You’re Confident Your Decision Is Right—How to Persuade Your Team

Persuasion? You’re mistaken. If you’re the leader, the team just executes. If you’re not, simply sync the idea to the leader and let them decide.

As the head of a technology department, I often make many decisions, and team members naturally voice differing opinions. Even a technically strong developer may say:

I think this shouldn’t be done that way; if we do it and something goes wrong, I’ll have to take the blame.

He is right—if something fails, the responsible leader bears the consequence, but the developer must still execute.

Recently, a senior developer received a request to create a separate microservice, arguing:

This functionality is business‑wise independent and resource‑intensive, so to avoid dragging down other services it should be split out.

Although he is a technical expert and insists on this, I declined for three reasons:

Cost savings – from a budgeting perspective.

The business operation frequency is low and can tolerate failures; we can handle edge cases in code.

We have few developers, so creating many microservices is unnecessary. Using DDD, we can isolate the context within the existing codebase and consider a separate microservice only if future needs arise.

The developer’s warning resurfaced: "If the system fails, you’ll be responsible." Nevertheless, we followed my decision, and no incidents have occurred to date.

This experience reinforces that a leader must ultimately be accountable for outcomes; therefore, making the final decision is entirely appropriate.

For non‑leaders—ordinary developers with technical concerns—the correct approach is to professionally articulate the idea, schedule a meeting to sync the issue, and let the leader make the decision.