What I was getting at was the idea of time spent on things that aren’t directly and immediately able to be, say, put into a sales demo, but instead impact the customer a but more tangentially, which is also when communicating clearly about business impact is particularly important. I would also argue that companies do tons of genuinely non customer facing stuff with varying levels of justification, for better or worse.
Regardless, who knows whether this was the case in the story being discussed, but it’s not unthinkable that this genre of communication breakdown was involved to some extent.
My point is that just about any justification for any business activity ends up being customer-related at some level.
Example:
Why do we want to spend money on Jetbrains licenses for developers? Because we want them to be happy, comfortable, and productive. And why do we want them to be happy, comfortable, and productive? Because they build stuff that customers want.
Regardless, who knows whether this was the case in the story being discussed, but it’s not unthinkable that this genre of communication breakdown was involved to some extent.