What do you count as a small company? My experience at a small company in London was that I had to be a combined programmer, manager, product owner, project manager and user researcher very early on because, well, there weren’t enough employees/customers to have actual qualified people acting in those roles full-time. (And it’s cheaper to make one person do all the roles and only pay them for one role, of course...)

Try using that to get PO or PM role at your next job. You won't even get to interview. I know, I've tried. Really really hard. I've sent out 100s of cv's applying for pm or ba roles with ample experience at small companies, with tech lead role, re facto scrum master role. 15 years experience. With a c.v the a CTO helped me write. And got absolutely no where. 1 interview out of hundreds of applications. You just do not realise that it is impossible to climb out of the programming hole.

I work in a large European bank. Mind you, the coder who was made PO is very good at human interactions and politics - but that's kind of a prerequisite for this role.