if you think this is just UX, you have simply no clue about business processes. once you have a large number of customers, corprations, which are truly global, your nice and simple approach will not scale.

our devs are centralized, whereas our product management is out there, on the ground, from the US to china, europe, japan, etc.

wanna understand sampling compliance in Italy? expense reporting in Germany? order management in Spain? EPPV in Japan? do you know what EPPV means?

there are no coders out there to cover this broad level of business knowledge.

i started in consulting, with a background in coding as well as business. worked myself up the ladder, was a system architect for global systems. then became a "product guy" - because I have all this knowledge and experience now, in my head. which you can't simply learn or read up. only years of experience can give you that.

It's not at all laughable that most engineers can't translate business or compliance requirements into engineering or UX requirements. It's a different language to them. It's like asking an American to translate Swahili into English. It's possible that a few could do it, but the vast majority would be unable to do so. In this respect, having a domain-experienced programmer is just as "rare" (or even rarer) than a "great" PM.

The programmers are the ones least suited to figuring out what the product should do because they aren't the ones who are going to use it. They approach the problem from a programmer's perspective on the technical requirements of implementation, not on the user's functionality (PM) or usability (UX) requirements. Product Managers design the product from a standpoint of actual domain experience for the end customer to use.

(I say this as someone who has been both a PM and a SE.)