Market your R&D work like a product
Figure out what your R&D work really means for others, both inside and outside of the organization, and promote the meaning of your work beyond scientific publications; experiment with new internal and external channels.
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Most companies’ approach to career development is biased in favor of those with a visible contribution to tangible, measurable results: managers, marketers and salespeople. Marred by the very indirect and tenuous link of their work to revenues and profits, as well as by a common penchant for understatement, R&Ders often come up short in terms of opportunities, willingness and ability to explain the value of their work. The few, truly remarkable R&Ders treat their work output as a valuable, desirable product, and market it accordingly within the organization.
As such a remarkable R&Der, first examine who poses requirements on your work, such as project leaders, product managers, supply chain managers, and steering boards. Besides what is obviously asked for you to deliver, think about which requirements are rarely expressed, but are vital for the “purchase”, and for “customer delight”. To do so, you need to think beyond R&D and understand the larger context. Which battles (regulatory, competitive) is your work helping the company to win – and how is it different to alternatives within R&D and complements provided by other functions?
Moreover, think about the total cost of your R&D work for the company: it’s not only labor and material. It’s also the effort invested in adapting and integrating your work into a product, the opportunity cost of not pursuing other alternatives, and the emotional cost of tackling the uncertainty inherent in R&D work. And, it’s also a couple of things rarely considered: the effort associated with keeping your work up-to-date in the future as needs and requirements shift, and the impact on the cash flow from delayed R&D work that prevents the company from executing on its product roadmap.
Furthermore, think about how to make your work conveniently accessible. Create “artifacts” with the aim of improving the quality and timeliness of others’ decision-making. For example, put yourself in the shoes of a product manager tasked with a product performance upgrade. Assume that he needs to understand the circumstances and risk under which what you developed some time ago could be stretched to fulfill new requirements. A long-form R&D report full of technical jargon and sophisticated charts is probably not the best option, even though it may fill you with pride and satisfaction for a problem well solved. Neither is a slide deck saved on an obscure network drive only accessible to R&Ders. What would its “user manual” look like, if your work were a stand-alone product?
Now that you have considered these elements surrounding the hard core of your R&D work, pursue opportunities to communicate the concrete value of your work, and the value you can generally provide. Presenting R&D work in R&D conferences is the comfort zone. Presenting it in an informal, engaging, conversational manner to non-R&Ders is where discomfort and growth happens, as you learn how others perceive your contributions (or fail to do so). After all, as Marvin Minsky once said, “you don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way”.