The key is to understand that computers exist to serve human needs, and the less code / UI / hoops to solve a problem the better, and to think end-to-end. If you are able to do that, most systems built by committee have a lot of low-hanging fruit that can be improved without much sacrifice. In practice, political realities and operational concerns may come in the way, but I firmly believe this is the only way to successfully operate as an engineer, and it will only become more important in the age of AI.

I push "money and data are sacred"; if we lose either of those, someone cries. Build the platform slow and fast. Governance, scaling etc sits here.

Provide reference APIs and let the product team one shot whatever they want and need, build fast and experimental, but your platform enforces constraints.

Best of both worlds (though feels like we're back in backend vs frontend development)

The demand for new features come from sales and executive people who want to check more boxes on a customer's checklist.