I've been hearing the term in silicon valley for over a decade, it's not particularly new. A lot of time in projects like these you end up getting shunted to t

I've been hearing the term in silicon valley for over a decade, it's not particularly new. A lot of time in projects like these you end up getting shunted to tech leads, managers, etc, whose job it is to "take the coordination work" so that people writing code can "focus on implementation". The point of this advice is very specifically to bypass the coordinators and go directly to the people using your project in their code to make sure you understand their concerns, and don't play political telephone.