You Want to Tell Me Where the Headline Goes
“Sandro, come on, I studied design and they want to tell me where to place the heading. They come up with recommendations that are against all design principles.”
A case from my practice, fully anonymized. Details such as role, industry and personal information have been changed.
What’s really going on
Feedback that reaches deep into visual design, concrete instructions about where to place an element, for instance, rarely lands as purely professional for designers. For someone who studied design and works in it professionally, expertise and professional identity are closely intertwined. When feedback overrides that expertise instead of building on it, it quickly becomes more than a disagreement about content. It turns into an attack on someone’s value system.
That was exactly what had happened at the creative agency I worked with on this project. On the surface, it was about a headline. Underneath, it was about whether an entire professional identity still had room in this client relationship.
The starting point
I was commissioned by the bank’s Head of HR. Between the internal marketing team and the external creative agency, little had gone smoothly for months. Deadlines were missed, feedback missed its mark, work was duplicated, and morale in both teams suffered accordingly. What had started as a straightforward, factual problem had long since turned into a personal conflict; people on both teams no longer wanted to work with each other directly.
Both teams also brought different cultural backgrounds: the marketing team leaned German, the creative agency leaned British. Direct feedback, standard practice in one culture, landed as harsh and intimidating in the other, a pattern that fueled the conflict further.
The constant revision loops cost more than time. They led to overtime on both sides. With every missed deadline, resentment grew a little further, without anyone being able to say exactly what was causing it.
Getting to the real problem
Individual interviews with people from both teams and both leaders showed early on: there was no shared understanding of what the actual problem even was. At a joint workshop day, we collected and categorized both teams’ issues, working from agreed ground rules, among them that both sides genuinely wanted a solution.
Part of the conflict turned out to be a pure process problem. There were no interfaces for early alignment, so small change requests from the marketing team triggered long revision loops at the agency. We fixed this part practically, mapping the workflow together as a flowchart and defining new, earlier feedback checkpoints, first as an experiment.
The other part of the conflict, the part behind the quote that opens this case, couldn’t be solved with a flowchart. Alongside the process design, I worked with each team separately to clarify their roles again: what falls under their own responsibility, and what clearly sits outside it. That clarity took some of the pressure out of daily work, because not every open question immediately turned into a debate about first principles anymore. But it still didn’t explain why a single sentence about a headline’s position could carry so much charge.
Back to the person behind the quote
In a longer one-on-one conversation with the person most affected, we worked out a clear separation of roles together: their own artistic work shapes their identity. The work done for the marketing team is client work, work they need to stand behind, without it having to express who they are. We used role clarification and floor anchors so that this distinction would actually hold in daily work.
In parallel, I developed a set of guidelines with the marketing team for their own decision-making authority as the client, and we talked openly about the cultural effect of feedback. The team still wanted to give substantive feedback, including on details like a headline’s position. But we worked specifically on how to phrase that feedback so it would land without attacking the other side’s professional identity.
What’s changed since
Even the first test run of the new feedback checkpoints sped up delivery noticeably. Feedback on a headline’s position still came, but now early in the process. The creative agency knew from the start what mattered, instead of rebuilding finished work from scratch.
When I checked back three months later, there were no conflicts left. The collaboration was focused, effective, and, for both teams, noticeably less draining than before.
The person who said the quote that opens this case would probably put it differently today. Their standards for their own work haven’t dropped; the feedback that reaches them now builds on their expertise instead of overriding it. The argument about the headline was never really about design. It was about whether their professional expertise gets seen within the client relationship.
Quotes translated from German, except the anchor quote above, which was originally given in English.