> what happens to the business if nobody solves this problem space > Attaching your work to the reasons they hear for things taking too long, costing so much,

> what happens to the business if nobody solves this problem space > Attaching your work to the reasons they hear for things taking too long, costing so much, or causing downtime > if you don't align incentives with your work through bi-directional communication you're going to find yourself eternally understaffed This comment reads grounded in practical, pragmatic, real world experience. Talk backend stuff to decision makers and they will find a way to avoid (or worse pretend) to listen. Don't talk and they will never know your worth. The middle ground here is to connect. My hack; I maintain 2 lists of key words from town halls, skip levels, one-on-ones and company-wide communications. A green list of things we want (targets, goals, visions). A red list of things we don't want (downtime, op costs, hardware cost, incidents, bad customer feedback, etc.) Connect each chunk of backend work to at least one green item. If not, connect to the absence of 2 red items. Ideally both. A slide with "Customer support costs from our last quarter's town hall meeting was at x cents per customer interaction. This self-help feature should avoid 3 of the top 5 common customer questions reducing the load on our customer service teams, dropping costs" delivers the message strongly as compared to a demo about the ingenious AI based (ugh!) routing mechanism. The harder stuff is where things get expensive before the get cheaper.