You ever catch yourself saying, “Wait—didn’t they mention this once, like… three calls ago?”
Welcome to the secret job of every PM and team lead: professional memory keeper. Unofficial mind reader. The one person who remembers that, apparently, purple is cursed, because some branding agency once convinced the client “eggplant” was a power color, and then the project flopped so hard they still won’t say its name out loud.
It’s easy to forget, when you’re knee-deep in screens and style guides, that the client isn’t seeing things through Figma frames. They’re seeing themselves—their brand, their idea, their million-dollar baby—reflected back. So when you’re reviewing a new visual direction, or a minor “it’s nothing, really” feature update, it helps to shift your POV. Look at it not with your team’s eyes, but with the client’s. Because odds are, you’re the only one on the team who heard that throwaway comment three weeks ago about hating gradients. Or serif fonts. Or anything that feels “too startup-y.”
Miss it now, and you’ll see it again—as an email at 5:43 PM on a Friday, with a friendly “tiny tweak” that somehow snowballs into an extra week of work.
Why Anticipating Client Reactions Saves Projects
That’s why our job is to preempt. If there’s even a 20% chance a choice might trigger a nope from the client, we draft two versions. One we’re proud of. One we know won’t scare them. Not to compromise the work, but to keep it moving forward—it’s easier to keep momentum going than to redo something from scratch later, after everyone’s emotionally attached and the team Slack thread is 73 messages deep.
Over time, this gets easier. Not because the feedback gets clearer—it usually doesn’t. You just start reading updates with the client’s voice in your head, and scanning designs the way they will. Would this new layout feel like an upgrade, or like a stranger moved the furniture and didn’t tell them? Does that icon say “modern,” or does it unlock a memory of their 2015 rebrand that went nowhere and cost too much? Is the motion playful… or performative?
Pre-Editing the Feedback Loop Before It Begins
You get spooked by things they’d be spooked by. Say things like “let’s simplify” when what you really mean is “they’ll panic if they see this.” Notice when a copy tweak feels off-brand, even though the brand book doesn’t mention tone. And somewhere between update v2.6 and v3.1-final-FINAL, you start pre-editing the feedback loop before it even begins.
Consider it the soft skill that keeps projects running smoothly. Or, as I like to think of it, the art of paying attention. And if you, as a PM, have done your job right, no one notices. Which, in this line of work, might be the highest compliment there is.
