The current dominant models of intervention design in the development sector do not account for the complexity and unpredictability of implementation challenges. Decision makers and implementers need timely feedback during implementation to respond to field realities and to course-correct. This letter calls for a new approach of “responsive feedback” or “feedback loops” that promotes interactions between project designers, implementers, researchers and decision-makers to enable course corrections needed to achieve intended outcomes. A responsive feedback approach, in theory, should be agile, flexible, adaptive, iterative, and actionable.