Agree that this can be an issue but to clarify, I was finding bugs or missed outages, not gathering feature requests or trying to do product dev. Think "I clicked the button and got a 500 Server Error". I don't think random devs should try and decide what features to work on by reading user forums - having PMs decide that does make sense as long as the PM is good. However, big tech PMs too often abstract the user base behind metrics and data, and can miss obvious/embarrassing bugs that don't show up in those feeds. The ground truth is still whether users are complaining. Eng can skip complaints about missing features/UI redesigns or whatever, but complaints about broken stuff in prod needs their attention.