[jjav]

> Engineers don't want to talk to the customer, so who will do so to know what to build?

Product Managers as they have become today (from my experience over the last decade+ in 7 companies) are far too involved in technical decisions (on which they most often have no clue about) and far too little involved in talking to real customers.

In the olden days (the 90s for me) we had people whose job was to track the pulse of customers to see what they needed and provide that feedback in an organized form to engineering leadership. At least in the companies I was in, their title was not PM (can't remember their exact title).

That was very useful, it gave engineering leadership a clear view on what customers like and what they hate and what they want in the next release. And it was not interference, as these people had zero say in engineering decisions.

Today the average PM is just meddling in technical decisions they are not qualified to have an opinion on and most of them don't really spend enough time with customers, their product direction is all based on their personal (largely uninformed) opinion.

Maybe there are still companies that do the PM role right, but I haven't met any.