Neither me nor my friends ever worked at such companies. C-suite sets direction in a stategic way, department heads (or whatever, managers between C-suite and you) set tactical goals, product managers think up "things we should do", and product teams deliver those things (and manage this delivery together, e.g. timelines and such).
It would be ridiculous for a CEO, or really anyone who's not my manager, to ask the team personally to do anything. If they had an important task they'd have to trade-off something else from the immediate backlog, by going through the product manager.
Even in small companies you generally have a PM in front of a team.
