> Technically, everything you do affects end-users - including faster deployments - although in some cases that effect is more obvious than in others. I agree

> Technically, everything you do affects end-users - including faster deployments - although in some cases that effect is more obvious than in others. I agree with this. This is why the dev managers/directors/VPs own the _delivery_ of the business goals for the year. They balance the customer-facing improvements with internal improvements which affect development velocity (deployments, ops, how easy is it for new employees to onboard onto a code base, how easy is it for someone with <2 years experience on a codebase to ship a feature, etc.). So PMs in collaboration with dev managers own _what_ customer-facing improvements to deliver, and the responsibility of _how_ to deliver and the actual delivery falls on the dev managers. I'm not proposing this as a new model, I'm saying this is what I've seen been followed in some companies.