How Good Websites Get Ruined in the Leadership Review Meeting
Hey execs…your company website is not your megaphone.
I’m calling you out, because everyone reading this has watched it happen.
The situation: A design and marketing team spends weeks on a site design.
They talk to customers, map the questions real buyers ask, agonize over what comes first.
Then the review meeting happens, and somewhere around minute five, the page stops being built for the customer and starts being built for the highest ranking leader in the room.
“The award goes in the hero! The new partnership we earned must get a banner. Change the headline to a sentence that mentions the company three times and the customer's problem zero times.”
Everyone leaves feeling like “well… if they run the company, what can we possible do?”
The site is now worse, and the only people who can tell are the customers who weren't invited.
This is the single most common way a good website becomes a bad one.
Not bad designers. Not bad budgets or plans. A bad idea… quietly and almost universally held, is that the website is the company's megaphone.
A surface for leadership to broadcast what they want the market to hear.
It is worth saying plainly: that idea is wrong, it is expensive, and most companies have organized their entire web presence around it.
This post is for everyone in that building… designers, yes, but executives especially. Because the people with the most power over the website are usually the ones operating on the most outdated model of it. That deserves to be examined.
Where the ‘megaphone’ instinct comes from
Its hard for me to say but that instinct isn't stupid.
For most of business history, every channel a company owned was a broadcast channel. The brochure, the press release, the trade-show booth, the thirty-second spot. You decide the message, you push it outward, you hope it lands. There was no other option. A generation of leaders built their entire intuition for "communication" in that world, and the website showed up looking like nothing so much as the newest, biggest, most expensive brochure.
Then there's the visibility problem.
The website is the one company asset every executive can see, judge, and have a ‘confident’ opinion about without any specialized knowledge.
Nobody redlines the database architecture in a leadership meeting.
Everybody redlines the homepage.
So it becomes the surface where every internal anxiety comes to land.
The board wants the new positioning reflected somewhere, sales wants its case study above the fold, and the CEO just got back from a conference with three Ideas and nowhere else to put them.
And underneath all of it: the website feels like the company's face. "This represents us" is an emotionally true sentence. Executives are not wrong to care intensely about it.
They're wrong about the most important thing. They think the face is for them. It isn't.
The dysfunction
Hot take: A website is not where you talk. It is where someone decided to come find an answer.
Nobody… not one human being, ever…has visited a homepage to receive a company's message. People arrive mid-task. They are evaluating whether you solve their problem, hunting for pricing, looking for the login, deciding in roughly eight seconds whether you are credible enough to keep reading. Every single visitor is in the middle of a job.
The megaphone model treats that visitor as an audience. They are not an audience.
An audience showed up to listen to you. A website visitor showed up to use something, and they will close the tab the instant it stops being useful. Without guilt, without notice, and without ever telling you why.
So let's actually name the dysfunction, because "the website is our megaphone" is a polite phrase for a set of genuinely destructive behaviors:
It optimizes for applause from the wrong room. A page built to satisfy internal stakeholders gets graded by internal stakeholders. It "tests well" in the conference room and dies in the wild, and because the conference room never sees the wild, the failure is invisible. The company congratulates itself on a page its customers are actively fleeing from.
It mistakes "important to us" for "useful to them." The partnership announcement is genuinely a big deal inside the building. To a buyer comparing three vendors with four tabs open, it is noise sitting between them and the answer they came for. Both things are true. The megaphone approach can only see the first one.
It has no natural limit, so it always ends in a committee. If the website is a megaphone, then every team has a legitimate claim to airtime, because every team has a message. There is no principled way to say no. So the homepage becomes a negotiated treaty between departments… cluttered, self-referential, slow, and accountable to no one outside the org chart.
A page that serves everyone internally serves no one externally.
It cannot be argued with, because it has no scoreboard. "Make the logo bigger" has no success metric. "Lead with the award" has no success metric. These are assertions of taste and rank, and you cannot win a debate about taste against someone who outranks you.
The megaphone model isn't just wrong, it's structurally designed so that being right doesn't help you.
And the deepest problem, the one underneath all the others: the megaphone has no feedback loop. A real website is a conversation.
The visitor asks a question with every click, and the page either answers it or fails.
A company running the megaphone model can be losing customers on its homepage for years and experience that loss as nothing but a vague disappointment with the conversion rate.
That's the most prevalent dysfunction in nearly every website i’ve worked on in the past 10 years.
Now here's my take on what to do about it.
The next section is for both sides of the table, because the fix requires the designer to change their tactics and the executive to change their model.
“Why do I even bother preparing data if we ignore it?” - web designers everywhere
Tips to Regain & Reframe
Being right is necessary here and almost completely useless on its own. The executive is not behaving irrationally given their model of the website. So you don't win by proving the layout is better. You win by retiring the model.
Here is a concrete approach for doing exactly that.
1. Reframe the room before you reveal the page
Never open a review with "here's the new design." That invites everyone to react with their taste. Open with the visitor's situation instead.
"Before we look at anything… here's who this page is for. Someone clicks our ad. They've got about eight seconds and exactly one question in their head: can this thing do the specific job I need done. Everything we look at today, let's judge by whether it answers that person. Sound fair?"
You have just changed the question the room is answering. Every comment from here is measured against the visitor instead of against the commenter's department. That single sentence does more work than twenty slides.
But Hope, what if i’m not the one presenting the design?
I’ve been here. And it is dumb first and foremost but it happens.
If, by some asinine reasoning, someone other than you the designer is presenting your work… provide pre-read materials.
If you don’t get invited to the room with the execs, at least share this perspective in print. Print can be saved, referenced and pointed at should someone ask for receipts.
2. Humans deserve to be named
"Users" is an abstraction, and an abstraction is easy to overrule. A real person is not.
"This is Marcus. He's a procurement manager. Right now he has our site open next to two competitors, he's been burned by overpromising vendors before, and he is allergic to fluff. When we say 'lead with the award', what does that do for Marcus?"
It is genuinely harder (not impossible) to bury someone's question under a press release when that someone has a name, a job, and a bad mood. Bring Marcus to every meeting. Make people argue against him, not against you.
3. Convert every argument about taste into an evidence question
The megaphone debate is unwinnable on opinion alone and very winnable on data.
Build the reflex of turning every subjective claim into a testable one… out loud, in the room.
Exec: "The headline should lead with the award."
You: "Could be right. Let's not guess, let's run both. Award headline against benefit headline, two weeks, real traffic. Whichever wins, wins. I'll set it up tomorrow."
Exec: "This page feels cluttered."
You: "Let's find out for sure… five users from our actual target segment, fifteen minutes each. If they're lost, you'll have caught a real problem. If they're not, we'll know it's solid. Either way we're better off than guessing."
You are not trying to embarrass anyone. You are moving the decision off of who has the most seniority and onto what the visitor actually does.
An executive who insists on overruling test data in front of the room is now making a very different, very visible choice.
4. Stop saying "no." Start saying "not here."
A startling amount of conflict evaporates when you stop rejecting the message and start relocating it.
The award, the partnership, the founder's vision…. these often genuinely belong on the site.
They do not belong in the single most contested rectangle of pixels on the internet.
"This is a real story and it deserves real space…. not three words fighting for room in the hero. Let's give it a proper page where it can actually breathe and we can tell it well. I'll link to it prominently. Deal?"
The executive wanted the message to exist and to be honored. They will usually take that deal, because you've offered them both.
You've just declined to let it bulldoze the customer's path on the way in.
5. Give the brand fight away on purpose
Here is a concession you should make loudly and early, because it buys enormous credibility. Executives are often right that the site should feel unmistakably like the company. Voice, tone, visual identity, point of view, attitude… yes. Express all of it, turn it up.
"You're completely right that this has to feel like us, and I want to push that further, not less. So let's pour the personality into the voice and the visual identity, and keep the structure of the page ruthlessly focused on the customer's job. Those two things don't fight. We can have both."
The megaphone conflict is almost never really about brand expression. It's about structure… what gets prioritized, what's above the fold, what the navigation leads with. Give the expression fight away generously and you've earned the standing to win the structure fight, which is the one that actually decides whether the site works.
6. Make the price of "everything" impossible to ignore
Executives pile things into a website or homepage because additions feel free.
They are not free, and your job is to make the bill visible.
Never say "we can't add that." Say "we can, and here's what it costs," and then show them.
"Absolutely, we can add it. Here's that version. Notice the primary call-to-action just moved further down the page, and we've added about a second and a half to load time. Best estimate, somewhere around a third of mobile visitors now never reach the button. So the real question is: is this announcement worth roughly a third of our mobile conversions?
Genuinely your call… I just want us deciding it on purpose."
You haven't refused anything. You've made the trade-off legible and handed the decision back. A surprising number of executives un-ask the question themselves the moment the cost stops being invisible.
7. Build your support squad before the meeting starts
The review meeting is the worst possible place to have this fight for the first time.
Positions get public, egos get attached, and retreat becomes humiliating. So do the real work earlier, one conversation at a time.
To the head of sales, beforehand: "You need this page converting qualified leads, not just looking impressive. I think we want the same thing. Can I show you the direction before the big review, so you know what you're backing?"
Sales wants conversion, not clutter, and sales has credibility with leadership that a designer often doesn't. Whoever owns the revenue number is your natural ally. Walk into the room with them already on side and you are no longer a lone designer being precious about whitespace… you are the visible edge of a consensus that's already formed.
8. Retire the craft vocabulary
I mean this in the nicest way possible - most execs don’t have a vocabulary that appreciates design.
"Clean," "elegant," "intuitive," "modern," "on-brand"… this vocabulary quietly labels you as the taste person.
And taste is precisely the thing an executive feels equally entitled to have.
The moment the conversation is about taste, rank wins.
So change the words. Same decisions, completely different power:
Not: "This cleaner layout feels more elegant and intuitive." Instead: "This layout gets the visitor to their answer in one scroll instead of three. We'd expect that to show up in bounce rate and in qualified leads… that’s the comparison I'd watch."
Talk about conversion, qualified pipeline, bounce rate, time-to-answer, support tickets deflected, cost of acquisition. When you frame your work as a lever on the outcomes the executive is personally accountable for, you stop being someone whose opinion can be pulled rank on and become someone whose analysis has to be answered.
That is the whole game.
For the executives still reading
If you run a company or a function and you've read this far without getting defensive: thank you, and here is the part worth learning from.
Your instinct to care about the website is correct.
Your instinct that it represents the company is correct.
The only thing worth changing is one quiet assumption: that the website is where you get to talk.
It isn't. It's where your customer talks, by clicking or by leaving, and the only question that matters is whether anyone in your building is set up to hear them.
When you overrule a test result, when you add the banner because you or the board expects it, when you ask for the design to be changed last minute… you are not using the megaphone. You are turning up the volume while the customer is mid-sentence.
The most valuable thing you can do is not generate your better perspective for the website.
It's to ask, every single time, a different question: not "what do we want to say here" but "what did the person who landed here come to find… and did we hand it to them faster than the competitor did."
The bottom line
The megaphone model says: the website is where we talk. The model that actually wins says: the website is where we answer.
Every reframe in this post, every user test, every "let's give that its own page," every cost made visible.
They are all small deposits toward that one shift. You will probably not flip it in a single meeting. But the designers and the leaders who keep translating craft into outcomes, who keep dragging the named customer into the room, who keep making trade-offs legible instead of just objecting… they slowly become the people a company checks with instead of overrides.
The website was never the mouthpiece. The customer was always the one talking.
The entire job, design's job, leadership's job, everyone's job… is to make sure the website is answering the right questions.