Lean Business Value Calculator app for iPhone and iPad

Estimate the Business Value of your User Stories or Themes on the go!

If youre a Product Owner in an agile organization, youve probably been asked to provide the business value for all of your user stories or themes in your backlog, but wait! You might have no idea where to start or what business value really means! So, lets back-up and answer a few questions just in case business value is new to you:

What is business value? It’s a number expressing the overall importance of a user story or theme.

Why is it important? Business Value is important because it helps Product Owners make critical decisions about prioritizing the release work. The Product Owner is also responsible for estimating & assigning business value for each user story or theme. Again, its important to have this value assigned as it aids in release planning and prioritization of work, but estimating business value can often be very difficult as there are numerous, often limitless ways to calculate “value” - from the income a new feature might bring, to the cost of building it, to the types of risk it could add to the project – the list is endless!

So how & where does a Product Owner begin? Using the Lean Business Value Calculator, Product Owners consider how their user stories or themes rate on a scale of 0-5 (5 being the highest value) for each of the eight provided consideration points; the app will then provides the assigned value.

The Lean Business Value Calculator is based on the lean estimation method where the only values to choose are limited to 1,2,4,8 (8 being the highest value)

Depending on the total score of each rating, the system will verify the range and assign the appropriate value. Here’s how the calculator normalizes business value:

Total Points Calculated/Business Value Assigned
0-10/1
11-20/2
21-30/4
31-40/8

Normalization is important for both individuals and multiple, cross functional teams working in the same organization so that theres some consistency in the metrics.

Consideration Points

The below list represents the criteria used to find the business value:

Potential Revenue
Demand from Customers
Demand from Prospects
Frequency of Use
Competitor Risk
Building Core Capability
Alignment to Strategy
Overall Importance