> I think this is what you're saying, that ideally product managers should be people who were engineers at some point and understands how the product they're managing works, as well as the customer needs.

It takes knowledge of the problem and solution domain to maintain a vision and lead a team. But in this case, the scarcity is with the problem domain. People who really understand what problem the product solves, and the best way to think about it, especially when their view leads the industry, are very hard to find. Too hard to build an organization around the implicit assumption of finding them.

My advice for organization building is not to have product managers, or even allow the term into your company. There are people with good product taste, they occur at some rate, and when you find them doing other things like writing software or supporting users you nudge them in the direction of curating a product vision and controlling resources to execute on it. Framed that way, the importance and hardness of the problem are very clear.