than the sentences, and no rewriting fixes it: asking the people who report to you, face to face, about how you manage them. The arithmetic they do before answering is not about honesty, and the tool says so instead of helping you polish it.
What a request that works looks like
Asked
“Hey, any feedback for me on the roadmap stuff?”
Asked so it gets answered
“In Tuesday's leadership review, when I pushed back on the launch timeline — I think I came across as inflexible about it, but I'm not sure it landed that way for everyone. What did you actually see?”
One occasion instead of a topic, a hypothesis they can correct instead of a blank invitation, and a question about what they saw instead of whether you were good.
More of them, sorted by who you are asking, in how to ask for honest feedback.
When asking isn't the right instrument
When you want the pattern, not one view. Asking five people the same question does not give you richer data, it gives you noise — five slightly different answers and no way to tell which is representative. A pattern needs the same questions asked of everyone and the answers aggregated.
When the answer is costly to give. Anywhere the person answering pays a price for candour — your reports especially — the request is not what is holding them back, and a better sentence will not change it.
When you have not asked yourself first. The fastest route to a specific question is naming what you already suspect about yourself. Answering a set about yourself takes ten minutes and usually produces the question you should have been asking.
The full thing
Mirorly is the version of this with other people in it
This page helps you write one request. The product runs the whole thing: the same questions to everyone who watches you work. Their answers come back without names and stay hidden until enough people have replied that nobody can be picked out, and you read them next to your own — so the difference between how you see yourself and how they see you stops being a guess.
Twenty-one question sets, rounds you can repeat so drift becomes visible, and one plan for one person — it was built for individual leaders running their own development loop, not for enterprise review cycles.
From $9 a week. Cancel any time. The tools themselves are free.