Employ Social Proof to Ensure Your Professional Ideas Are Heard

Arpit Bhayani

Arpit Bhayani

Jul 27, 2026 • 1 min read


If your design, engineering decision, or product suggestion is not getting heard, try saying, “I went through blogs from a few companies and spoke with a few people…” instead of, “I think we should do this.”

The logic is simple - a personal opinion makes people evaluate you, while social proof lets them evaluate a pattern. Evaluating a pattern is easier, and it already carries the weight of external validation, making it easier to get agreement, or at least get your idea heard.

It is the same reason a tool gets adopted the moment a big company publishes a blog about using it in production, even though the technical case had been there all along.

By the way, this is a double-edged sword. If you are smuggling a bad idea through social proof, it can backfire big time. So it is important to be absolutely sure of what you are proposing and why it works.

At least your idea will get heard. After that, it is up to the merit of the idea itself.

Arpit Bhayani

Principal Engineer II at Razorpay - building Agent Studio, Ex-staff engg at GCP Memorystore & Dataproc, Creator of DiceDB, ex-Amazon Fast Data, ex-Director of Engg. SRE and Data Engineering at Unacademy. I spark engineering curiosity through my no-fluff engineering videos on YouTube and my courses