Feedback is not approval.

Why feedback scatters

The thread on r/agencynewbies, titled "Client just fired us because of our feedback process", described a familiar mess: feedback split across email, design comments and chat. It rarely starts that way on purpose. The deliverable goes out as an attachment, one person replies to the email, another leaves comments in the design file, a third sends a message on the way into a meeting. Each is about a slightly different version. Somebody on your side copies it all into a list, and anything they miss becomes "we told you that".

The question on r/marketingagency, "How do you know when client feedback is actually complete enough to start revisions?", is the other side of it. If feedback can arrive from anywhere at any time, there is no moment when the round is done.

Five things to write down

On 22 September, @itsmeasadali put it in a line on X: "Feedback is not approval." Before moving a client project forward, the post said to record five things:

• the exact version reviewed
• the decision maker
• the acceptance criteria
• the approval deadline
• the effect of late changes

That list answers both threads. The version and the deadline tell you when a round is complete. The decision maker tells you whose comments count. The criteria and the cost of late changes stop a comment from quietly reopening work that was already agreed.

One place, tied to the words

The first half of the fix is mechanical: feedback goes on the work, not next to it. If a comment is attached to the sentence, the figure or the image it is about, there is nothing to reconstruct. You know which version it was on, because it is on the version they were reading. And you are not reading "the second chart looks off" and guessing which chart.

The second half is closing the loop where the client can see it. A comment that disappears into your inbox tells them nothing. A comment marked resolved, with a short note saying what changed, on the same link they already have, tells them the round is moving and that they were heard.

How Stacktree does it

When you send a page from Stacktree, you can let the client comment on the page itself. They select words and press Comment, or press Comment and click an image, a chart, a section, or a moment in a video, which pauses on that frame and keeps the timestamp. They do not need an account; the link is the way in. Only you see the comments.

You get one email a few minutes after their last comment, not one per comment. On the page's screen in the dashboard, "What came back" lists each one with what it is on. You make the change, or your agent does, and republish to the same link. Each comment is then resolved, and when your agent resolves it, it adds a note saying what changed. The client sees their comments as open, resolved with that note, or no longer on the page if the words they commented on were rewritten.

If the page has a page video on it, the one-minute version is on the same link too, so a client with a minute still sees the version you are asking them to react to.

Then ask for the approval

Comments close a round. They do not approve a version. When the open list is empty, send one short message naming the version, the person you need a yes from, and what it is being accepted against. That is the step that moves the project forward, and it is much easier to ask for when every comment on the page is visibly resolved.