Why have Product Managers stopped speaking to customers?

Very sadly, most product managers I meet today no longer talk directly to customers regularly. If you ask;

“How many customers did you speak to this week?”

…most invariably say zero. I know this because I asked. I ran a survey with industry insiders and at least 50% of all product managers who responded haven’t spoken to a customer recently. From my own experiences, this is something I noticed more over the years, and thought it must have been a mistake or perhaps just a few select cases, so I started asking people to see if I was wrong.

I’ve asked friends who do the job at social events and got the same answer, and frequently asked members of my own teams, who struggled to find the time to do it. But to stress the point, it’s not because they don’t want to, or don’t strive to, — something else is going on entirely, making this particular dimension of the job increasingly rare. But why?

To compensate, I’ve seen UX researchers & designers pick up the mantle a lot more, and the design teams have really leaned into this space. I even know some highly effective organisations with hundreds of thousands of users who just have product designers instead of product managers in most of their squads and are seeing positive results. One particular example, UpBank, I’d argue one of the most underrated and successful software companies in Australia, only has Product Designers with one single product leadership role.