RnD is a new area of business. It involves researching and developing products, services and technologies. RnD specialists work in a wide variety of niches: industry, medicine and economics.
Together with Vladimir Vorobyov, an analyst at Sberbank, we use a specific example to understand why RnD is needed in the IT sector.
What is RnD?
It is a structure within a company or individual specialists who look for ideas, put forward hypotheses, develop new products or improve existing ones.
The main difference between RnD and conventional development is that there is no guarantee of results. Specialists test various hypotheses, and successful cases are passed on to the development team.
Stages of RnD work in IT
Let's say a product team has decided to create an LLM-based medical decision support system. This is a tool that helps doctors quickly analyse a patient's condition and make the correct diagnosis. A basic check revealed that clinical specialists are dissatisfied with the quality of the product, so the R&D department will continue to work on this issue.
The work of specialists can be divided into four stages:
- Information analysis. First of all, the RnD specialist will collect and analyse all the source data: business requirements, available datasets, and feedback from clinical specialists. This will help to form a complete picture and identify possible problems.
- Gathering additional information. Next, R&D will study scientific literature on developments in AI in medicine and NLP technologies. Specialists are not required to know everything, but they must be able to quickly find the information they need.
- Proposing and testing hypotheses. At this stage, RnD formulates how a specific task can be solved and organises the preparation of a dataset to test the hypotheses.
- In some teams, the RnD specialist independently creates an MVP (minimum viable product). This allows the hypothesis to be tested without involving the development team and to abandon unsuccessful ideas in a timely manner.
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Transferring decisions to the product team. If an engineer can prove with test data that their hypothesis has worked, and this is confirmed by clinical specialists, the project can be transferred to the product team. There, developers will work on the code, and designers will create a beautiful and user-friendly interface for the service.
How to evaluate the effectiveness of the RnD team
Not every RnD project makes it to the development team; some remain just hypotheses. Therefore, the following metrics are used to evaluate RnD work:
- number of tasks in progress;
- number of projects that did not make it to production;
- number of projects that made it to the development stage;
- average cost of a successful case;
- total cost of R&D;
- duration of the R&D cycle.
Metrics are collected several times a year. They help to calculate how effectively the R&D team is working. For enterprise companies, a good result is considered to be the success of every third product, while for start-ups, this indicator may be one in a hundred.
Key facts about R&D work
R&D exists in many areas of business. In IT, it is a way to create innovation.
An R&D specialist is someone who creates cutting-edge technologies. They collect data, formulate hypotheses, and create a test product.
Successful cases are passed on to the development team along with technical documentation.
R&D works without a guarantee of results, so some projects remain only hypotheses.
To become an R&D specialist in IT, you will need a higher education in computer science. Soft skills are also a big plus: the ability to process large amounts of information and work in a team.
