Giving Feedback - Effective Communication For Engineers

If you're giving constructive feedback, try to pair it with something positive. In general, positives are good at offsetting negatives.
Tentative language is also crucial, especially with constructive feedback.
Example feedback around running meetings:
- Bad: "You need to stop cutting people off in meetings."
- Good: "You do a great job running meetings and making sure that they're on track, but I feel like in pursuit of that, you sometimes cut people off too soon and aggressively instead of letting their voice fully be heard. I think letting everyone get their complete thoughts out is important for our team, and we can always extend the meeting length if there's no way we can time-box properly while doing this."
Your overall mentality should be, "How can we all become better?", as opposed to, "I need to tell this person why they suck.".
If you don't feel too close to the person you're giving feedback to, you can go through your manager to share the feedback with them or with their manager. At a high-level, you can see your manager as a "people API" to abstract away issues like these.