Project leadership at a small company/startup is going to be much different than at a larger company and vastly different than at a Fortune 500. The path of a

Project leadership at a small company/startup is going to be much different than at a larger company and vastly different than at a Fortune 500. The path of a PM is typically to progressively manage more complex and larger projects whether in scope or budget. A tech lead is a different role than a PM. Tech leads should be mentoring junior devs, guiding overall solution and working with a PM from a technical perspective like being a sounding board for crazy customer ideas. Your company is small enough to keep dabbling in the project mgmt while coding. You don't need to make any decisions, just see where it goes. You may want to suggest to management that if there are enough devs doing PM tasks spread across X projects, at some point it might help to get a PM to do the PM stuff, then devs can focus more on development. Having done the PM role, SW Mgr role, and lead engineer role, I found the PM role the most tedious/repetitive and missed coding. The problems being solved by a PM weren't technical and that is what I missed. It ultimately comes down to what interests you more.