One of the deliberate outcomes of putting a product lead in place is to train the engineer to fully understand the product. For any vertical market or B2B product the chance of hiring engineers who understand the business domain is virtually zero so they need clear guidance to build what customers want.
Having worked in both situations (product person vs no product person), this reads like fiction to me.
Most PMs I worked were nowhere near being able to guide anyone, especially on B2B domains. I had to train a lot of them just to do basic follow up stuff, and honestly the vast majority was below expectation, and mostly just receiving requests from customers and giving opinions on designs.
And even in the best cases, an understanding of the product filtered by a product lead was nowhere near as good as actually having engineers who care, dogfood, talk with customers, read feedback, design solutions and verify them with end users.
IMO the concept of product leads, PMs, etc, is ok, but the implementation is always lacking. It's always a "creative type" that is stifling creativity of engineers while not really adding a lot of value.
I much prefer the concept of "Product Owner" of Scrum: someone that brings the tasks but isn't really dictating taste (except via feedback) or removing the creative part of engineering work.
I completely disagree, but your experience may vary. I am not trying to take away from that.
I am merely saying that maybe there should be a stronger discussion than just dismissing engineers as mere "thing-doers". I also accept that there are many people here who are exactly that, and I and they should find it shameful.
We can't control that, but maybe we should try harder to do instead of being lazy and assuming market forces are the boss... maybe we are the boss (we are).
I have worked as an engineer on a product that didn't have a dedicated product lead and it was extremely hard to deliver new features without understanding the complex business side of things. Working without a dedicated product person to explain the business sounds hell to me.
