I think those big companies are poor examples, as big companies have always more problems with aligning people around customer needs/business priorities. There's a lot more of corporate politics that takes time and a lot more money to waste (when the core business itself is highly profitable). If you look at the smaller companies (e.g. Linear.app) it is immensely hard to argument that they would not be building "useful software."

In our case, we stay close to the customer. Some ways we achieve this:

- We have a shared Slack channels with at least 20 customers. All engineers are on these channels and see the communications that is going on.

- All engineers work with customer support 1 week every X weeks. All engineers are on the support channel too and see the topics of the tickets / customer requests. - We gather customer feedback for feature requests and all new features are based on business priorities informed by this feedback.

- PMs and Designers regularly talk with customers when doing product research. When we have an idea of what we might want to build, 1-2 engineers join them in shaping an Epic (size: 1-2 months) or a Story (size: ~2 weeks). One of these engineers will lead the Epic/Story, which means that they amass a lot of context of the both problems of the customers and the technical details of the solution. Usually they are able to do much of the scoping/product decisions quite quickly after the Epic/Story has started.

- Engineers watch a sales / customer success call every two weeks and then join to discuss the contents of the call together.