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

I agree completely that these are the important qualifications to be setting direction for a product.

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

This doesn't necessarily follow from the above, but in Anthropic's case specifically, where the users are software engineers, it probably would have worked better than whatever they have going on now.

In general, it's probably better to have domain experts doing product management, as opposed to someone who is trained in product management.