You hired an expert, so let them be one

Hiring an expert because you don’t know their field, then approving every detail of their work yourself, is a reliable way to stall a website project.

I was talking with a friend who runs a design agency. He was venting, politely, about a client who kept sending notes on font sizes and whitespace. In the discovery call, that client had said he didn’t know this stuff. That was why he hired them. Then he became the one approving the work.

“They hire us because they don’t know this shit,” my friend said. “But then they are the ones approving the work. It’s so weird.”

It happens all the time, and it rarely gets named.

A website project holds two jobs. Deciding what success looks like is yours. Deciding how to get there belongs to the expert. Most approval processes blur the two, and the owner ends up redesigning the homepage in a comment thread late at night.

The useful question is “Is this getting us closer to the goal?” The question that stalls projects is “Do I like this shade of blue?”

Staying involved is fine. Change what you approve. Sign off on the strategy first, on its own, before anyone designs anything. Then judge each page by outcomes. Does it make the right people curious? Does the headline make a stranger keep reading? Whether you like the font is the expert’s call.

When you judge whether the work is working, you ask better questions and you stop designing. That’s the part of the project only you can do.