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 representan 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 organizationis a scatterplot of R&D spend as a % of margin versus Yo...