Comment by vunderba

100% this. Encouraging devs to reach out to customers? I can't think of a single engineer (particularly on the backend) that would EVER have any desire to do this in their already limited time.

If you have PMs, directors, product designers, etc. actually doing their jobs - then the needs of the customers should already be more than adequately translated into well-defined engineering tasks.

Engineers already have enough on their plates without being forced into some customer-facing or adjacent role.