I'm so tired
Long story (not that) short.
I'm a product designer with prior experience of ~8 years, mostly tbh in consultancy and not product but still.
I've got my actual role in a start up after a long hiring process (that kind with weird questionnaire-Googlewannabe-like at the beginning). I've arrived with the product mindset aka data > assumptions, quali-quanti is the compass and so on.
Fast forward after a year in the company: every single thing I design or propose is never enough, apparently, for the Cs. Bare in mind that we're a team of 30 ppl and whenever the product lead is on holiday, the CEO and co founder (head of marketing) immediately step in to micromanage and comment everything I do as of "this doesn't work" without even saying why.
What makes me completely going nuts is that I've recently got a pay raise for a overall company pay adjustments, but then I keep trying to propose improvements and they would always add comments on Figma asking me to change the design or copy (making it like 3727272 times longer) and in the next workshop the same ppl revising my copy or design based on their comments, complaining about a screen being a wall of text.
Now. The real deal is that they don't trust me, obviously, despite I clearly explain the rationale of my choices and at the end of the day they forget their involvement in the edits I had to do and complain about "my" design choices. Also when I've had to digest a random 4 pages pdf of critique generated by AI sent to me by the CEO, where 80% is only noise and not relevant.
I've reached a point in which I feel frustrated, burned out and -mostly- questioning my skills and starting to hate the same job I've fought for and loved for so many years.
I even embraced the AI as requested from the founders to speed up the process -and it actually helped to iterate on stuff or speed up the research insights documentation, I even vibecoded myself some stuff doing git PRs and so on- but then the CEO throws up a couple of screenshots of my designs, with no context at all, to whatever AI he feels like to and coming back with pages and pages of feedbacks that are 80% noise (again).
Sorry for the rant here but I'm so very fucking tired.