This is the sort of thing that you don't recognize until you become a manager, and then you do and you watch everyone on your team run around like a bunch of kids chasing whatever caught their attention that day and it all becomes a lot clearer.

"Why are we doing this" and "how does it align with the business's goals" and more pointedly "what are we not doing so we can do this instead" and "is that the right trade-off" are all questions even very technically gifted engineers seem to have a really hard time answering.