What is Value versus Effort?
Value versus effort is a prioritizing model where you can ask your team to assign each feature with a value and a measure of effort. The value, in this case, is the revenue potential of the feature, and the measure of effort would be the amount of time it takes to achieve that feature.
Thanks to the value versus effort method, your team can identify which feature is going to make a bigger impact on your audience and what it’s going to cost the company. Moreover, if you combine this with the important/urgent matrix, you can reduce the risk of doing the grunt work.
How to measure value vs effort?
When considering value, you should run it through the mental model of how much it aligns with your business goals and objectives. How much value can it add to your customers? Here’s what you need to thoroughly consider:
Business value - Your business runs on KPIs and OKRs, and all your decisions should be based on how much value it drives to those objectives. For example, your business might have objectives like reducing churn or increasing the click-through rate, etc.
Customer value - Your customers are the biggest stakeholders in your business. You should consider their pain points and how far it goes to reduce them. Or have they requested this feature on your feature voting board?
You try to measure the amount of effort required to perform this task. Most product teams try to use a “story point” based system or the number of hours it will require is predecided by the collaboration of the team during the start of the sprint. You must consider developer hours, costs of external services, and risks to external stakeholders.