R&D must be on the offensive

For most of the last 30 years, R&D sat deep inside the company. A customer would ask for a new feature such as an integration needed to make the product work inside its environment. The request then moved through account teams, product managers, prioritization meetings, roadmap debates, QA, release planning, and deployment windows. By the time the answer came back, the customer had often built a workaround or chosen another vendor. That process felt responsible because every release carried…