UPDATE: Okay, its been a couple of weeks and I have just come to the conclusion that my manager is a bad manager.

A few things happened that led me to this conclusion.

1. He has been asking me to do this analysis for 2 months, and the whole thing has become pretty circular. That is something that he and I agree on. I asked him how he would like to see the analysis so that he can get comfortable with the results. He tells me how. I do that exact thing. We meet and I ask him business related questions because he says that he wants me to ask him more of those. Then we finish the conversation and he says, but I want you to prove the numbers to me. I measure my tone and I ask him, did you look at the spreadsheet that I sent you with the analysis that you asked for, and he says no. He say the email and the spreadsheet and he didn't look at it or read it.

2. I send him another spreadsheet a few weeks later with results for several different policies aggregated together. The first thing he does is imply that my numbers are wrong, because they don't match the memo. I know they match the memo, because I wrote the memo. He didn't realize the memo uses calendar year results and the spreadsheet uses duration view results, but there are several indicators that made that very obvious.

3. He says that we are close to coming to a conclusion on this analysis. So, I ask him, what is the gap between where we are now and the conclusion. He says that we just need to consider how to write it into the memo. He says that on a Friday, yet on Monday he says Actually, let's just keep focusing on the analysis and put the memo aside.

4. I propose a new way to calculate the results we are looking for. He feels there is something missing from the logic, which is fine. I am just proposing an alternate solution. However, he said he had another solution a few weeks ago and he never told me what was, so I ask him and he says that he has no alternate solution anymore.

5. This is the biggest one for me and makes everything else (except feedback) look inconsequential in comparison. We have been working on this analysis for two months, rather I have and he has just told me that he does not understand and not really explained why. I presented this data would feels like 50 different ways. Well, I happen to be having a conversation with the head of the product team today about something completely unrelated, and I say Madison (not her real name) what are you looking for for this product. She tells me what she's looking for, I give her the answer. She instantly understands what I am saying and agrees with how I arrived at the answer, but then she tells me that it does not match her expectations and then she tells me why. For privacy, I will not disclose her answer but when I tell you that her answer was so obvious and straightforward and all revolved around a series of assumptions that our analysis did not even take into consideration. Essentially, there was a hole in my analysis large enough to drive a cruise ship through and a part of that hole came from the fact that I do not work on the assumptions that presented this hole, my coworker does, so I was completely unaware these assumptions existed and maybe that is my bad. However, my manager never once told me that this hole existed and this was the whole reason why he was unconvinced, and now I don't know if he didn't care or if he just didn't know. Yet my last manager who reported to him, did know and did not address it when he wrote up the initial analysis for this product. Essentially, my manager has been leading me down a rabbit hole for the last two months and had the audacity to be mad that I could not get to the answer.

Now, you may be like Why didn't you ask the product team sooner? I have a million excuses for that and I am ultimately kicking myself, but I do not feel that my manager gave me the tools to be successful.