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.”
Engineers work micro features which are sliced out of micro picture epics with maybe a vague Northstar.
Sitting engineers with users is a key thing I'm driving at my work since we're on internal tooling. Pretty much to a tee every participant comes out and goes "Wow... I had no idea that's how people were using our product"
Building user empathy results in greater connections within our organization, puts names to faces in our support channels, and results in more well rounded engineers who develop software with both technical and end user experience concerns in mind.
I mean, there's a reason most software interfaces are still shit, and often physical products too. It's cause we take tons of input from people who haven't extensively thought about user experience a day in their lives