Yeah, this has a tendency to happen, it's sort of the constant fight. You can really only fight it with metrics, you can sort of start to show that 3tiny+1med tends to be equivalent to 1 large tends to be equivalent to 5small, or whatever. At the end of the day, you're trying to make it as hard as possible to simply add numbers. People will naturally try to map these things to ordinal numbers, and it's important to sort of keep a light constant pressure to prevent this the further away from the team you go. You need to start by training your team and your PMs and your manager to avoid this as much as possible. It's their job to train their stake holders and bosses in turn. I can tell you from experience that it's an incredible amount of effort, but the benefits are really worth it. Having a team with space to be effective is a magical place to be. I still mourn needing to leave that team and organization.