I think about growth and innovation all the time. What it takes to make it happen. What opportunities we or our customers may be missing. How to deliver maximum innovation with minimum risk.
All business leaders measure growth in different ways: top line, bottom line, headcount, etc. All of these measures are important and relevant. But if you’re an owner or have an equity stake in your business, what you’re thinking about in the quiet moments or late at night is your need to grow your valuation. And in many cases, the clearest estimate of this is some multiple of your earnings. And your earnings are just a measure of the return you’re getting on the investments you make in sales, marketing, operations, support, and R&D. The better your return on these investments, the faster and safer you’ll be able to grow your business and its valuation.
But if you’re like many software business leaders I know, what’s keeping you up at night isn’t sales or marketing, nor finance or ops–it’s R&D. It’s so central to everything you do–you’re a software business after all. You keep pouring money and resources into it–but the return usually lets you down with missed dates, blown budgets, and unkept promises. It’s not for lack of trying either–you know you have good people trying to do the right thing. If R&D is feeling more like an anchor slowing you down than a plow horse pulling you down the field toward your goal, it’s understandable you might find yourself hating it–hating R&D.
There’s a better way
It doesn’t have to be this way. It is possible for you to love and trust R&D, improve your return on your R&D investment, and start to see R&D as a powerful and efficient engine that will drive your growth, rather than a weak and sputtering one that will drag you down.
Naturally, senior leaders want more and faster value creation from their R&D teams. However, they often end up hearing excuses about why they can’t deliver.
Problems you may be hearing from your R&D team:
1. “I can’t deliver new products or features because our legacy software is too old and clunky.”
Have you heard this one before? Your R&D team claims that in order to meet your business needs, they have to upgrade their tech stack and rewrite your products. You’re faced with seven-digit price tags and multi-quarter implementation timelines, and that’s before you can even get started on the feature work.
2. “I need more detailed requirements for the feature to be built correctly.”
Quite often, businesses fail to provide the right specs to their software team and end up dissatisfied with their results. The business points at R&D, who points right back at the business. In truth, it’s both parties’ responsibility to validate requirements at each step in the process. While the business and product management teams have the responsibility to make sure ideas are completely thought through and spec’d out, it’s up to R&D to communicate uncertainty back up the funnel before embarking on development. This becomes a problem for companies that don’t have the right tools, processes, or culture in place to facilitate the conversations.
3. “I can’t hit the date needed by the business because the change you are requesting is more complicated than you think!”
In many cases, R&D teams will require more time than you think to get something done right. We see this especially often with larger, more mature R&D programs. Over time you’ve made investments to build intricate systems that are highly reliable and come with redundancy, monitoring, logging, and the works. The side effect of that, however, is that a seemingly small change from the business perspective may actually involve significant changes in the infrastructure or simply require multiple touchpoints.
All of these complaints can be frustrating. However, with the right tools and management, it is possible to go from hating your R&D team to appreciating everything they contribute to your business.
How to start loving your R&D
1. Build it Right!
It is crucial to ensure that your R&D teams know WHY they are working on a project, as well as how it aligns with the overall company goals. Team-based communication, agile methodology, idea portals, and issue-tracking software are all crucial to maintaining clear communication and expectations. The right tools, processes and culture help your teams to be on the same page from the beginning, and they provide engineers with a complete understanding of the impact their development efforts will have on the business and your customers.
Over-the-wall engineering doesn’t work. What does is Concurrent Engineering, where you put your engineers (of every type) on the same team and in the same room (physical or virtual) with Sales, Marketing, Finance, Product Design, Customer Service Reps, and even key customers themselves. The automotive industry figured this out 20 years ago and it’s time to apply the same principles to software engineering today.
2. Build it Fast!
Everyone wants to build fast, but few take the steps to empower their teams enough to actually do it. To enable your teams, it may be prudent to do what you can to improve what they’re working with. We use tools to support automation whenever possible, and we cover the ways it can be beneficial to your team here. Automation is key to ensuring efficiency and delivery of features on time. It will prevent your team from having to perform the same tasks over and over again. Instead, they can focus their efforts on more meaningful work (such as building revenue-generating features)
3. Build it to Last!
Building in and on a well-defined and fully supported architecture that is constantly managed and upgraded will allow your team to have confidence that their solutions are always secure, modern, and can handle even the most complex scenarios with ease. No more complaints of unanticipated, overly complex changes. Managed architecture allows your team to stop worrying about downtime or changes that could affect the delivery of new products and features into the market. To actually get to this step of having systems built to last, it’s so important for your teams to be on the same page. When your business is thinking years ahead and communicating this vision to your R&D teams, your systems will follow suit.
Conclusion
Most businesses across the world are experiencing digital transformations. It has become crucial for companies to ensure their products have advanced capabilities to get ahead of their competitors. As a result, it is now more important than ever to improve your company’s R&D culture.
Adopting the mantra of Built Right, Built Fast, and Built to Last leads to loving your R&D team and opening more doors to growth and innovation.
For the business, it really means:
- Communication removes barriers to revenue-generating feature development.
- Automation that allows software teams to fly through development.
- Pre-built architecture managed by Modularis that saves your team from building and maintaining it themselves.
Building a new feature or making a tech decision? Use our technology decision tool to help make sure your business and R&D are aligned. If you’re ready for the next step, visit our PlatformPlus page to see how we can help.