How to Increase R&D Value: Business and Technical Value, Effective Time, and Cost Reduction

When you become a technology team manager, you are often asked where the value of R&D lies, how to increase it, and how your team's efficiency, capability, and level compare to the industry.

Each manager has their own logic for answering these questions, as it is a core part of team leadership.

This article does not claim to provide a definitive answer; it merely shares recent personal reflections on these issues.

Two simplified formulas are introduced:

Formula 1: 研发的价值 = (业务价值 + 技术价值) - 非正常成本 - 正常成本

Formula 2: 研发的价值 = 单位有效时间内产出的价值 × 有效时间 - 非正常成本 - 正常成本

This basic model serves as a foundation for understanding R&D value creation, though real‑world applications may require further refinement.

Overall, increasing value involves both "attack" (raising output value) and "defense" (reducing costs).

On the attack side, output value consists of business value and technical value. Business value depends on the intrinsic worth of a requirement and the speed at which it becomes effective; delivering higher‑value requirements faster is the main logic for boosting business value.

Improving Business Value

The logic includes two aspects: larger‑value business requirements and faster delivery.

Identifying larger‑value requirements involves prioritizing important work, which can be evaluated in two stages: before the work is defined and after it is defined. Pre‑definition criteria include:

Strategy and Expectations: company strategy, long‑term technical roadmap, and leadership expectations.

Business Impact and Target Value: impact on business goals, revenue growth, NPS, etc.

Third‑Party Constraints and Risks: contractual deadlines, strict technical risks, stability concerns, and so on.

After filtering, managers must also consider resource constraints—human, time, and financial resources—which affect priority decisions.

Once priorities are set, faster delivery can be achieved through three layers: R&D process, engineering systems, and team collaboration/communication.

R&D Process Simplify Process: Optimize the flow from development to release, eliminate unnecessary steps, and track time spent at each stage to reduce overall delivery time. Agile Practices: Adopt Scrum or Kanban for small‑batch, rapid iterations, measuring throughput, average delivery cycle, and per‑requirement labor cost.

Engineering Systems System Engineering: Invest in automated testing, CI, CD, and other tools to improve development and deployment efficiency. Architecture Optimization: Continuously refine the technical architecture to support rapid growth, change, and lower long‑term maintenance cost.

Team Collaboration and Communication Cross‑Department Collaboration: Foster communication among development, operations, product, and other teams to ensure quick requirement flow and issue resolution. Communication Mechanisms: Establish regular meetings, instant‑messaging tools, and project‑management software for smooth information flow. Team Empowerment: Grant teams decision‑making authority so they can act quickly without excessive approvals.

Improving Technical Value

Technical value follows a slightly different logic: on top of delivering higher‑value technology faster, it requires unwavering sustained investment and planned, steady construction.

Sustained investment means protecting the share of resources allocated to technical work even when business demand is high.

Planned steady construction involves optimizing system stability, defining a technical roadmap, and executing improvements step‑by‑step with clear goals and timelines.

Improving Value per Effective Time

According to Formula 2 ( 单位有效时间内产出的价值 × 有效时间 ), increasing R&D value requires raising the value produced per unit of effective time and extending that effective time.

Ways to raise unit value include delivering higher‑value business requirements faster and enhancing individual capability, as the performance of each engineer heavily influences overall team output.

To extend effective time, managers can protect development time through mechanisms such as "silent time" where non‑coding interruptions are prohibited, or focus‑driven initiatives like "black rooms" that concentrate effort on a specific goal—though such practices should align with company culture.

From the defensive perspective, reducing abnormal costs is essential.

Reducing Abnormal Costs

非正常成本是指在生产和运营过程中由于管理不善、技术失败、人为疏忽或外部因素导致的超出正常开支的成本。 These costs are not required for production and can be mitigated.

Key sources of abnormal cost include:

1. Project Delays and Requirement Changes

Delays and changes increase labor cost and postpone value delivery; tighter project management and formal change‑control processes can limit these impacts.

2. Technical Challenges

Unexpected technical difficulties can stall projects; early risk assessment, rapid resource coordination, and external expertise can help, while building a stronger talent ladder reduces future challenges.

3. Product Defects

Online bugs trigger costly incident response; code reviews, automated testing, and robust defect‑tracking systems help catch issues early and manage them efficiently.

4. Over‑Design

Excessive design effort leads to unnecessary complexity; adhering to the KISS（Keep It Simple, Stupid） 原则 avoids wasteful over‑engineering.

5. Historical Debt

Technical debt from rushed solutions incurs future rework and slows productivity; identifying, recording, and planning systematic debt repayment while preventing new debt is crucial.

6. Online Incidents

Production outages cause user impact, data loss, and revenue damage; comprehensive monitoring, disaster‑recovery plans, and post‑mortem analyses reduce recurrence.

Continuously reducing these abnormal costs, along with managing overall system complexity, enhances the total R&D value.

康康说：老板要的无非是「人少活好效率高」 – in other words, low cost, high quality, high output; high quality itself reduces cost, though the nature of the cost differs from simply having fewer people.

老板看的还是 ROI