How can I grow my entrepreneurship skills in my backend dev job?

1/ Explore how other roles like marketing, sales work.
2/ As a dev, you get feature requests to implement. Understand the business reasons and business behind the requests.

Once you start doing these two, you will eventually understand the Enterpreneur ecosystem. This is where most Devs fail too as Devs think that 'The implemented feature is bringing business' but it's actually 'The business is bringing the feature request'.

I was also a backend dev and I did this by cold messaging people in the company and heads of departments. (I'd typically do this when I was already travelling to the HQ for other reasons)

Company was ~400 people, I messaged the head of sales and asked for details about how sales at the company worked. He set meetings up with me with a few people in the sales org who told me about their role and how they worked with the people around them. From that I learned what the sales process was (really, what an example of a sales process is) and phases of deals are, that sort of thing.

I did the same thing with marketing. I got to know a bunch of them and it actually helped a lot in my scope of understanding at the company as well as my network and understanding of how big orgs work.

Hey @Logan,

Depending on your company structure, try to listen to other departments and what problems they have that "automation" or engineering work might highly benefit from. Ask your manager that the are some tasks that might benefit the overall situation of that team in X, Y, Z.

Listen to how product people talk, convince each other, what metrics matter. Learning why we do things in a company where you are an individual contributor might help you.

Do something intrapreneurial, an entrepreneur in your company. Take babysteps and learn.

This could be e.g. coming up with a proposal how you can help the company do something better (i.e. faster, cheaper, more secure, easier, money saving). Champion and develop the idea, talk to people, "sell the idea" and concept to others, then see through the implementation.

An example:
As a backenend engineer you figured out that you can do something with less CPU cycles (or storage, RAM, bandwidth, etc.), so go talk to Finance & DevOps (or whoever owns the infrastructure budget) and propose to them changes how they can save money, then if they like the idea, have them talk to your boss/manager/sprintlead to convince them that you need to work on this.

(Source: I once was the guy who owned the budget and I loved having people come to me with ideas how to save the company some money. Nobody likes to waste money.)

You should start a side project and try to make money with it. There are many backend devs doing the same in the WBE Space and they are learning a lot from each other and the other entrepreneurs...