The HiPPO problem and how to neutralise it
Highest Paid Person's Opinion beats data in every meeting unless you change the room.
Daniel
Fifteen years running growth for SaaS, ecommerce, and hardware brands. Currently shipping SaaSValidatr out of Australia.
HiPPO — Highest Paid Person's Opinion — is older than tech. Every industry has it. In SaaS companies it shows up when the CEO walks into a product review and by minute four the team is reshuffling a roadmap around what the CEO seems to prefer. Nobody votes on it. The decision is made anyway.
Three rules that break the pattern
- Score before you discuss. Anonymous scores get logged first; the conversation starts from data, not personality.
- Reveal simultaneously. No running tallies. Everyone sees everyone at the same moment, or you get anchoring.
- Require dissent to be named. If the group is unanimous, that's a signal to pause — real ideas generate disagreement.
This isn't anti-leadership. It's pro-decision. The CEO's instinct is still in the room. It's just in the room with everyone else's, weighted by the same rules, without the corridor-conversation override. Leaders who install this structure find their teams stop telling them what they want to hear and start telling them what they think.
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