Here's how you can provide effective feedback to junior team members in the gaming industry.

Start by explaining the project goals, individual roles, and success metrics. This clarity gives junior team members a roadmap, helping them understand the context of the feedback. It's essential to balance constructive criticism with positive reinforcement, celebrating their successes while guiding them towards improvement. Align their efforts with team objectives, ensuring they know what is expected and how they can contribute to the desired outcomes.

Be clear with your instructions, be specific, and constructive. Highlight strengths, address areas for improvement with actionable advice, don't insult, and don't speak negatively, there's always a room for improvement. Encourage open communication for questions, they are doing the best they can, help them to help you.

My experience shows: Clear expectations are key for impactful feedback! Before diving in, set the stage. Outline project goals, team roles, and how we measure success. This roadmap empowers junior members to understand the context of the feedback they receive. It's not just about pointing out what could be better; it's celebrating what they've done right, aligning their efforts with the team's objectives, and guiding them towards the desired outcomes

Junior team members need guidance and constructive criticism, take your time to explain them the project core essence, their responsibilities, pipelines, and introduce them to other colleagues that can help them with questions or give a helping hand when required. Make sure they understood their tasks and its scopes; double check that their deliverables are fulfilling the required level of quality for the project. If they're not accomplish it, make honest but respectful feedback and tell them ways to improve in their tasks or work pipeline. Always give them solutions to the problems, that's fundamental to allow them to understand what was wrong and make opportune corrections in the future.

Use less technical terms or abbreviations when giving feedback to them, explain with precision and examples what was wrong in the first place or what can be improved so they can think of solutions inside the required scope. If the person is new to the project, avoid using specific project terminologies as part of the task, since they can increase confusion rather than helping with the task clarity. Give them some time to learn about the specifics of the project, the tools or pipelines, and of course, if you consider it necessary, explain them the most used or important concepts.

Outline exactly what you need, and most importantly, tell them why you need it. Juniors are much more likely to want to put their passion into their work if they feel like it's part of the bigger picture. Give them a ticket, Jira, Github Projects, Notion, Linear, and give them accountability for it. Juniors like responsibility, give them room for improvement, and thoughtful succinct feedback.

Juniors are also professionals and people with their own ideas and experiences, when constructing feedback allow them to express themselves and listen to what they are saying. Dialogue is part of a healthy professional growth, if the solution they're proposing is not the best, explain to them with fundaments and propose another solution or way to address the problem. A good practice in game programming is to make collaborative coding, and this can be applied to Art or other areas, where two or more people is working together in the same task, creating more solid and optimal solutions together.

Collaboration is king, power is in numbers. When a junior asks you questions, take the time to walk them through the solution. If you don't know the solution, work with them to brainstorm it. Juniors can be passionate about everything, trying to take on more than they can handle. If they're really passionate about something, let them work on it with you. Guide them through your thought process, your goals, your vision. Promoting open communication makes everyone feel important and valued.

Rome wasn't built in a day, and your juniors wont understand everything from day one. Focus on instilling a driven spirit, the desire to act like an owner, fighting for the quality of the product. Growth takes time, give juniors room to make mistakes and learn from them. Remind them that you make mistakes too, and that everyone does. The biggest pitfalls in learning are doubt and shame. Believe in them, encourage them, make them feel welcome, and give them the resources they need to improve without harsh judgement.

When making feedback always point out the correct way to do the job, show examples or reference images, concepts, UI, VFX, etc. to both make clear what was wrong and create a window for improvement in the Junior team member. If the feedback is code related, show some well written code examples with similar logic, or allow the Junior to take some sessions of collaborative coding with a Senior programmer in that area. The most important result in this exercise is not to just accomplish the task or solve the issue, but to allow the Junior team member to be able to solve future similar problems by himself/herself.