Thursday, April 23, 2009

Calculate the cost of a priority mistake

If you want an estimate of the cost of making a bad prioritization decision, try this cute little calculator.

2 comments:

  1. Aren't you leaving out the opportinity cost there? Yeah, I spent X amount of salary by not implementing something people want, but I missed Y amount of revenue for 3 months while we built the wrong thing.

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  2. I didn't write it, I just found it.

    It is an interesting bit, though.

    If you look at it one way it's not all that expensive and you can say "Hey, it's only 64K, in the grand scheme it's not all that bad." It's only a few weeks of time, maybe.

    On the other hand you see that there is real money involved. it's not free.

    As, as you say, if the team had completed a minimal marketable feature, you might be making more money by now instead of writing off a mistake.

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