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Cost of a Story Point

Have you every worked out what your team cost per story point is? I have and it has some pros and cons but largely I found it valuable. Here is why.

Let's imagine your team has got to the point of consistent, predictable delivery and the number of story points completed is pretty accurate each sprint. Let's also imagine you have created a pretty good User Story Map that  shows which stories are required to deliver a Feature. At this point I can total up the number of story points for a Feature to understand how much it is going to cost to deliver. 

In one teams case this was $2,370 for a Story Point and a Feature cost on ave. was approx $15,000. What this did was help not only the Product Owner but also the Business Stakeholders decide if they really wanted to "Buy" that feature. Would the value be worth the cost. If you have never played the "Buy A Feature" game I highly recommend it - https://lnkd.in/gyhkbShF





There are some Cons to this approach, you must accept these are estimate aggregated costs. Remember is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong. You also must not use this information to compare costs across teams, every team and every teams work is different.


My team and I had some very valuable conversations with the Product Owner and Business Stakeholders once we could talk cost to build, adding to the prioritisation and even de-scoping features from the Product all together.


Have you used this approach, did it work for you?

#agile #planning #costestimation #projectmanagement #productownership

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