I’ve worked at a small company for about 6 years and recently found out I’m being laid off, along with half the company. My CEO(70s), has had me working on a new product idea and developing a business plan for it. He never invests more than 10k on product development & is very controlling over UX/UI, leading to rough products, but he’s working with developers on it.

He hinted at giving me equity or a stake in this new SaaS tool after I leave and used that as motivation to push me, and I was open to it, but mostly I just wanted to do a good job on my way out. I’ve been pushing to talk to customers and understand their needs, but he wants me to focus solely on the business plan. He’s old school and always wants a huge doc. Today, he asked what segmentation and customer personas were and told me to delete all this because “they are dumb and nobody actually uses them”. I bit my tongue, disagreed, then said I’d remove it. TAM, SAM, SOM…also cut.

After our four-hour meeting, he mentioned the need to hurry this up. He said he’s taking it to a local MBA program to have a student potentially take over, saying they’d be better at making it big and suggesting I could probably work with them. I have 20 years of business experience, a degree in marketing, a certificate in entrepreneurial studies, experience with two startups, and knowledge of the space. How would you have responded? How should I have responded professionally? I’m soft spoken but I fired shots. 😬