When you're a small organization/team, there are perks. Ownership. Freedom yes (if you use it well). Direct Line to the C-Suite.

A lot of onus falls on people, especially the product manager/owner. The processes may not have been drafted or are still shaping up. Anything that's not sales and development, falls under his bucket. There is no concept of task delegation. As a PM, I've written SQL queries, made board presentations and also accompanies sales to client meeting even before commercial negotiations have been closed out. You're the CRM guy. You are certainly the analytics guy. You're the Product Owner of course.

As the company grows, a PM role may move towards as the prioritization guru. There are specialists for every other thing - user research teams, data analysts, program managers, project managers, technical product manager and so on. The processes are now set in stone. When Paytm Insurance team started growing, we expanded from 2 to 20 in 2 years and we had each one of these. When I started I was the only PM.

In a startup environment, depth of your impact as a PM is massive. It is not as if it cant happen in a mid-sized organisation, but the well cut-out roles distribute the load as well as impact & credit.

To conclude, I would like to draw inspiration from a tweet from the very sorted Shreyas Doshi. As a PM in a large organization, you want to avoid False Negatives - not building features you should have built. While at startups, you should avoid False Positives - building features you should not be built.