Specific beats polished. "Make the headline bigger and the photos warmer" gets exactly that; "make it pop" gets a guess. Three habits that make every request land:
- Say the outcome, not the method. "People should be able to book a Saturday slot" — the engineer picks the how.
- One thing at a time for changes you care about; batch small tweaks in a list.
- React to what comes back. "Closer — but the orange is too loud" is a perfectly good instruction.
Clumsy-but-specific always wins. You're the owner giving direction, not a programmer writing code.