This. I went from engineering to sales (solutions architect, woo!) for almost two years. Amazing experience, and one of the best and most informative parts was actually getting hands-on with the people who use the product. Get a much better idea of what matters, what doesn't, and why.
Yup. Same reason the medical instrumentation company I worked for used to try to get developers to shadow medical lab techs for a day. The things we as developers thought were important were often completely irrelevant to our end users and vice versa.
