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.
I would think the engineers usually get their kick out of making things fast or easy to maintain. If you have a product manager and the customers hate the product, how is that the engineers fault?
I've built a couple useless features that I wouldn't want to use and couldn't explain how to use. But if you have a product person, they get to design is BECAUSE they're in the line of fire.
That's a comfortable position to be in as an engineer, except that you sometimes have to build things more than once.
Is your company hiring? Because I've spent 30 years being this engineer and nearly everyone looks at me like I've got horns growing out of my head.
That's not where most engineers find their job satisfaction, more's the pity. And they think they know better than users. There's a reason UX has been around for at least four decades longer than DX. Developers think both are made up.