How to Handle Unreasonable Executives
3 ways to wrangle them in and keep your projects and your sanity on track
Hands down, the hardest part of Product Management is dealing with unreasonable executives who expect you to deliver the sun and the moon at the snap of their manicured fingers.
In my time, I’ve had all sorts. Worst ever was a company full of execs that expected me to build an incredibly complicated software product without giving me a single designer or even a developer — and they wanted the project done and earning money from 4 months before I’d even started working for them.
I’m not kidding.
Yes, these kinds of things can happen in the land of software where executives fail up the ladder or they’re just plain nuts. But the problem is these executives can be powerful and hold the keys to your fate at the company, so you can’t just tell them to cram it. You have to very cleverly tell them to cram it.
So here are some standard situations these out-of-touch psychopaths will put you into and some strategies to wrangle them back into reality.
