Member-only story
How we put a value on every feature in our backlog
Helping the prioritization discussion with some numbers people can relate to
One of the first things I spoke to my CTO about when I started one of my roles was what it actually cost us for each hour of a developer’s time.
Not the amount we pay the developer, but the actual cost of that developer being in the business, when you take into account not just their salary, but their pension contributions, their training, their equipment, their share of the heating and lighting, and a host of other things.
I was lucky, in that the CTO knew what the number was.
From this we had our Average Hourly Cost, which we could use alongside our estimations of time to deliver, in order to give us a rough cost of delivering the feature.
This was going to be useful in helping us determine the value that we could deliver for the business with a particular feature, but it was only half of the equation.
(Before we move on, yes, I know we’re estimating in time and that’s not the way many people do it but you need to do something to figure out whether the effort v reward calculation works in your favour. It’s just a finger in the air estimate to help us work out how to plan where the work sits)
