Yeah we call them "building blocks." Instead of building specific individual features we create building blocks that we can use to implement features. The key difference is that by exposing the building blocks to customers they can use the building blocks in ways that we didn't imagine.

The most important reason for us to do this is so that our customers can always accomplish what they need, even if it's somewhat manual or painful. By exposing our building blocks we never have an emergency where we need to implement the feature "copy foo to bar so that customer X can accomplish important thing Y." Instead we can say "you're able to do that manually and we'll talk about a feature that will help you automate if the manual process is too painful."

Sometimes you just need to write some straight business logic, don't get me wrong, and it takes experience to know when to create a new concept and when to just bang out some code. But exposing primitives or building blocks reduces the amount of "critical" development substantially.