Bike Sheds
The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved
He calls this the Law of Triviality. It’s also the source of the Bike Shed argument. Or to put another way :
A committee will spend more time discussing things they understand. A nuclear power plant will sail through a finance committee, but a bicycle shed will get stuck in endless debates because everybody will have an opinion.
While no-one on the committee will understand the finer points of a nuclear power plant, bicycle sheds are simple, they’re just sheds for bikes, so everyone will feel they intimately understand the subject, and feel the need to have input on it. So you’ll end up with a multi-million pound power plant being okayed in a (relative) fraction of the time it takes to decide on a color to paint a £50 bike shed.
The same is true of web development
You can outline the architecture for a massively complicated product feature without too much hassle. Buy these servers, get a license for that, allocate so much time. Clean-cut and simple, and the client will follow your every suggestion.
Now try and explain why the main navigation should work a certain way and the link colour needs to be that subtle shade of red, and you’ll be going round and round and round for weeks. Endless emails and phone calls, and ‘Can we just try it this way to see…’ conversations until you’ve been through every possible variation and have utterly lost the will to live.