Most R&D organizations 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, Kassim Alani shares a lightweight investment allocation system built on Airtable that gives medium-sized organizations this visibility without heavy tooling or exhaustive ticket tracking. You'll learn how "perfectly imprecise" directional inputs can categorize 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.