[JohnBooty]

This is kind of the gold standard and well worth aspiring to for any given situation.

I've often found it hard to achieve in practice.

A typical issue is that for non-trivial performance improvements (the kind that will take several days to several months to achieve) it's hard to estimate the speedup (and therefore, the the corresponding dollar amount) without actually doing a substantial portion of the work and estimating the corresponding speedup.

Another typical issue is where the performance speedup doesn't correspond directly to a dollar amount. At a recent employer we were working on a scientific product. The optimizations would have affected the size of the datasets able to be handled by our product. So there would have been a dollar impact, but it would have not been some kind of relatively simple AWS math. It would have been measured in potential sales dollars.

It's like making your game run at 60fps instead of 30fps. 60fps is clearly better (all other things being equal) and better games tend to sell better, and we'd like to make the best game possible and sell the most copies possible... but how do we quantify the expected return on this work? Many times, I don't think you can.