You are right. The engineering manager listens to the voice of the engineering manager's customer. The engineering manager's customer is perhaps the product manager or some marketing team, but it's not us. We, the end user, are the customer of only those responcible for selling us the product. It's only they that listen to our voice. Sorry for the six sigma speak but that's the clearest way of putting it.
@BobT
In a
, it is a key responsibility of the product manager to survey the market. That includes direct and indirect ways of surveying user needs. For Lightroom, that means that somebody should be routinely watching the messages on this very board as well as their own in-house board. That's in addition to the roles that Adobe technical personnel play. However, it's not clear judging from many, many posts on this board and on the Adobe board, that Adobe really considers user needs
Note my qualifiers. In smaller organizations, notably startups, there is no product manger, just the founders making product decisions in their copious spare time. Or the decisions are defaulted to engineering management. In organizations that are not well managed, there is sometimes a rivalry, ev3en a struggle for power and influence, between the nominal product manger and the people actually making product decisions.
As both an employee and then as a consultant in software companies, I have been through all these situations. And as long as the money rolls in, there is usually no appetite for change. A famous Warren Buffett quote: "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked." That quote applies even to Adobe. The problem for most companies is that by the time they realize they need to change, it's too little, too late.
[For non-US readers, Buffett is one of the wealthiest men in America. He actually lives quite modestly, but has gained fame through careful investments in the stock market.]
Phil Burton