This is something that can divide a lot of opinions but I am still going to go ahead and write it. It might also be that I tend to think this way just because I come from a totally different market (India) and the developers there don't work the same way the developers would in other markets.
The problem, it seems, is that the developers do not want to think outside of what they are working on or in other words given to work on. Because I am a mobile developer, I have seen this quite often that my fellow mobile application developers just want to implement that new feature without knowing why or how it would benefit the user. Even if they do know the why and the how, their efforts into development go only as far as programming the new feature and get done with it. As a developer, it should be our responsibility to let the product managers know that there is a better way of doing things. If there is a better place or a better interaction for that 'Complete Purchase' button, then it is the developer's job to convey that to the product managers. Not all the product managers or the UI/UX designers know what could be achieved in a technical sense of things. Meanwhile, a developer would have gone through a ton of third-party libraries or frameworks that could be used to make the look and feel of the app even better.
This obviously doesn't work in a big organisation which has the money to pay the salaries of a technical designer, a technical product manager on top of the non-technical people in the same fields. Talk about a startup though and you are bringing in a lot to the table. Even outside of a startup, if you have worked enough on these things, you would have created new skillsets for yourselves and potentially new career paths to take up.
The sad reality right now is that companies do not care about what other skills a candidate brings to the organisation, the only thing they ever care about is the quality of the code the developers are going to write. Please don't get me wrong, this is totally fair for them to ask for. A bad piece of code can break a lot of things, both in terms of functionality and also the efficiency of the team the person who wrote the bad code were working with. Good coding practices are the first thing a developer should know. But add to that the ability to come up with good solutions to the user's problems and you're suddenly looking at a complete developer. That developer is then able to work closely with their product managers, user-experience designers or even CEOs to take critical decisions on the product and not just sit on their desk waiting for the next set of tasks to be assigned to them through the task tracking tool.
Push the limits. If there is an analytics tool being used in the app, have a look at the dashboard of that tool to see what kind of data is being recorded and how it is helping the marketing team to come up with crucial answers. You never know you might have the perfect set of events to be placed in the app which could save the product manager hours of headache just because they never knew something like that could be implemented in the code. Have a look at the customer support tool being used in the app and try out all the similar tools available in the market. You might come up with that perfect tool which would allow you to integrate it with the analytics tool you're using while also making the customer support team feel like they are chatting with the users over messages just like they would with their friends on WhatsApp. Start playing around with the communication tool you use to see if all these tools can be integrated into your communication tool making the whole flow super easy.
To wrap up, I must say that there are all kinds of developers and programmers out there. Some like to be creative with how they write the code and some like to be creative with what they are working on. A good balance of a both of them could work wonders for an organisation as they can both push each other towards the other side. At the same time, an absence of the both of them or even one of them could prove to be fatal for the organisation as they then won't have anyone to either maintain the quality of the code or the quality of the product.
