[jiusanzhou]

The 3-5x return threshold is the part most eng leaders never internalize. I've seen teams spend entire quarters on internal tooling that saves maybe 20 minutes per developer per week — nowhere near break-even, let alone a healthy return. The uncomfortable truth is that most prioritization frameworks (RICE, WSJF, etc.) deliberately avoid dollar amounts because nobody wants to see the math on their pet project. Once you attach real costs to sprint decisions, half the roadmap becomes indefensible.

[olsondv]

On the other hand, I’ve also seen single developers create a tool or dashboard off-the-books that had widespread adoption. Things that would never have breached the top 100 features list since they are entirely internal. The irony is then they are expected to maintain it indefinitely without official effort allocation.

[cpinto]

You’re absolutely right, but just to a point. It should be easy to clearly quantify the desired financial outcome of a sprint, but not of its components. I don’t want to spend a single minute figuring out the financial outcome of a single ticket.