The Most Expensive Opinion in the Room

The night before the Challenger launched, a group of engineers at Morton Thiokol were trying to stop it.

NASA had contracted Morton Thiokol to build the Challenger’s solid rocket boosters. They’d run the numbers on the O-rings, the rubber seals that kept hot gases from escaping the rocket boosters. The forecast called for overnight temperatures to be 22°F by 6 a.m. They’d never tested the O-rings below 53°F. Every data point they had said not to launch in cold weather.

The engineers told their managers. Their managers told NASA, but NASA pushed back. They’d delayed launches before, they were under pressure, and they needed evidence more definitive than “we haven’t tested it.”

So Morton Thiokol’s VP of Engineering, a guy named Bob Lund, had to make the call. He’d been an engineer his entire career, but now he was in management. He understood the technical concerns as well as the political pressure.

During a caucus, Thiokol’s Senior VP Jerry Mason asked Lund to reconsider. Mason told him, “Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat.”

So Lund did. He reversed his recommendation. The Challenger launched the next morning at 36°F, the coldest shuttle launch ever.

Seventy-three seconds later, the O-ring failed and seven people died.

Later, when the Rogers Commission investigated the disaster, the cause was abundantly clear. The engineers were right. They had the data and the expertise. But the most expensive opinion in the room wasn’t theirs. It was the opinion of the person who had to balance technical reality against political pressure.

The person furthest from the technical problem made the technical decision, and it went down in history.

Now, lucky for you, your website decisions don’t kill people. But the same dynamic plays out every time you sit down to plan a website redesign. The most expensive opinion in the room, the one that shapes everything that follows, usually belongs to the person furthest from the actual problem.

Imagine for a moment that you’re reviewing homepage mockups with your team. The designer has created a version that immediately orients first-time visitors. It has clear service categories, prominent “find help” pathways, amd straightforward language about what you do and who you serve.

Your ED looks at it and frowns. “This doesn’t communicate who we are. People need to understand our history and our mission before they’ll trust us. I think we need to lead with our story, how we were founded, what makes our approach different, why we’re uniquely positioned to help.”

Nobody in the room says anything for a moment. Is the ED’s feedback wrong? It doesn’t sound wrong. They’ve been here for 15 years. They’ve built relationships with major funders. They know what creates credibility with foundation officers and board members, and that expertise has real value.

But here’s what’s actually happening: the ED is solving for the wrong audience. They’re thinking about the people they talk to every day, the foundation officers, board chairs, and community leaders. The people who need deep organizational context before they write a check or join a partnership.

Your website visitors aren’t those people. In this scenario, your typical visitor is an adult child trying to figure out if your programs can help their aging parent. They don’t need your founding story. They need to know what services you provide for seniors and whether Medicare covers them.

The homepage gets built around the ED’s experience anyway and launches three months later. People abandon the site just as much as before. Users still can’t find what they need in the first thirty seconds, so they leave.

But the ED thinks it looks great, because it answers the questions that matter to EDs.

This pattern repeats because organizations reward proximity to power, not proximity to users.

Senior people get senior by being good at their jobs. Your ED’s instincts about organizational positioning? Probably excellent when it comes to foundation grants and board recruitment.

The problem is that websites serve different people with different needs. Your ED talks to maybe fifty important stakeholders a year. Your website needs to serve not just those fifty people, but the five thousand people who’ve never heard of you.

And there’s no organizational incentive to say this out loud. Nobody wants to tell their ED that their opinion about the website might not matter as much as a random user’s experience. Nobody wants to suggest that the development director’s decade of expertise might not produce the best donation page.

So the most senior opinion becomes the most expensive opinion. Not because senior people are wrong about everything, but because everyone else is afraid to push back on their assumptions.

Now, the solution isn’t to ignore leadership input. That would be just as foolish.

Your ED should absolutely help define what success looks like. What are we trying to accomplish? Who are we trying to serve? What outcomes would make this website a success? Those are questions where experience and institutional knowledge matter enormously.

But tactical decisions, like what goes on the homepage, what you call things, how you organize navigation, where you put the donate button: all those things shouldn’t be settled by whose opinion carries the most weight in staff meetings. They should be settled by evidence from the people you’re trying to reach.

When your ED says “I think we should lead with our history,” the answer isn’t yes or no. It’s “let’s test that with people who’ve never heard of us and see if it helps them find what they need.”

When your development director has strong opinions about the donation flow, you don’t debate their expertise. You watch five first-time donors try to give $25 and see where they get stuck.

When your communications director presents two design options, you don’t ask which one will make your CEO most happy. You ask which one helps users accomplish their goals.

By taking this approach, you’re not dismissing people’s experience. Instead, you’re measuring it against the only thing that actually matters: whether it works for the people you’re trying to serve.

Every organization has expensive opinions. They’re expensive not because they’re wrong in principle, but because they’re often right for the wrong people.

The trick is knowing when expertise helps and when it gets in the way. Senior leaders are excellent at the problems they face every day. They’re often terrible at imagining problems they haven’t faced in years (or have never faced at all).

Bob Lund knew more about rocket engineering than almost anyone at Morton Thiokol. But when Jerry Mason asked him to put on his management hat, Lund started optimizing for management problems instead of engineering problems. The result was catastrophic.

Your website mistakes won’t kill anyone. But they’ll waste money, frustrate users, and undermine your mission, all because the most expensive opinion in the room went untested.

The difference between organizations that build effective websites and organizations that waste money on them isn’t intelligence or budget. It’s their willingness to let user evidence overrule internal authority.