Stop designing for the approval meeting

The most expensive audience your website will ever perform for is not your customers. It's your team, in a meeting, on a Tuesday.

Internal audiences reward complexity - every stakeholder needs their section, their message, their slide. Customers reward clarity. These two forces pull in exactly opposite directions, and most websites are the wreckage of the collision.

A test I use with clients: for every section on a page, ask "would we keep this if our customer was in a hurry?" Because they are. They're always in a hurry.

Design for the person who's about to close the tab. That's who's actually visiting.