Unresponsive PM, how to deal with it?
Hi everyone,
I'm looking for advice as to how to move forward with an unresponsive PM I'm dealing with.
Context: Feb this year my company went through a pretty harsh lay-off round, 2-3 ppl from every department were let go, one of those ppl was the PM I reported to. He was a really good PM, a real go-getter. He was replaced by a content design guy who was "promoted" to PM, this content design guy also happens to be buddies with the CTO from a previous company. That, and my previous PM being very vocal about things he disliked about our processes led to this.
So, sure, I might be a little biased against this guy because he replaced a very competent person just because of nepotism basically. I'm trying to push that feeling aside tho. The problem is that this new PM, the content design guy, isn't just not a go-getter, he isn't responsive at all. About all the negative traits he brings to the table we have:
- He makes a town hall meeting to decide on every little thing, he asks the designers or the QA for product feedback, things that he should decide. He is unable to make one single decision.
- He abuses DM, like instead of kicking a thread on the dev or design channel, he just messages a bunch of ppl privately and we all miss context about things going on.
- Doesn't keep consistency for any processes. We have decided that we would start using Google Docs to spec the features out so we could talk about them in there. We did that once. After that he decided he would use JIRA tickets as the spec. Then not even that, we coded a POC and because it "looked good" went out with that.
- I pinged him on Slack asking for product decision feedback and he doesn't reply until next day, some times he never does reply at all!
- We, the dev team, were running out of things to do, so I drafted some specs for some low-hanging fruit we could pull, shared those specs and never got any feedback from him.
All this being said, what the f am I supposed to do?
Again, this guy is buddies with the CTO from a previous job, and the CTO is the only person I think I can bring this up to, as my engineer manager has lost any will to do anything in the company.
Is it worth talking about this with the CTO? I've always been proud of my skill to not shy away from difficult situations, but for the first time in my carrer I kinda feel there are no options to move forward.
Best case scenario: I talk about this with the CTO, everything respectfully in a "we need to improve" manner instead of "your buddy is useless" – and maybe things do improve.
Worst case scenario: I talk about this with the CTO, he wipes his ass with my feedback and puts me on the chipping block for the next lay-off round.
I don't, has anyone gone through this situation ever?