This reads like it was written by a PM. You lacked higher level context and prioritization skills early in your career so the take away is it's best to divest agency to others?

There is a whole modern line of thinking that leaders should be providing the context and skills to give high performing teams MORE agency over their work streams.

I think he has a point. These power structures exist for some good reasons as well.

The opposite thing (engineers engaging directly with customers) can eventually lead to customer capture of your engineering org. You shouldn't have a small group of existing, noisy customers directly driving your engineering to the detriment of other existing or future customers.

Microsoft had customer capture institutionally: the existing big corporate customers were all that mattered. It lead to rebooting Windows CE into Windows Mobile way too late to make a difference, for example. But it also meant that backwards compatibility and the desire to ship Windows XP forever were sacred cows.

There are also nasty games that can be played by soliciting negative feedback for political advantage.

Dysfunction can exist with any structure. It's probably best that there's some small amount of direct user feedback as well as the big formalized feedback systems, at least so that one is a check for the performance of the other. If the user engagement team says everything is good, but there are massive Reddit threads about how horrible the product is to work with and the engineers know it could be better, it's time for engineering to start addressing the issues alongside feedback to the user engagement teams.

There's not enough hours in the day for everyone to do everything.

> There is a whole modern line of thinking that leaders should be providing the context and skills to give high performing teams MORE agency over their work streams.

Yes, this is great for agency over implementation, because leaders do not have context to decide and dictate the What/How of implementing every single change or solution to a problem. And the implementers need to know the context to ensure they make decisions consistent with that context.

But "leaders providing the context" is very different from "everyone researching the context on their own." So where are leaders getting this context from? A not-very-differentiated pile of 1000 generalist engineers-who-also-talk-to-customers-frequently-and-manage-their-own-work-streams? Or do they build a team with specialists to avoid needing the majority of people to constantly context-switch in a quest to be all of context-gatherers, work-prioritizers, market-researchers, and implementation-builders?