I actually hope “product people” won’t be involved as long as possible. “Product people” is mostly a reason of our current state of enshitification of most of the products. I would actually try my best to gatekeep.
You really think it's product people pushing enshitification rather than the people who want to financialize every aspect of our lives?
Every product person I have worked with was just a SME in their domain, and pushed for a cohesive piece of software that solved their (users) needs.
"Product people" have long been involved, it's called Ubuntu and SteamOS.
Do we think these companies aren't selling anything??