There are many important meetings in your first ninety days as a new engineering leader, but one that’s both easy to forget and surprisingly important is your first meeting with the finance team. There’s a lot to learn from the finance team, particularly drilling into your profit and loss statement, but there’s one narrow topic that causes a surprising amount of frustration between engineering and finance teams: how do you capitalize software engineering costs?| lethain.com
A few years ago I wrote about reading a Profit & Loss statement, which is a foundational executive skill. I also subsequently wrote about ways to measure your engineering organization. Despite having written those, I still spend a lot of time wondering about effective ways to represent an engineering organization to your board of directors. Over the past few years, one of the most useful charts I’ve found for explaining an R&D organization is a scatterplot of R&D spend as a % of margin vers...| lethain.com