Every ServiceNow developer, administrator, and architect has at one time or another, got a requirement from their client that they know is bad-practice, silly, or sub-optimal.

I often come across developers in the ServiceNow communities (such as the ServiceNow Developer forums, Discord, or Telegram groups), having conversations like this:

How do I do X?
“Why would you want to do that? What’s the goal?”
Because that’s the requirement from the client.

Even when told that what they want to do is technically impossible, some will refuse to go back to the client and tell them that.
It’s as if people sometimes can’t fathom telling a client “that’s not possible but, if you tell me why you want to do it, I might be able to find a better way”.

In this article, we discuss how to approach these situations and what it means to be the guide as a ServiceNow developer.