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.”
The moment you have stubborn engineer who knows better than PM and user, it is really difficult to get anywhere. However if you will put such engineer into line of fire from a users that's suddenly not engineer's friendly PM trying to tell the engineer that this is wrong, these are frustrated people who would like to skin engineer alive as a punishment for using his "awesome" creations! That induces fear, but absolutely also crushes his ego, because somebody is berating product of engineer's genius like it would be a retarded hamster.
From my perspective, it is not about showing that PM is an idiot, it is about humbling your engineers. Their ego will grow again and this exercise will need to be repeated.
Every human has an opinion on practically everything. But has that human put in the effort to justify pushing that specific opinion?
In this case, is the opinionated engineer humble enough to realize that using software in their day to day life does not equal using software in our customer's context?
Neither answer is necessarily wrong, you just need to make a choice.
My mom can use gmail, but she doesn’t even know about its hotkeys and accelerators, or Labs and whatnot
This fallacy is at the heart of the failure of modern software.
Making things work for the median user is almost entirely about defaults and intuitiveness. If everybody is sending messages all the time, there should be a conspicuous button for sending messages.
Making things work for power users is about allowing those defaults to be changed. It's fine if this is five deep in a menu somewhere. It's fine if there is an option for "advanced mode" that opens up a bunch of menus that are otherwise hidden. It's fine if this requires you to write your own filter rules etc., as long as that's available. What's not fine is to make the limited interface the only interface.
Simple things should be easy and complex things should be possible.
I love this.
Building on this thought: When you are starting to build something, you have very limited resources. Focus only on making simple things easy and forget everything else. Once you have product market fit expand into making complex things possible. This applies to 90% of all products.