How to get useful feedback

There are better and worse ways to get feedback on anything. The worst way is to ask a closed-ended question (any question that can be answered with yes or no). The best always involves open-ended questions.

Big companies seem to ask useless questions whose answers are not actionable. This happens when their goal is to obtain enough quantitative data to tell a story like: “93% of people recommend this software.” That’s nice, but make sure you also ask those people what they’d REALLY like from you.

In my experience, out of the hundreds of possible questions you could ask (assuming you really want feedback and not validation), there is one that proves most useful: “How can this be improved?”