[beremaki]

Most the time the only thing devs are allowed to interact with on the business side is a product/feature proposal with all assumptions already made.

If devs do not know the customers/users nor interact with them then they can't really argue about the proposal's assumptions, it defacto becomes a demand.

With experience devs see such proposals with skepticism. A significant amount of our output ends up being useless, no matter how fast or well it was built.

If you want devs to focus on value creation you have to make it their job, they have to take ownership of the whole thing. When a dev can help a user or a customer they tend to feel fantastic about it.

But truth is business people think devs are inept at doing that so most companies are structured in a way where the only agency devs have is how much time they have to do something.