This is where good leadership in the dev team is needed.

Is the improvement likely to reduce maintenance overhead (and thus cost)? Or improve performance allowing for fewer services running (and thus reducing cost)? Or reduce bugs that force people out of a workflow (eg in an online shop, thus fixing it increases sales)?

Or if it’s just tech debt then use Jira (etc) to your advantage and talk about the number of tickets you can close of this sprint due to this engineering initiative.

If the development team and product teams goals are largely aligned then the problem with engineering initiatives is just how you explain them to the product team.