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.

I think a mix of both is best. If support can quickly solve a customer issue they should. But they also should make note of it and pass it along.

If it was the case the customer support simply knows an undocumented work-around that they can solve the problem and provide that to the customer. I mean that works, but a better solution is for that problem to get back to engineering and be fixed once and for all.