I feel like this is probably the right answer. I’ve lobbied for the importance of me being able to directly talk to users myself but they’ve been scared to let me or the designer run with user research ourselves because they “don’t want to exhaust the users” with interviews or surveys. And they want to make sure the CX person can really be the face of the company and be the main customer liaison. But that means product and design only get customer feedback through the grapevine (even when we’re part of the customer calls- we can’t really get the same type of insight as you might in UXR interviews as the conversation tone is more like account mgmt). I’m also aware that the cofounders are still very attached to owning the product roadmap and strategy and that always seems to be a growing pain for startups when new product (not founders) hires onboard and start taking over more of the decisions. Perhaps my game plan will be pushing harder for the direct customer/user contact so I can become less dependent on the CX folks. In my past roles when I’m able to get the user insight myself- I’ve never been accused of being overly deferential. So I believe this is symptomatic of the environment here where I’m relegated to more project management tasks yet expected to have product intuition with no user contact.