> Hire people who have never used the product and don't think like or accurately represent our users

In most of my engineering jobs, the Product Managers were much closer to our users than the engineers.

Good product managers are very valuable. There are a lot of bad ones carrying the product manager title because it was viewed as the easy way to get a job in tech without having to know how to program, but smart companies are getting better at filtering them out.

> Find your most socially competent engineer, and have them talk to users a couple times a month

Every single time I've seen this tried, it turns into a situation where one or two highly vocal customers capture the engineering team's direction and steer the product toward their personal needs. It's the same thing that happens when the sales people start feeding requests from their customers into the roadmap.