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

I have been at countless places where the engineers are out of sync with the product.

And it might be something silly like their coworker added something they didn't know about and the UI is now confusing. Could even be the website started proclaiming something that didn't align well with the product.

Another factor is that the [product -> PM -> bug system -> engineer -> fix -> QA -> product] loop is heavy. It takes a long time and major things get fixed but minor friction doesn't.

having [product <-> engineer] can be amazing.

Engineers might have never encountered the full experience, or may merely be out of sync with how it works today vs last year.

Me too, but surprisingly it happens more often at places with the most Product Managers.

My worst experience was at a company that tried to enforce a specific ratio of Product Managers and "Product Designers" to engineers. If you added up the designers, product, project, and program people the total was higher than the number of engineers.

It only made everything worse. Fighting your way through the Product Management bureaucracy while trying to avoid having one of the PMs view your input as a threat was a job in itself.

Great Product Managers are invaluable additions to a company. The modern version of Product Management has attracted a lot of people who thrive on bureaucracy and process. The proliferation of Product Management influencers has made it much worse.