You (or your team) are not your users

People in your team, including yourself, may project their own needs or personal preferences onto the products. These opinions may not help solve the real needs of your users, and often lead to fruitless discussions among people with different preferences.

In these situations, it is important to change the perspective of the conversation--instead of discussing about what people in the team like, focus the conversation on what will work for your users. This encourages people to connect their feedback to the product goals and provide more context.

A complaint such as I don't like this drop-down menu is not very helpful. Framing it as I don't think this drop-down works since users are provided with too many options when making a quick decision brings more context and it is presented as an hypothesis that can be checked--you can ask for a situation in which such a problematic case would manifest, and recreate this when testing. This perspective change helps to focus on the user goals, and turns feedback into opportunities for learning more about your users. Making sure that the team regularly views real users using your products and prototypes will help with this shift of perspective.