It depends. Over time, I've seen a lot of cases where other teams were duplicating effort, or product owners or project managers were making bad guesses about w

It depends. Over time, I've seen a lot of cases where other teams were duplicating effort, or product owners or project managers were making bad guesses about what was difficult, or impossible, or already done - and the reason was that they either didn't know what was being worked on or didn't understand the impact. When your head is down in an interesting, thorny problem, it is easy to forget how those other folks are affected by your work, and it's easy to lose appreciation for the fact that their head is filled with a completely different information set. So it can be very useful to spend 5% of your time on this. Or heck, just try 2.5% - one hour out of a standard work week. Personal anecdote: I wrote up a little thing about why customers would pick one video encoder over another, and marketing just did backflips and started asking my manager if I could write more things.