Design / UX: Get Stakeholder Approval — Simple Ways to Do It
“Client: Shouldn’t these additional tasks have all been covered at the start of the project?
Me: Yes, if you had told us about them. You gave us many new tasks during the project and we dealt with each one as they came. We had to work weekends.
Client: But how did you not know about them?
Me: How did we not know about tasks that you did not tell us about?
Client: I thought you were professionals.”
Designers love making fun of bad clients and stakeholders. There are definitely some very unreasonable, disrespectful people out there — especially in those first two years of your career when you’re just starting out and you’re working with businesses that have very small budgets and no exposure to what it’s like to work with designers.
But as a professional, it’s important to take responsibility for your part in managing a client relationship. The better you are at managing clients, the less problems you’ll have, even with the more unreasonable clients.
