Most R&D organisations can't answer a basic question: where is your engineering time actually going? Without that visibility, executives struggle to justify budgets, R&D leaders can't make informed tradeoffs, and finance teams are disconnected from what R&D spending produces. In this session we share a lightweight investment allocation system built on Airtable that gives medium-sized organisations this visibility without heavy tooling or exhaustive ticket tracking. You'll learn how "perfectly imprecise" directional inputs can categorise engineering effort across themes like new development, maintenance, and compliance, enabling R&D leaders to connect their work to business outcomes and make the case for continued investment.