it's real. it usually happens when i working on mobile apps for big companies. apps are comparably new (compared to websites, desktop apps or server software) a

it's real. it usually happens when i working on mobile apps for big companies. apps are comparably new (compared to websites, desktop apps or server software) and for a lot of customers these are the first apps they launch. so new and exciting! they want to be part of it, they have to be part of it. another reason is they're afraid of getting downsized if they're not working on (contributing to) N projects at once. on a technical level they don't have to add anything to it, so it's mostly visual tweaks they're demanding; usually something they've seen in other apps (no matter if it was something that made sense on ios in a different context and we're working on android). that's called bikeshedding. if the project bombs they didn't really have anything to do with it (apart from that one minor change) - if it's a success they were an integral part of the team. one project, we needed a notification sound. the product owner begged us to keep our mouths shut, take one of the default notification sound files and tell the others custom sounds aren't possible - because if the marketing department got wind of it we'd have to test a boatload of different files for different managers and wait another month for the notification-sound-committees final decision.