[motles]

Another way to look at it is - you can work on those SQL queries and deep technical problems, but you can't stop short at checking in the code and not telling anyone, or only mentioning it to your colleagues for engineering cred. Show people the performance impact, how much better the user experience is now. Especially those who are likely to trumpet it to the rest of the company (managers, sales people, marketing people, executives).

I used to be an engineer and now I'm a product manager (since 1 year ago). It's so funny being on the otherside and seeing how engineers claim "well not everything is demo-able, it's hard to quantify customer value" and in reality, I'd say 80% of the stuff they work on could be explained in a way that still has a visible outcome to me and to customers. But they want to write user stories like "As a developer, I want to refactor the controller manager to use new rust traits from the bind system blah blee bloo". But then during demo time, they show that actually now, a new feature that wasn't working before now works.

Guys. Lead with what you are going to actually change in the product that you can show me, not the technical change you are making. I know it's hard to get out of the details/weeds - but if you can uplevel a bit to what is going to be different when I'm done with this - sell that!