Comment by austin-cheney

At most employers product management is far separated from product development. There are several reasons for that:

* management distrust of developers, if your developers need a lot of help to do their jobs management won’t let them near the customers for good reason

* separation of concerns, specialization

* emphasis of productivity, developers should be developing

* assumptions and biases that developers are not people people, which is sometimes completely unfounded and other times strongly reinforced

If you want developers to understand your customers they have to be directly embedded in customer engagement meetings where they can directly see customer wants and reactions the same way your product management learns these things. This can prove very risky due to the personalities involved.

In my line of work developers are completely on the front lines directly communicating with customers. My line of work, enterprise API management, is highly technical demanding a wide technology background but it’s not that challenging. The customers know what their end state is but not how to express their business requirements or diagnose their challenges. The developers, myself included, often have no idea behind the business goals for interconnecting various business system but have little challenge solving for the communications in the middle. Most areas of software are not like this, by a lot.