DM the CEO
At Remote, when I get a DM from one of my colleagues with whom I don’t talk very frequently or have never spoken to before, they often say “sorry for contacting you here!”. This annoys me greatly for two reasons. First, because I’m just another human just like you. Second, because it’s actually super important for the CEO to talk regularly with different people around the organization and hear what they have to say.
This is something that I’ve been seeing: the larger the organization is, the less likely individuals are directly contacting the CEO, for whatever reaon. This is incredibly bad for the organization because the CEO needs to be able to act on what people in the field/on the ground are seeing, feeling and hearing. Unless you actually directly tell them, the only way the CEO is going to hear about what is happening on the ground is filtered through layers of management. In and of itself, not a bad thing because indeed not everything is priority. But if you feel something is important and you work at that company for a while, you are probably right that it is important.
Similarly, if you are a customer of a given business, the same dynamics happen. I sometimes get emails from customers that apologize for contacting me or see reaching out to me as a last-ditch effort in resolving some conflict. Whereas in reality, I prefer to be rolled into conflicts much earlier because I have really high leverage in solving those.
All of this to say that I feel quite strongly that you should actually DM the CEO if you have something important to share with them, whether you are a customer or whether you’re working for that company. Maybe your manager or even your manager’s manager might not enjoy this because they feel like you’re bypassing them. But in reality, if you feel that something is so important that the CEO should know about this and it is so urgent that you should definitely DM them.
What is important is that you don’t doubt yourself. It doesn’t have to be the end of the world. Really, anything related to customers is probably on top of mind for whomever’s leading the company, and so therefore it might be worth sending a message.
On top of that, yes, they might get a lot of messages every single day, but sending a short message is not a big bother to anybody, or really it shouldn’t be.
Whenever I have really strong feedback, be that positive or negative, I tend to try to do this. I send a message to the CEO of said company of which I’m a customer, and 50% of the cases I actually get a reply. And there’s no correlation between the size of the company and the reply. And I’m pretty sure that in the other 50% of the cases, they still see my message and they might do something or not with it. But at least I did an attempt and it didn’t hurt anybody to do so.
Likewise, it will not hurt you to send that message. If you have something to say, send a message to the CEO. It’s okay. The world is not going to end.1
Of course, there are exceptions to the rules, and in some companies, it might be totally not-done to do this. But I would argue that’s a minority of companies and definitely not the super successful ones. Worst case is that your message gets no reply.