Is that not a straight up engineering job? A good chunk of "engineer school" is practicing "customer has an issue, design a solution" type problems, in-between all the math.
A good product person is able to drill down to the fundamental problem the customer really has and articulate that to engineers.
Also, good product people should be evaluating the customers problem in terms of the whole market.
After all, engineering is a limited resource. So you need to solve the problems that exist for your target market, not just a single customer.
Of course, I’ve seen good engineers who can do this, but it takes time and effort to sift through all of the customers issues and work out which ones to solve. So product managers are focused on this to free up the good engineers to design solutions to those problems.
In my experience the vast majority of PMs do exactly this. Half of my job since I became a staff+ engineer almost a decade ago is taking “solutions” from product managers and trying to figure out what they really want.
In the modern consumer application, you have to understand business concepts like differentiation. If your product is very good, but it’s strictly worse than another product in every dimension, you don’t get any credit for second place. You actually get close to zero sales because no consumer chooses your product over the alternative, in contrast to a “bad” product that does at least something very well in a niche.
And in software there are plenty of cases where the 2nd or 3rd place product gets tons of sales even if it’s strictly worse in every category. There are so many things that impact market success that are completely out of the hands of product or engineering.
And even if it was, no, engineer personalities are horrible at designing solutions that actually meet customers’ and the business’s needs
This sort of stuff is a not-insignificant portion of my job as well, since PMs rarely have the technical skills to know what's feasible as a solution anyway in my experience.
Product figures out what to build, and Engineering figures out how.
What you’re describing is a huge part of engineering. Engineers have been doing this long before Product Managers existed. When I started, software engineers used to just talk directly to customers, domain experts, business analysts, and business leaders.
At “product led companies” the engineers just end up trying to figure out what the product manager actually wants because it’s not really possible in most cases to separate the what from the how.
Having worked with both systems, I don’t think the way it works now is better.