Because developers know code.
They do not know your business or your customers.
They don’t know how your customers use your product or what problems they use it to solve.
They don’t have the empathy or skills to understand what it’s really like on the ground talking with customers.
You might think these things are obvious, but they are not.
Humans are really bad at this, we think things that are obvious to us, are obvious to everyone else too.
I call this your “business domain knowledge”.
It’s critical that your offshore/external dev team understands “why” they are building the thing that they are building.
This is what leads to long term solutions to customer issues instead of patch jobs.
And they need to be able to communicate back clearly with the right message, whether that’s to you, the sales team, the client service team or with customers.
Being really good at React or AWS doesn’t mean you’re good at these things.
Nor does being really cost-effective make this a good trade-off for you. Unhappy team members and customers will cost you more.
A client-facing voice of technology bridges the gap here.