Customer engagement, requirements engineering, product managing - all good things that are (stereo-)typically hard for software engineers...

I gave up reading before I got to what it was he did to improve the development rate - TL;DR anyone? :-)

It seems to boil down to talking to people in the industry and figuring out what problems they have that the product could potentially solve.

TL;DR: Market Research - customer interviews.

He's a people person. He talked to the end-users so the engineers didn't have to. Then the engineers could focus on what those people told him they wanted.