Cost of A Wrong Decision
Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at 06:39PM What is the cost of a decision about features and priorities? Consider this from the point of view of an agile product manager planning major releases or a portfolio team looking for incremental revenue.
We've built a very simple tool below to help estimate the cost of an epic. Epics are major improvements or marketable features that "move the needle," and are made up of many individual user stories. To estimate "points per epic," add up all of the story points to create an important customers capability.
Since we spend as much on an unneeded epic as one that customers demand, this gives us the cost of a wrong decision. Agile product managers need to be applying good tools - roadmaps, collaborative customer input, and well-designed business models - to focus on what matters to customers.

Reader Comments (2)
[...] Cost of A Wrong Decision [Enthiosys] [...]
Great concise post.
This should be coupled with the Opportunity Loss of not going with the next best Epic candidate and any new or recurring revenue impacted.