alt Hacker News> They act as stand-ins for actual users and will flag all sorts of usability problems
True, but it raises another question, what were your Product Managers doing in the first place if tech writer is finding out about usability problems
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Yes, product managers and product owners should also be looking for usability problems. That said, the docs people are often going through procedures step by step, double-checking things, and they will often hit something that the others missed.
I take your point, but a good PM will have been inside the decision-making process and carry embedded assumptions about how things should work, so they'll miss things. An outside eye - whether it's QA, user-testing, (as here) the technical writer, or even asking someone from a different team to take an informal look - is an essential part of designing anything to be used by humans.
Realistically, PMs incentives are often aligned elsewhere.
But even if a PM cares about UX, they are often not in a good position to spot problems with designs and flows they are closely involved in and intimately familiar with.
Having someone else with a special perspective can be very useful, even if their job provides other beneficial functions, too. Using this "resource" is the job of the PM.