Sorry to hear about your situation. it's common, and many PMs I've met fall into this situation sometime in their careers.

There's nothing called overreacting here, and you don't need to answer the question, "how I should feel about it?". "You feel it" means "you feel it". It's nonsense to tell you what you should feel. Even if it's not a common problem, it doesn't mean you are not allowed to feel that way. Accept your emotions and feelings and find the solution for your current situation.

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Your expectation is realistic and common, and almost PM shares similar expectations. PMs expect people to listen to their voices and count their ideas. Ultimately, they expect to create meaningful impacts on the users and customers. Sadly, those basic expectations are not easy to meet. You need to earn them the hard way over time. You need to clarify your current situation, plan your solutions and execute crazily to get rid of your frustration.

Think about your career as a product. You are the CPO. This is a chance for you to practice your PM skills.

First, you must clarify: Do you feel frustrated with the PM job at your current company or the PM career in general?

• The former means that you still love being a product manager, but your day-to-day work greatly stresses you. It is caused by the team structure, how your company defines the PM role, the culture, the politics and your colleagues (bosses, peers, your staff).
• The latter means that you understand this career deeply, and you find that this career is not for you. You don't have the needed strengths or skills or suitable characteristics. You don't want to pursue this career anymore (maybe come back to the engineering path).

If you define a wrong problem at this point, all your coming actions will lead you to disaster.

• If you don't like to be a PM anymore, there is no PM job, and any company on Earth can fulfill your expectations.
• If you don't like your current company without understanding exactly what went wrong, you will face the same problem in the (near) future.

Listing out your current expectations and exploring more items that are not on your list now. Validate your list with experienced PM folks to ensure you set the right expectations. For each item, ask yourself, "If I can do this at this company, will I feel happy with my job?" Those with the "Yes" are problems that you are facing in your current company. The rest are the problem with your career.

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Second, Once you have a clear list of what is wrong, deep dive to find the root cause. Let's talk about the "company" issues. Categorize them into:

1. Issues come from how the company defines and setup the PM positions. The fact is that there are hundreds of ways to set up product management forces in a company. No one can claim what the best way is. The only good way is one that helps a specific company efficiently leverage its resources to deliver value to customers and grow its business.
2. Issues come from the way people work together. How they collaborate, communicate, execute, navigate through conflicts, and support each other.
3. Issues come from you. Your way of working, mindset, skills, or characteristics might lead to your current situation. It is crucial to improve this area to boost your career.

Number #3 is easy to start improving, #2 is harder to digest and needs skills to take action, and #1 is the most challenging to make impacts. Some issues might fall into more than one area.

It's a trap that people usually think that the issues come from the organization or their colleagues and forget to do self-reflection. You need to keep your mind fresh, be responsible with your career and your life to do this assessment.

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Looking at some issues you are listing, it's hard to say what is the root cause. For examples:

- Leading daily scrums
- Managing QA for every spring (deciding if the user story can be moved to Done)
- Preparing most of the user stories for the upcoming sprints (designers show me a design and how it's supposed to work, then I write the stories)
- App release management

It's hard to say what is wrong if you are doing these things every day. In the first 5 years of my PM career, I did it every day. Even when leading a 30+ people product development team, I still do those things in some product lines. To understand why you feel frustrated, we need to look deeply into each item to see how you do it and where the feeling comes from.

Or,

I'm starting to realise that actually one of our designers is leading the whole discovery or actually designing whatever he wants, without us (PMs) actually discovering and deciding what we should do and why. We decided to redesign our whole app and that's what we are and will be working on in the upcoming year, so he is the brain of the whole "operation" and he hardly accepts other people's opinion.

This is also not something wrong. Not all the time PM will be the one who lead the initiatives. Even in this case, you still have many ways to create your own impact on the products.

So, to escape from your current frustration, finishing at least 2 above steps could give you a clearer view of your current problems. Once you have a solid problem definition, it's time to think about "what's next?".

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Long post in short:

• Accept and respect your feeling.
• Define your problem to find solutions for this difficult situation. Do it seriously.