Well then the project manager should have argued back and said, Hey Bill, I know you're the boss, but you're mistaken about this. This completely breaks the convention from the rest of our programs and therefore the expected behavior within our ecosystem. And then laid out several additional good reasons why Ctrl-F is logically Find, not Forward, and asked him to deal with the inconvenience.

Perhaps Bill would have fired them, but if he's as smart as people say he is he would've been convinced by a good counterargument.