it’s finally happened to me. I have a micro manager. How do you gracefully push back on people like this and get them to give you some space? I feel like a child the way he’s constantly like “can you add more spacing between text in this slide” and criticizing how I make a slide deck for an INTERNAL meeting with similar level stakeholders. I’m nearly 30 years old and didn’t get into product to have someone breathing down my neck about such minor things

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Some folks have OCD with PPT's. 😀

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Sorry visual communication is super important and design matters more than people realize. My suggestion is to ask him to sit down with you and give you slide design pointers. Document it and turn it into a resource for yourself and others. Then you get better, he feels heard, and you are seen as a scaling thinker!

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I’ve been presenting his slide design to a very unegaged and uninterested group of stakeholders every week for 2 months now. Some of them don’t even show up anymore. I attempted to redo the slides and include better content that facilitated more discussion and he had me go back to his way. I’m just going off observation, the meetings are unimportant to our audience.

How you do anything is how you do everything

I'm not sure that what you're experiencing is micromanaging based on this example. Giving you feedback for improvements is not micromanaging. Maybe have a discussion to understand what the requirements are for presentations and where he's getting that info so you can follow the appropriate template in the future. I know we also have those types of requirements, internal or not, for company standards

How long have you been in product? As a Senior PM Im surprised you haven't encountered a manager like this. In my experience it's pretty typical for non-technical managers to focus on inane things.

this is my first product role where I spend 75% of my time on slide decks. a deeper issue is this company treats PMs like POs and leadership makes all the decisions. I’m used to a real PM job, not spending all my time in powerpoint but I guess Ppt is a big part of this job

I’m surprised by the comments. I sort of agree with them, but I also see your point.

Maybe just ask for a style guide or some qualitative rules to follow by. You might want to also consider reframing where your boss is coming from. These suggestions could be how he contributes to a collaborative environment because he sees you guys operating as a team. A way to guide his input is to ask him to score the priority - like is the change critical or personal style preference? This way it will force him to think about the suggestions he is making, and it will give both of you insight into what changes are actually important and which ones are superficial.

However, you will need to be honest with yourself about whether or not his suggestions do improve the quality of your work. It might be that his suggestions are pedantic personal preferences, but it might be that he’s demanding a certain level of quality. Only you can discern the truth.

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