I forced every engineer to take sales calls and they rewrote our platform

> At the end of it, they were sketching a completely different architecture without my "PMing". Because they finally understood who was actually using our product.

I cannot help but read this whole experience as: “We forced an engineer to take sales calls and we found out that the issue was that our PMs are doing a terrible job communicating between customer and engineering, and our DevOps engineer is more capable/actionable at turning customer needs into working solutions.”

Sadly, I've seen a significant number of engineers who simply don't trust what PM's say about what the customers need.

They think PM's don't provide value, so they ignore what PM's say.

It's only when they hear from customers directly that they go... oh, so these needs are real? I thought it was just PM bullshit.

In a healthy workplace this doesn't happen. But sometimes engineers need to talk to customers to trust that the stuff their PM has been telling them is actually true. And then the relationship becomes more collaborative and trusting.