Xoogler here.

When you get to a company that's that big, the roles are much more finely specialized.

I forget the title now, but we had someone who interfaced with our team and did the whole "talk to customers" thing. Her feedback was then incorporated into our day-to-day roadmap through a complex series of people that ended with our team's product manager.

So people at Google do indeed do this, they just aren't engineers, usually aren't product managers, frequently are several layers removed from engineers, and as a consequence usually have all the problems GP described.