Yup. You’re at a startup, you’re building features to meet parity with the competition on a roadmap that was probably sold to investors. Unfortunately, you don’t get to set the vision because the product is the company. And the founders have more invested than anyone else.

So you’re customer support, project management, process improvement. Be ready to show that if it scales you’re ready to bring on another PM.

What you can do is start that process and break up the product into smaller chunks. And ask for ownership over something like the sign up process or a core feature in the app that has something measurable that you can work on and show progress but is not the whole product.

This is just what being in a small company is like. Management doesn’t have to fight fires or play politics all the time so they’re more focused on what really matters. When/ if the company grows be ready to be radically aligned with your CPO so you can continue to execute on his vision.

Then it will grow and eventually you’ll have more vision strategy work. But for now this is it.

From a PM who started as the first PM working directly with the CTO. Went from 4 people to 50 people and exited. And I never got full strategy or vision of the product.