I am currently learning that platform work in most places means nothing if you cannot point at an actual metric that management at appropriate level cares about

I am currently learning that platform work in most places means nothing if you cannot point at an actual metric that management at appropriate level cares about, changing in a very tangible way; or unless your users are your peers, and you can be so good/promote yourself so well that your sheer reputation helps (and I'm not sure the latter even works in most places). I've actually previously worked at a platform team for a ton of internal customers, and then at a B2B startup selling platforms - that's where you get promoted for platform development, cause platform is the product and reducing request latency or whatever is something VPs care about... in my current team I have a long list of impactful (on platform level) improvements I could make to infrastructure and libraries, engineering fundamentals, etc... that I'm not doing, cause I'm doing some boring work that will move some number, or sitting in meetings with 3 teams trying to get out a feature, that customers (or management) care about for some strange reason ;) E.g. perf work only matters when we want to save on server budget, and we have to decide to save on it beforehand, and it still doesn't matter as much as shipping some new widget or a metric change. Or e.g. I created a library for X that ended up being used by a bunch of people in a few teams (not the original goal). I am pretty sure nobody above IC level cares. All I get for that are occasional bug reports and a perception that I might be an expert at X... if the library doesn't contribute to my career via the latter, there's no other way it will :)