The digital landscape is in a constant state of progress and reformation. Disruptive advancements in technology and policy happen seemingly continuously, and only organizations with innovation strategies find success.
In such a dynamic state that’s reliant on innovation to drive product differentiation and efficiency, leadership is one of the most significant traits organizations should seek. Composing teams of talented, driven individuals is a necessary first step, but it takes effective leadership for these teams to realize their full potential.
One essential aspect of a software company’s success — the R&D department — is often overlooked. Most organizations see software R&D as a necessary evil, a sunken cost. As such, software engineering efforts are not part of the organizational strategic objectives, and the lack of strategic alignment creates unnecessary friction.
These are three leadership strategies you can use to reverse this script and rev up your software company’s success:
1. Look at R&D through a different lens.
You need to start thinking differently about software development. Instead of thinking of your R&D department as a cost center, you need to start seeing it as a value creation engine.
The R&D department plays a pivotal role in any software company. Responsible for product development and differentiation, it lays the groundwork for departments like sales, customer support, and marketing. R&D is the central force for fostering an atmosphere of cooperation and innovation across departments.
If you tell yourself that investing in R&D is a waste of time and resources, you’re more likely to make wasteful investments. Flipping the script on thinking about how an R&D department provides value is the first step in looking at R&D through a different lens.
For context, every new feature added during software development should impact your top line, your operating costs, or your bottom line. The work of potentially every department is affected, so it only makes sense to adopt a broader view from the get-go. Incorporating every team’s responsibility, from software planning to delivery, through a well-equipped and highly skilled R&D department will enhance your team’s overall effectiveness and help generate net new revenue.
2. Remove obstacles for your team.
Every great team works like a well-oiled machine, equipped with the right tools and the best fuel to maximize efficiency. As a leader of your software company, it falls on you to provide those resources to your team and pave the way for team members to do their best work.
A production work center needs quality inputs, tools, people, and a process to produce value. The same applies to your R&D team. You already have a committed team using the latest technology and agile methodology; however, they can’t seem to deliver what you need promptly.
The leading cause of this problem in teams of all sizes and expertise levels is that they are often not given clear goals (not requirements) with direct attribution to revenue generation. You need to provide quality inputs to produce the value you need for your customers. Asking your engineers to build a screen with a blue button and a red background ASAP does not provide enough context to understand your window of opportunity. Instead, make them part of your strategic goal and ask your engineering team to find the path to success, as it will strengthen the momentum of the R&D team and motivate them to take leaps in innovation confidently.
3. Enhance productivity through inspiration and guidance.
Leading an R&D team without any structure and planning is like constructing a building without knowing how many floors it needs to have. How does your team measure the work they’ve done and the work they need to do?
KPIs are a decent measure to gauge progress, but only if their purpose is enhanced. Instead of tying KPIs to an imaginary points system, connecting them to each milestone’s impact on the top and bottom line is more beneficial to understand their contribution to the business. There are three KPIs that will give you and your team a good picture of the positive impact on the organization: Effectiveness Ratio, Efficiency Proportion, and Productivity Trend.
The Effectiveness Proportion tracks the proportion of the effort expended by your R&D team toward working on user stories/tasks that create new value for the business (a feature or enhancement that has a direct impact on net new revenue, retention of recurring revenue, or decrease of operating costs). Guide your team toward creating new value and minimizing the effort used toward working on maintenance user stories/tasks. Usually, your team should spend a minimum of 80% of their time creating new value for every sprint.
The Efficiency Proportion tracks the percentage of the effort expended working on planned user stories compared to the effort used to put out fires or unplanned activities, such as scope creep. Guide your team to prioritize the planned work to move your rocks and analyze any unanticipated work opportunity cost. If your team is constantly putting out fires, pause on new feature development and focus on fixing the code that’s causing the constant interruptions.
The Productivity Trend tracks the effort measured in plan points or any other effort unit achieved by the team every quarter. Ideally, the trend line should always show an upward trajectory. As time goes by, the number of plan points completed increases as your team becomes more knowledgeable, effective, and efficient. Guide your team to work smarter and not harder. And remember, time is not an effort unit. Keeping track of how many hours somebody spent on a task does not indicate effort or efficiency; it’s just a number that looks good on a timesheet and that most of the time will add up to 40 hours per week, which is an exercise of compliance and not a reliable productivity metric.
By keeping track of these KPIs, you’re showing your team the influence their work has on the company and the value they’re delivering to customers. These real motivators boost your team’s confidence and inspire a more productive and efficient work ethic.
Learn more about why we think you should replace points with relevant motivators in our blog article here.
Long-term returns over short-term
Excellent leadership skills, above everything else, require you to consider the prospective future constantly. The key benefit of enhancing your R&D affairs is that it de-risks and accelerates the software development process. With the right improvements, you’re looking at better ROI, boosted productivity, and increased net new revenue.
It may still seem daunting to incorporate such leadership strategies in a fruitful way for your company. If so, PlatformPlus could be what you need.
Supercharge your R&D with PlatformPlus
We believe there’s a better way to develop commercial software products. We believe we can help de-risk and accelerate your software development. We created PlatformPlus, a product-based and service-based solution in one complete package. PlatformPlus is the world’s most efficient development platform that automates up to 70% of the code your developers need to deliver compelling SaaS, IoT, and any other cloud platforms, allowing them more time to build more value for your customers.
Want to see how PlatformPlus can propel your business? Check out a helpful overview here.
Our powerful software is complemented by the full support of our expert software architecture and engineering team, with years of technical leadership and coaching experience. We’ve made your software’s launch, from its inception to the market, a whole lot faster. For more information about the benefits of PlatformPlus, visit here.
If you’re curious about what kind of results to expect from PlatformPlus, this article should alleviate your concerns. However, if you still have questions, feel free to reach out to us here!