The reality is, most of the time when you “ship” your software, executive management neither notices nor cares. Even if you get the “attaboy” from a manager, they will forget it 10 minutes later.
You ship your software because you care about work, and maybe because you care about your users. In a big software company, shipping is not going to get you noticed unless you are literally the guy delivering gmail or google maps.
To be clear, the pathway to management noticing is not you going around the building loudly blaring that you did a thing, it's that churn went down, or ARPU went up or CAC went down or uptime went up or something management cares about.
But the essential thing to also understand is that this doesn't just happen for free. Figure out what metric your ship is meant to affect, put monitoring in place and proactively notify those above you about how your ship impacted that metric. If you don't do this last step, you didn't ship.
your reality might be different than mine, but things that got shipped definitely get noticed because they are used as a bargaining chip for promotions, funding and for visibility of the entire team, that's one of the main concerns of a manager (unless they've checked out and are searching for another job)