Several years ago, I was working with a client on a new web feature. It wasn’t in Salesforce, but Siebel CRM. For those of you who are unaware, Siebel was *the* CRM before Salesforce, perhaps 10-15 years ago.

The new feature was a tree-like hierarchical folder structure, like you see in Windows Explorer. When you click on a node, it expands its child nodes. When you click on the node a second time, it collapses its child nodes. Nothing too complicated, right?

Well, the client wasn’t happy with the proposed icon that represented the clickable node. When collapsed, the icon was a full black diamond. When expanded, it was the outline of a black diamond.

Instead, the client wanted a white diamond. On a white background.

I tried multiple times and multiple ways to explain this would be a bad idea, but the client wouldn’t hear it. They knew what they wanted, and that was that.

So I decided to give them what they wanted. And sure enough, when they reviewed the results, the client looked up at me and sheepishly said, “Um, I cannot see my white diamond”.

The takeaway
Despite all your good intentions, sometimes we need to let the client make their own mistakes. Sometimes they need to see the error of their ways to understand. Just don’t say, “I told you so!” 🙂

Category:
Communication