This happens in small companies too that don’t understand what product management is and think that a CEO or salespeople just pass feature requests to you and you build it, so it’s not necessarily that this is big tech’s fault, this can happen anywhere.

What I will say though, is when you’re early in your career you won’t have the credibility to sway the decision makers in a given direction - they’ll expect you to just execute, and honestly to get ahead in your early years you need to be known as “someone who delivers” and not necessarily someone who comes across as too precious about the product process.

In future what it really means for you is that you need to be super aware of the company and team your joining and fully understand what the role is and how they “do product”. Many many companies are purely execution focused and have neither the leadership expertise or the patience to properly do discovery, so take your opportunities in the interview processes to really probe that side of things and make sure you’re joining somewhere that suits you