I’ve worked with my fair share of difficult stakeholders. This time I’ve encountered a product director who seems to make regular, sweeping assumptions about my work.

His reports - product managers - then come back to me with his “concerns,” which often happen to be foolishly misguided.

Example: my organization recently went through layoffs, so the product director wants to focus on high priority work. Well, we have a sister product team and we sought to align based on his guidance. Some of the work that needs to be done first are audits. It’s not sexy work, but they can highlight tons of opportunities. For some reason, he is thinking the work is going to last one quarter. Never said that and I even wrote up a brief, and we’re not choosing to do all the audits.

I get frustrated because the PMs represent me in meetings and whatever I do always seems to get slammed by him without me being there to defend myself.

One thing I could see is updating the timeline for the audits in the brief because I have more information as of this morning. So I’ll change that tomorrow. Any thoughts on how to get this director to back off more often?