You're twenty minutes into a design review, and you feel the focus slipping. It starts with the logo — can it be bigger? Then the color palette comes under fire. It should be bolder but also more approachable. By the time someone suggests adding a tagline, the project is being designed by committee, which rarely ends well.
Nobody in that room is trying to derail the work — not intentionally anyway. Everyone wants it to succeed. But without a shared definition of success, people are left grasping for meaningful ways to contribute. And the easiest thing to grab is their personal preferences.
We've been on both sides of this. We've watched strong work get diluted by rounds of well-meaning revisions. We've also seen what happens when the process flows in a more generative way — when feedback sharpens what’s being created instead of diminishing it. The difference isn't the people in the room. It's whether the right conversation happened before the project even started.
That conversation comes down to three questions. Who is this for? Not the stakeholders in the room, but the audience you're trying to reach. What should they feel when they see it? And what action should it inspire?
When those questions get answered upfront, everything gets easier. No one’s left guessing how to react. Design choices don't get reduced to matters of taste. Everyone's evaluating the same thing — does this deliverable solve the problem we agreed on?
That doesn't mean strong opinions won't surface. They will. But now they have somewhere productive to land. "I don't like the blue" becomes "Does this blue convey the trust we're going for?" One conversation loops in circles. The other moves things forward.
This isn't about limiting input. It's about making input useful. The best creative relationships we've been a part of aren't the ones with the fewest opinions. They're the ones where everyone's working from the same playbook.
When you anchor the project in a set of shared expectations, feedback becomes a tool instead of an obstacle. The work gets stronger. The process gets faster. And everyone walks away feeling like they contributed to something they believe in.
