As I write this, I am on my way back from a conference in Munich where I gave a keynote to a sizable audience working on software quality. One of the parts of my keynote is where I show a calculation of how much revenue each € invested in R&D has to create. This turns out to be 100 divided by the percentage of company revenue allocated to R&D. That means that if your company spends 5% of revenue on R&D, each € invested in R&D has to generate €20 of revenue. Of course, this is sometimes hard to calculate as there is both a time lag between the time of investment and the time of revenue generation and a risk that a prioritized feature does not generate the expected outcome. During the keynote, I realized, and not for the first time, that many, especially European, engineers don’t care about the business side of their efforts. This annoys me to no end as engineers are at the heart of value creation in companies and they need to focus their efforts on what offers the greatest impact. If you work in engineering, you better care about the business.