Throw Your Team a Bone

You like little treats, so do other people! Sometimes you gotta give your peers something to make them feel good too.

Sometimes this is called the hairy arm technique, sometimes it’s a manifestation of Cunningham’s Law. What you do is this: present something obviously wrong or easily correctable when you make a presentation. This lets the other person feel smart (“you need to fix this broken thing that you made broken”) and changes the focus of the argument so that you get the nitpicking out of the way early and the uneeded but inevitable stage where it happens doesn’t derail the conversation when discussing actual work.

Some examples I’ve used over the years:

• Name a new source file slightly wrong in the PR. You’ll be asked to correct the name and then you won’t have to have a long conversation where you get the reviewer up-to-speed about the logic of the method that you spent a week thinking through, they’re satisfied with the feedback they’ve given and do not feel obligated to go further.
• Just ship a new UI without being provided a design. You’ll get some minor markup corrections but you don’t have to go through a lengthy planning phase.

Just a suggestion!