So I joined a fintech startup 10 months ago in good faith, CEO is a charming guy, he could get investors money, assured me of product being in a good state, no financial issues and team is building but we have a good foundation.
It turned out he has control issues, micromanages everybody, sneaks on people, randomly probing if they are doing what they are supposed to. Monitoring email traffic, using obligatory Wakatime to track if people are working as most of the devs are remote, and contractor, not even employees.
It turned out the product is in a very bad shape, no testing is done, competence is not covering all needs, and there is no technical leadership. Practically unusable.
And now the fun part starts.
As a PM I tried to suggest changes, to make a strategy and learn from our mistakes.
- – I was told there is a no-meeting policy, as meetings are a waste, so if I have any issue, I should tell him directly.
- – When I told him about issues, my proposals were rejected in ever case, with strange reasons.
- – No work from home is allowed, although we are often in calls with devs all day.
- – We dont have write access to company file storage, we need to request creating/moving folders each time, reason is to keep order.
- – When an important network device fried, we had to wait until we got another via warranty, and for weeks we couldnt use certain business critical servers.
- – When I didnt get into a fight he induced, he asked me in PM if he offended me, when I said yes, and explained it demotivates me that he micro manages, he reasoned that he is the CEO and he is right, see below discussion.
Chat snippet:
- – CEO: You are the best :muscle: Hope you didn't mind that I gave suggestion regarding _____ and ______ announcement. I'm trying to parry eventual follow up questions, as ______ has a similar mindset and background to me.
- – Me: Thanks for bringing that up, it shows you care about how I took your suggestion.
- Actually I took your phrasing a bit more instructive than supportive. To have examples you used: always wait… , tell it as…, keep it…
- I consider you to have valuable experience in many areas, so you (as well as others in the team) sharing your way of thinking gives me ideas, options, and is always appreciated. Letting others be in charge, on the other hand helps to keep (and build up) responsibility, and have motivation for the role. Using an instructive tone with me makes me lose some motivation to take responsibility for my role(s).
- So making an example, you could say: informing a business partner of an issue without having options will show you're not in control. Delaying communication but providing options, or having the problem already solved will show, you know what you're doing.
- I hope the above makes sense.
- – CEO: Thanks for sharing! Good to hear and happy you followed up.
- I do understand your concern, and see your thought process. I've been in a similar situation. Important to add is the mindset of different stakeholder at a company, which naturally holds their experience and area to heart. You to products, _____ to commercials, _____ to technology, _____ to AI and so on. The annoyance of working close to someone as a founder/CEO/COO, who's role it is to work between all areas, mitigating risk, setting overall strategy and to make sure the interest of one doesn't overrule another, is very specific for startup and has little to do with “control” or “ownership”. To my knowledge I haven't been involved in Project ______ more than by request and for parts concerning my areas, hence I don't even know how the product looks.
- As “Keeping it clean” is a personal driven value, which I agree to in many ways personally but need to be mindful of in certain corporate situations, it may affect certain risks beyond product area. Especially commercially each words has a concequence and knowing _____ (given we have similar investment related background and have spoken for 1.5 years), to not considering a sales driven communication towards a venture capitalist stakeholder (which is incredibly unique/rare in a tech developement project), could affect the company (short term funding). Therefore, it is my job to oversee overall strategy between all areas, to identify risks and share it. Please note that I always consider what I write carefully, hence rarely I would share or request something random – although it sometimes will and can intefere with the area of your, ______, ______ or ______, ______, etc.
- Sometime as a suggestion, other times as a request.
- – Me: So bottomline of what you´re saying is that the way you communicated (always wait… , tell it as…, keep it…) and the effect it had on me (demotivation due to instructive tone) has its place due to you being a CEO?
- – CEO: No that would be to simply put and could involve multiple people as we grow (finance, legal, commercials, marketing, tech and or investment teams). I would assume your demotivation in the errend seems to arrive from:
- A) when you feel inteferance from another perspective and stakeholder indirectly or directly to be involved asking you to revise something that could affect the company in different ways, relating a Product or the Project that you work with.
- And, in combination with;
- B) in this perticular instance a template, although was truly based as a suggestion (as I wrote), which included specific words that were selected to emphasis each session and things to consider/the importance from another perspective than purly Product/This Project related.
- If so, it is not meant as a demotivating factor, and I will consider other words to emphasis the rationale within a suggestion next time as there will be other and more cases where alignment of company interest needs to be assured.
Do you think its a normal reaction I want to jump ship?