Personally speaking, the biggest bursts of developer contributions I've observed haven't necessarily been technical achievements (though those exist, particular

Personally speaking, the biggest bursts of developer contributions I've observed haven't necessarily been technical achievements (though those exist, particularly in crunch-time situations where somebody really busts his ass for a few days/weeks/months), but process and business realizations. Once a smart developer gets his hands into a domain and really understands how and why things work, they come up with realizations about the business or problem that really needs to be solved. Because they see all of the technical parts of the project, they can see stuff that the business people can't: things like figuring out what tasks might be able to be automated? Or what data can be connected to create new insights? I've seen some genuinely very smart business people working on a particular problem for years who didn't make the mental connections about what was possible to do with a certain kind of data, who smacked his own face in frustration once he was told by the developer what he could do with his data. These kinds of realizations are usually worth more to a project than even the most skilled developer.