I was a very early employee at my startup. ive gone from working closely with the CEO to working with a de facto head of engineering. i am a product manager and am having issues with him in terms of not trusting me, micro managing, delivering nasty feedback, etc. and i am being required to run things by him for approval constantly. the CEO obviously trusts him, but i am having trouble working for him. what do i do? note that he is causing issues with multiple people, not just myself. think very bright but a poor people manager.
This situation exactly happened to me 2 years ago, I got invited by one ex VP of a big corporation I previously worked for, the vp was the CEO of the new startup, myself and other 5 folks were founder members of the initial engineering team, we used to work directly with the CEO and we pretty much own the product, full autonomy, then the CEO hired more developers and brought a pajeet CTO and the cto brought a pajeet architect, the CTO started to do micro management on everybody and promised impossible things to the CEO, it was hard work at the beginning but the pajeet made it worst (slack calls at 4am etc) every single developer of the initial team started to break, myself included so finally most of the original ones resign, the last thing I heard it was that finally the CEO realized how badly the CTO hurt the company an the team's moral so he fired him. My advice to you is don't tolerate any kind of abuse on your person, I mean everyone has a different level of tolerance, for me it was my health, I can tolerate bad attitude and disrespect (at a certain level) but once my health started to deteriorate I said fuck this shit I'm done..
Do you actually work FOR this person? PM should not report to engineering as it creates significant conflicts of interest. If you're in a position to make that organizational change that'd be first. If you don't actually work for them, then convincing them that your ideas are good are literally part of the job, as impossible as it may be sometimes. Building a relationship is the basis of course: beg borrow or steal get in their good graces first.
I effectively report to him. His title is not head of engineering yet, but he’s about 8 years older than me so I suppose he’s been put in charge of me. I have to run things by him. If I am a first time PM and believe I am doing well and have the ear of the rest of the team, do I have enough clout to request a change? Could I effectively run the “product” and only report to CEO? Note there is a possibility there are broader leadership issues in the company and a bad culture that may be stemming from the CEO. Not a great situation.
A few factors to consider: Do you really want to keep working here? Are you learning things, making money, getting options, that you couldn't get elsewhere? If yes to any of those, is it worth the aggravation, assuming nothing changes? I think the answer to the second question has to be yes, because you can't guarantee anything will change. If it's still yes, then I see no harm in talking to the CEO and giving your opinions (some research might help, if you don't have the work experience credibility at least have the data). I'd also say more than likely the "bad culture may be stemming from CEO" part is true. That just factors into the two questions above
Get all the folks who can't get along with him to write him a feedback together with you, and summarize then submit to his manager (CEO probably at that point?) and to HR (if he's too abusive) because people relationships in the company are HR job and she did her job wrong if she has people inside the company who can't get along.
Unionize and lead a revolt.
Stunning and brave.
I think your best bet is to let them dig their own hole and keep a paper trail of the solid work you're doing At least then I'd the blame game starts you've done your CYA