When product feedback becomes performance art and every opinion carries equal weight, good products die by a thousand well-meaning cuts.

You’ve seen this play before. The team’s done the work—user research, prototypes, real validation. But then comes the final stakeholder review.

Suddenly the room fills up: marketing, legal, ops, that one guy from sales who once took a design bootcamp. And then the feedback avalanche hits:

• “This feels unclear.”
• “What if we added a tooltip?”
• “Could we try a chatbot? Everyone’s doing chatbots.”

It’s not grounded in user data. It’s not based on actual problems. It’s vibes.

You know this is solid. You’ve tested it. Users get it.

But to appease the room, you compromise. You clutter the UI. You delay launch. You fix problems that never existed.

This isn’t product development. It’s Feedback Theater—the performance that emerges when review culture drifts away from user truth and toward internal optics.

And it’s powered by three invisible dynamics.

The Diagnosis

There are three invisible dynamics that power this dysfunction:

1. Phantom Friction: Fixing problems that don’t exist

Fixing problems that don’t exist.

Stakeholders review static screens, not real flows. What looks “confusing” in a screenshot is obvious in context. What feels ambiguous in a boardroom feels intuitive in the wild.

This creates invented friction points—hallucinations—that teams scramble to fix …even when users never struggled in the first place.

The result? Unnecessary tweaks, bloated UX, slower shipping.

2. The “Everyone’s a Critic” Effect

When every opinion feels credible, expertise gets flattened.

Product is one of the few disciplines where everyone feels qualified to weigh in.

• “I wouldn’t click that.”
• “My mom wouldn’t get this.”
• “Our competitor does it this way.”

Even experts get overruled by the HIPPO (the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion).

And the most dangerous refrain of all:

“Product X does this. Shouldn’t we?”

This kind of comparison masquerades as rigor. But without context—user, job-to-be-done, incentives, constraints—it’s just copy-paste logic. This is how you end up with karaoke creativity: performing innovation by imitating others instead of solving your own users’ problems.

3. The Incentive to Perform

Meetings optimize for contribution signaling, not clarity.

Inside review meetings:

• Silence feels like disengagement.
• Opinions feel like participation.
• The room rewards “I found something” over “Users are fine.”

Two reinforcing forces emerge:

• Meeting Inflation: Too many people in the room.
• Critique Inflation: Everyone needs to speak to justify being there.

It’s no wonder Feedback Theater happens. The system rewards performance, not product judgment.

The Cost

This culture doesn’t just slow you down—it regresses your product to the mean.

• Diluted Vision – Sharp edges sanded off into safe mediocrity.
• Feature Creep – Every suggestion becomes a requirement.
• Decision Paralysis – The loudest opinion wins, not the clearest insight.
• False Meritocracy – Expertise is drowned out by egalitarian feedback.

And the tragic irony? No one remembers what they said in that meeting anyway. But the product lives with those compromises forever.

The Fix: Ship Behavior, Not Approval

You don’t want to squash feedback, but you have to design a system to protect signal from noise. Here’s how:

1. Curate the Room (Ruthlessly)

If they’re not building it or blocking it, they don’t need to be there. No spectators. Fewer opinions = better signal.

2. Normalize Silence

Make it explicit: “You don’t need to speak to be seen.” Listening is contribution.

3. Assign a DRI

Feedback ≠ mandate. Someone must edit, not transcribe. Designate the decider upfront.

4. Narrate the Flow, Not the Frame

Screenshots lie. Walk through the live experience:

“User taps this, sees that, completes the task.”

The tools exist. You can vibe code now. No excuses for not doing this.

5. Prototype Fast. Test Faster.

Replace “Will users get this?” with “Let’s see what they do.” Build just enough to observe behavior.

6. Ask the Magic Question

When someone says, “This might be confusing,” Ask:

“Confusing to whom? Have we seen that? Or are we just guessing?”

7. Distinguish Signal from Status

If someone cites another product—ask:

“Are their users the same? Their goals? Their constraints?”

Most product mimicry is shallow. Context is king. Don’t copy unless you understand the full system

Bottom Line

Product teams don’t get paid to make stakeholders feel smart or included.

They get paid to ship value.

Don’t let democratic dysfunction, Storm Thinking, or karaoke creativity dilute your product.

Filter for signal.

Push back with evidence & experience. Don’t fix what isn’t broken.

And above all: protect your users from your meetings.