How costly is it to ignore your engineers

I had a conversation the other day with an ELT member about engineering work we need to do to keep the system healthy and supporting our growth.   This person responded “The Netpromoter score says our users are happy” indicating the work I suggested was not needed.   (Netpromoter scores are the results from user surveys which can indicate their happiness with the software).

I have some concerns with this ELT response.  1)  The Netpromoter results only captured 50% of the user base 2) our product offerings are really niche so the users have little to compare to 3) It doesn’t capture our costs for supporting the user base

It’s the last point that just seems to get lost on c-suites.  They seem content to “we can address that when a user complains”.    However, that is very short sighted.   It ignores system health until its an issue, at which point, the resolution becomes a quick fix to address the user complaint quickly--which usually means the solution is more of patch than a system health correction.  Much of software engineering carries with it “hidden costs”, costs in man power, compute time, down time etc that cannot be directly measured against prior work or with a 3rd party score--I’ve mentioned this several times recently here--and knee jerk reactions only contribute to these hidden costs.

I am fairly certain that the solution involves having a vision, or road map, of the product offerings beyond one quarter and, definitely including, engineering needs (aka the architecture).   The c-suite types just don’t see that.  And I do not know how or what it takes to change it.   

Why is it that a talented, smart engineer who works their way up into ELT forget what is happening in the trenches and how costly it is?