Unless you're being micromanaged to an incredible degree, there's still a lot of room for an engineer's discretion on how things are implemented. That's where

Unless you're being micromanaged to an incredible degree, there's still a lot of room for an engineer's discretion on how things are implemented. That's where "getting it" can play into making better decisions. I'm not talking about moonlighting doing the design or PM work, I'm talking about bringing an understanding of the business to your engineering work. And yes, you don't want to go complete cowboy, major decisions should be run up the chain, but you do need to know what and why the major decisions are.