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.”

I run a small tech startup, about 2M ARR. And at times we’ve been short staffed on support and I’ve sat in for support for a day or two. And every time I do this I discover loads of issues customers are complaining about that don’t seem to ever make it back to our engineering team. Perhaps it’s just our support reps, or the nature of support, but they seem to love to “solve” problems themselves rather than reporting it to engineering for a more permanent fix.

At my last job I worked in professional services, and after reporting multiple issues over and over and over through the normal process I finally wormed my way into a friendship with engineering and product leadership. A conversation with someone they trust was THE ONLY WAY to get them to take seriously a Jira report from the field saying "this is annoying/broken at every customer. Yes there is a workaround, but can we get it fixed?"

Product at every company I've worked for only ever cared about prioritizing shiny new features or bugs that have people screaming at them.