Good Product leadership is rare because Product rarely uses their own product.

I can count on one hand the number of PMs in my career who understood the platforms they worked on outside of their extremely narrow domain - and even then that narrow specificity was often a distorted lens that came from the customer interviews they did that they remembered or found evocative. And this just gets worse the further up the chain you go.

Engineering knows that the best way to improve a product is to dogfood it. Nothing beats regular lived experience long enough for the human brain to start its pattern recognition. But nobody wants to eat their own dogfood, they want the kibble from another brand that has all the shiny marketing attached.

If I had my way, I'd stick PMs into shadowing sessions with Support on the regular for sentiment analysis. No relying on Support management to relay upwards trends - there's far too few Support managers worth their salt.