Product leaders, understanding customers and product is still a top priority

It's now somewhat common best practice (inconsistently practiced though) for Product Managers to talk to customers and use the product regularly. The reasoning is pretty straightforward - if you aren't really understanding what customers need and experience, then how can you successfully prioritize what to build and build it well?

But product leaders (PM Manager) can feel a push away from talking to customers directly or using the products as they take on more team management and strategy tasks (based on my true story). I'd posit that's going to hurt your effectiveness, especially if you are new to the domain or company. How are you going to set or vet the right team strategy, provide feedback, or take bold bets/changes if you aren't familiar with customers? How can you stop falling for availability bias (over-index on a limited set of user insights presented to you to develop an incorrect or incomplete model)? How are you going to stay connected to the ground reality of customer experience vs what's visible to you through your team? How can you maintain enough empathy to drive yourself and your team to make things better?

You can't fully rely on metrics, broad market research, or secondary/tertiary hand downs of user research. Those are all necessary and helpful - you can triangulate from various signals. But I'd say it isn't sufficient -- you still need first-hand customer conversations. 

Some helpful tactics: 

• Request one of the product managers or user researchers on the team to organize a weekly customer call that you, PMs on your team, UX/Engineers, and other stakeholders can listen in on. 
• Schedule a weekly time slot to review or participate in customer forums and/or look at reviews and support tickets. I like to join relevant subreddits, for example. 
• Pay attention to user research from your team and other teams; ask clarifying questions and point out if there are flawed or missing methods or insights. Ask for it if there isn't sufficient research (both broad and feature level) that's being done. 
• Test the product regularly, with different types of test accounts. Every once in a while, start with a new account from scratch. 
• Look at segmented product funnel metrics regularly to understand the behavior of different users, in different scenarios.