[dougmccune]

I have a similar story in some ways. Employee #1 at a startup, wrote much of the initial codebase, been with the company now for a bit over 7 years. We’re 20 people now, and have dedicated people for support, UX, QA, product management, etc etc all of which I used to have a hand in in the early days. I manage a small team of developers (not all the dev, just the clientside team), I still code a good bit (obviously less than before) and I’m involved in a lot of product discussions to figure out what we’re going to build. We’ve struggled a lot with figuring out the right title for me, and as long as the actual work is the right mix for what I like then I don’t really care all that much. But I’ve been recently brainstorming appropriate titles that better reflect what I do, beyond just being a developer (which has been my title since day 1), and I’ve come to settle on “Technical Director of Product”, which I don’t think is a real job title in any normal world. I make sure that I’m heavily involved in product decisions, because the thing I’ve found the most satisfaction in is defining and building product, and shaping the direction of the company through influencing the product development path. And I’m grounded in the technical side of that, which is an important distinction to me, since too often “product people” have no technical background and just lob things over the fence to engineering without understanding the tech side of the house.

So for me the important thing was trying to understand what parts of the job I really want to prioritize (in my case active coding and product definition) and regardless of title making sure I inject myself appropriately. So that means if there’s a conversation about a new product we’re thinking about building I make sure I’m in those conversations from the beginning.

If you’ve been with the company from essentially day 1 you likely have a decent amount of political sway, even if you don’t know it. I’d start by figuring out which parts of the things that you listed you actually want to stay involved in. As another commenter mentioned, if you really want to wear all those hats then maybe finding another brand new startup is the only real choice. But if there’s one or two areas that are dearer to your heart then I’d try to figure out how to make that your day to day activity. And I’d hope given your history with the team that you can have a dialogue with the founder(s) about how to make that happen. At the end of the day the title doesn’t really mean shit, but if you’re not loving the work then you owe it to yourself (and they owe it to you) to figure out how to make that right.