You should always be aligned to the revenue mission of the company. The mission is to earn money AND enhance the reputation of the company.
Scenario 1:
My first job out of college was developing automated pretty HTML for emails for this marketing company in the hospitality industry. It was still start-upish at that time, so the business was centered around account management and business relations. I was hired to be a developer, so I found problems to solve. When those solutions saved business relationships I could walk on water. I got good at task lists and account management even though account management was handled elsewhere.
Scenario 2:
I once did cyber defense for the US Army back before Army cyber was a thing. I started getting pretty good at it until I was promoted out of that organization into a logistics organization. All that cyber expertise didn't matter so much anymore, I had to be a manager in a group that different things. I was basically a people manager of a help desk plus other stuff. In order to protect my staff I had to learn logistics. I had to know how to do other people's jobs so that I could push back with better answers when leadership made decisions or other managers tried to poach my people. I have now been in logistics long enough I know the management of logistics operations better than many of the logistics managers even though I am just the IT guy. This provides me a lot of pull.
Scenario 3:
I spent a lot of time as a developer in the online travel agency space. I learned a lot about the retail side of e-commerce and the behavior of travel planning. As a junior developer I was promoted to a senior in about 2 years because I the A/B test guy for this major .com brand. I learned to master DOM traversal without abstraction layers so I could write tests really fast that did amazing things and were often more durable than the actual real code later released to production. Because I had also learned the business of e-commerce and the travel industry I could also design better tests and than many of the business owners recommended. So long as velocity, durability, and quality of test remained high I could walk on water.
Scenario 1:
My first job out of college was developing automated pretty HTML for emails for this marketing company in the hospitality industry. It was still start-upish at that time, so the business was centered around account management and business relations. I was hired to be a developer, so I found problems to solve. When those solutions saved business relationships I could walk on water. I got good at task lists and account management even though account management was handled elsewhere.
Scenario 2:
I once did cyber defense for the US Army back before Army cyber was a thing. I started getting pretty good at it until I was promoted out of that organization into a logistics organization. All that cyber expertise didn't matter so much anymore, I had to be a manager in a group that different things. I was basically a people manager of a help desk plus other stuff. In order to protect my staff I had to learn logistics. I had to know how to do other people's jobs so that I could push back with better answers when leadership made decisions or other managers tried to poach my people. I have now been in logistics long enough I know the management of logistics operations better than many of the logistics managers even though I am just the IT guy. This provides me a lot of pull.
Scenario 3:
I spent a lot of time as a developer in the online travel agency space. I learned a lot about the retail side of e-commerce and the behavior of travel planning. As a junior developer I was promoted to a senior in about 2 years because I the A/B test guy for this major .com brand. I learned to master DOM traversal without abstraction layers so I could write tests really fast that did amazing things and were often more durable than the actual real code later released to production. Because I had also learned the business of e-commerce and the travel industry I could also design better tests and than many of the business owners recommended. So long as velocity, durability, and quality of test remained high I could walk on water.