I lean towards telling your manager what they should want. Put issues that you identify as important on the table and draw attention to them. Explain why they're important. Make them benefit from your expertise by being proactive about this sort of thing.
My experience is still fairly limited with this, but I do have some successes.
Strongly agree. Our expertise is why we are there, when I tell my managers that something is important, they listen.
We need this feature, but before we can build this feature we need to make some changes to one or a few parts of the system. Otherwise we will be building on a bad foundation and fixing the foundation will be much more challenging after we have built on it.
My experience is still fairly limited with this, but I do have some successes.