The business itself is like a computer process. There are flows of information and resources. There is state. There are subroutines. There are bottlenecks and b

The business itself is like a computer process. There are flows of information and resources. There is state. There are subroutines. There are bottlenecks and bugs and wasted efforts and errors that may or may not be getting detected or mitigated. There are various intents that customers and stakeholders might have that are unreasonably difficult to fulfill under the current layout of things. You add value when you optimize, debug, and refactor the business operation. Increasingly in old-economy companies, but especially in Silicon Valley companies, the business operation is largely defined in code. So this is something software engineers can do, through well-chosen code changes. Outside of startups, engineers rarely do this alone. There are executives, business analysts, product managers, data scientists, etc. with very similar tasking. But you want to get into a position where these people see you as a full intellectual partner, not as an implementation resource to type in their already-baked ideas.