Of course your business folks care whether you are spending time adding business value and helping them make money.

I’ve had to explain to a CTO before why I had my team spending time on a CI/CD pipeline. Even now that I have a CTO whose idea of “writing requirements” is throwing together a Python proof of concept script and playing with Athena (writing Sql against a large CSV file stored in S3), I still better be able to articulate business value for any technological tangents I am going on.

Sure. Agree totally, maybe I misread your previous comment a bit. What I meant is that run-of-the-mill business folks do not necessarily know how business value is created in terms of code and architecture.

I don't know of any business where they wouldn't be involved. Not in the "Let's talk directly about implementation details" way, but in the "Driving product development and roadmap" and "ascertaining value to our customers" way.

Any time spent on work that doesn't directly create value for customers is work that the business should be weighing in on. I'm not saying that you should never spend any time doing anything else - but these are trade offs that the product manager should be involved in, and one of their primary jobs is being able to weight the technical and business realities and figuring out where resources should be going.