Someone Has to Decide What the Button Says

Not its color or its size, but rather what it should say.

I knew building the Eleven Eleven Coaching website would require decisions about the copy, the images, and the overall feeling of the site. I expected those. What I didn’t expect was a few words on a button to raise quite so many questions.

Should it say “Get Started”? That feels a little abrupt.

“Book a Call”? Accurate, perhaps, but not quite the experience I want to create.

“Begin a Conversation”? That feels more like me.

But once the button says “Begin a Conversation,” someone has to decide what happens after a person clicks it. And that someone is also me.

Does the person arrive at a form or a calendar? What does the form ask? How much do I need to know before we speak? How much should someone have to share before they’ve decided whether they want to work with me? What happens after they submit it? How quickly will they hear from me? What if they’re an individual seeking coaching for themselves? What if they’re a professional whose organization is sponsoring the coaching? What if an organization is reaching out about one of its leaders?

One button had now invited several forms, a scheduling process, an email sequence, and quite a few other decisions to the meeting.

This is how building a business has been going.

A decision that looks as though it should take twenty minutes introduces me to seven other decisions I didn’t know were waiting for me. Before long, I’m no longer deciding what a button should say. I’m thinking about the person on the other side of it. What might they be wondering? What do they need to know? What might make the process feel confusing, impersonal, or like more work than it needs to be? And what have I unintentionally promised by asking them to click?

This is where my Product Management brain enters the conversation. I start following the experience beyond the screen in front of me. I think about what happened before someone arrived, what they expect to happen next, and whether each part of the process makes sense when it meets the others. A perfectly reasonable button can create a perfectly confusing experience if no one has thought carefully about where it leads.

The same is true of a form. A form field may be helpful to the business and still feel unnecessary to the person completing it. A scheduling process may be efficient and still leave someone unsure about whether they’ve chosen the right kind of conversation. An automated email may deliver the correct information and somehow manage to sound as if no human being was involved.

These aren’t dramatic problems. No one is likely to write a strongly worded letter about a coaching inquiry form. But the small decisions begin creating an impression before I’ve ever met the person.

That matters to me.

Someone considering coaching may already be carrying a question they haven’t fully named. They may be thinking about a career change, a leadership challenge, a relationship, an ambition, or a part of their life that no longer feels quite right. They shouldn’t also need to solve the architecture of my business before we can talk about what brought them here.

I’m learning that owning a business doesn’t mean doing every part of the work myself. Fortunately, I have people around me who bring expertise I do not have, ask questions I have not considered, and help turn ideas into something real. But the decisions eventually come back to me. I’m responsible for whether the pieces fit together and for what the experience asks of someone. And I’m responsible for noticing when something technically works but still doesn’t feel right.

That is both the privilege and the weight of building something of my own. It’s also where much of my previous experience keeps showing up. Not as a list of roles I once held, but in the questions I instinctively ask and the details I can’t quite bring myself to dismiss.

The website is ready now. It has spent enough time in meetings with me. It’s ready to meet the people it was designed for.

I don’t think of that as finished. I expect the website to continue evolving as Eleven Eleven Coaching evolves. The Product Manager in me wouldn’t have it any other way. A launch doesn’t prove that every decision was right. It’s the point when the experience meets the people it was designed for and begins teaching you what planning alone couldn’t.

The button says “Begin a Conversation.”

On the other side is a process I have worked to make thoughtful, clear, and human. I’m also leaving room for experience to show me what could become clearer, warmer, simpler, or more useful.

So yes, someone had to decide what the button says.

But if it says “Begin a Conversation,” I want the experience on the other side to feel like one.