15Five, the social feedback and reporting tool (see Feedback, coaching, and deliberate practice in a busy world), has released a new version of their product, and it broadens the company’s offering by pulling more perspectives in the organization, not limiting it’s purview to the direct reporting relationship feedback of the earlier release.

As I wrote earlier,

The company’s product grew out of the techniques that Yves Chouinard dreamed up to manage Patagonia, the sporting goods company. He asked his staff to take 15 minutes each week to write positive and negative feedback on their work, a report that could be read in 5 minutes. Hence, 15five.

15five streamlines this activity, providing forms with basic questions to elicit feedback, and messaging to ping people to do their reports, and to pass these from staff to managers, and for the managers to synthesize and to respond and circulate in various ways. This can include pulling feedback from specific people, looking for trends, and so on. This finds its way to the manager’s manager, and so on.

In this release the company has enlarged those involved.

via email

• The ability to follow people who you aren’t directly reviewing reports for. This allows for multiple reviewers, increased flexibility, and even more transparency.
• New action bar with the ability to “like” comments instead of giving feedback for certain things, and also private comments.
• Ability to set aside answers for follow up
• Question cadence to ask questions on a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis.
• Inbox-style view for reviewing everyone’s reports.
• Simplified groups and reviewers
• New user interface and redesigned backend so we can better support you and make iterations even quicker.

15Five is naturally spreading the product’s reach based on the social connections in the business, which are not just direct reporting, and not just taking a snapshot of what’s happening right now: a more social and longitudinal view.