My point was you can do a lot of technical work that is 100% invisible to end users (except maybe performance gains) but results in a better or more stable product. So things that may not provide direct business value but provide it tangentially through more maintainable software, fewer and/or shorter maintenance windows, less unexpected downtime, etc. There is no corollary on the design side. Once the design is done, there's little reason for the designers to hang around.