Sending a paper for review can help with identifying whether
(1) What you're solving has already been solved
(2) You have a bug in your solution
(3) You can get feedback from the reviewers such that the system is ultimately improved (this happens more often than you think)
(4) You have actually shown that it works better or just deluded yourself into thinking it does (because you happen to have done a lot of work and are convinced that it was good work).
Submitting a paper for publication is essentially independent verification and validation from (hopefully, but not always) impartial people. If you can convince a committee of peers that what you do is the state of the art and you can show this on some public benchmark, then it's a very different proposition from beating some internal benchmark, which may or may not be well-constructed/biased/etc.
The downside is that you have to write a paper, go through the reviewing process etc (i.e. what a boss at most companies would consider a waste of time).
(1) What you're solving has already been solved
(2) You have a bug in your solution
(3) You can get feedback from the reviewers such that the system is ultimately improved (this happens more often than you think)
(4) You have actually shown that it works better or just deluded yourself into thinking it does (because you happen to have done a lot of work and are convinced that it was good work).
Submitting a paper for publication is essentially independent verification and validation from (hopefully, but not always) impartial people. If you can convince a committee of peers that what you do is the state of the art and you can show this on some public benchmark, then it's a very different proposition from beating some internal benchmark, which may or may not be well-constructed/biased/etc.
The downside is that you have to write a paper, go through the reviewing process etc (i.e. what a boss at most companies would consider a waste of time).