Comment by toss1

Don't blame it on the PMs (except to the extent they are separating the engineers from the customers).

The closer you can get the engineers to the users, the better your product will be, and this goes all the way to the backend and architecture.

This is true no matter how skilled and well-intentioned are the PMs or sales reps.

I've seen one single layer between the builders and users to help modulate high and constant user demand can help.

Beyond that, even two layers can strangle a project. One project my company was doing for IBM was moving along nicely with the developers talking to the actual users every few weeks as progress was made & delivered. I moved off the project, then IBM inserted a manager to "consolidate the communications" (take all the users' input and boil it down), and a manager at my company (not the engineers) talked to him. The project became one of those endless slogs of feature creep, yet no great success — ultimately deployed for some years, but not the resounding improvements in workflow efficiency they hoped and saw in the beginning.

Absolutely EVERYONE on both teams was competent and really wanted the project to be a great success. But adding the intervening layers, while it seemed more efficient, had only the opposite effect.

Seriously, it ALL happens where the rubber meets the road. Get your developers as close to the end-users' keyboards and screens as possible. Talking directly to the users is great. Even better if you can arrange to have them BE a user for a day or two.