Prioritizing Time for New Research and Development

Two weeks ago I had separate conversations with different entrepreneurs about how they prioritize research and development in their companies. Each conversation was brought up independently but the respective entrepreneur lamented how as their companies had grown the speed with which new features were released slowed down — it was now hard to make time for R & D. Customers were requesting enhancements to existing features, the architecture team wanted to improve back-end items, and the support team wanted to make certain processes easier.

One entrepreneur was thinking of going to an 80/20 model where engineers spent 20% of their time on new features and 80% of their time on existing requests. The other entrepreneur was thinking of dividing the engineers up into different teams where one team would only be new features and the other team would working on existing functionality. There’s no easy answer.

Here are a few best practices when prioritizing time for new features:

• Continually re-iterate that every hour spent on a new feature is taking time away from some other change, and that that is OK
• Remind all stakeholders that you can’t make everyone happy but that by having a strong vision and opinion for the product you’ll minimize time spent on features that are too narrow in focus
• Work with sales, marketing, support, operations, and engineering along with soliciting input from customers and partners during the time allocation decision making process

Prioritizing time for new R & D relative to other requests is hard. The best thing to do is to make the necessary time, over communicate, and deliver great results.

What else? What other thoughts do you have on prioritizing time for new research and development?