HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH AN EXECUTIVE DEMANDING FEATURES? CREATE A HYPOTHESIS

Summary from the TLDR Design newsletter

When executives demand features based on trends, designers should respond with strategic curiosity rather than compliance or refusal, using a stakeholder-as-user approach to understand motivations and context. Designers can justify their questions by estimating the likelihood that design decisions will impact user behavior, much like engineers provide development time estimates. Summarizing ideas into testable hypotheses—"If we [change feature], users will [behavior] because [rationale], achieving [goal]"—helps expose logical inconsistencies and may lead executives to reconsider poor decisions themselves.