The 2-Minute Ceiling

A microwave feedback moment should take under two minutes to deliver. If you need longer, you are writing a performance review, not giving quick feedback — and performance reviews are where honest observations go to die, buried under disclaimers.

Two minutes forces you to cut to the specific event, the specific impact, and one specific change. The brevity is the feature, not a constraint. It keeps feedback in the moment and prevents one observation from turning into a thirty-minute post-mortem.