My experience after over a decade of software engineering across 5 different companies is that the PM/Design role varies wildly from company to company and size

My experience after over a decade of software engineering across 5 different companies is that the PM/Design role varies wildly from company to company and size of the company seems to be the biggest factor in how "professional" the PM/Design team is. For context: I've worked at a huge fortune 500 company with thousands of employees, a small startup with less than 20, and a mid size startup with around 150. The big company hands down had the most thorough and professional PM and design process I've ever seen. Engineers were removed from the process. We (engineers) received fully specced out designs, with everything perfectly documented. Meetings to kick off projects were in depth and driven professionally by the PM. If questions arose, PM and Design hashed out answers and devs got a quick succinct response. There was never a meeting where a design was ambiguous or "hadn't thought of that yet". The PM and design team had spent weeks prior to coming to engineers, to think through everything and produce pages and pages of mockups. Honestly, I loved it. As a developer I want to implement beautiful designs and not be burdened by "how should this flow work if X" or "what if Y happens" questions. I want to sit down, open my mocks, and start coding. If I ask questions, I want quick answers with designs. At the smaller startups, this process was turned entirely on its head. Developers were a critical part of the product decision process, and often are asked to come up with designs on the fly due to missing, or incomplete flows. Whether employers realize it or not, this absolutely adds to the complexity of the job for the engineer. Now instead of facing the problem of how to implement something, I'm also faced with the problem of how it should look and sometimes even, how the entire user experience should feel. TLDR: You'll wear many different hats at startups. If you don't want to wear those hats, I recommend looking for work at a large company and in the interview process, ask directed questions about the size and scope of their PRODUCT and DESIGN teams. If their answer is "yea we have a guy" ... then you're going to be working with that "guy" to come up with product and design. If they say "we have a team of 20" then you are set.