V is for Valuable

One of the biggest struggles in technology is setting priorities. There is always a shortage of qualified people to do the work and not enough time to complete it. The pressures of time-to-market and customer demands are overwhelming. This reality forces people to make difficult choices about what to build and what must wait. The most important factor is determining value. As part of my continuing series on the INVEST model of story writing, we are covering how to make user stories more valuable.

The Problem of Subjective Value

Asking a businessperson whether something is valuable is always a challenge. To a salesperson, a new feature might close a sale. For an executive, a new feature might satisfy their ego. The repercussions of saying no to the salesperson differ from those of telling the CEO you don't have time. Often, the highest-paid person in the organization, or HiPPO as they are called, has the final say on priorities. It drives technology professionals crazy and often leads to political battles in the organization. Fortunately, a well-written story explicitly describes value.

Putting a Dollar Figure on Features

Look at the following example:

"As a marketing professional, I want to be on the new social media site 'Jabber' because their traffic increased from 150,000 unique users to one million in the last 90 days, and they are offering a $500,000 credit for us to use their shopping service."

The story clearly defines the value of a $500,000 credit to use the Jabber store features. The platform's audience is also growing rapidly, scaling by nearly a factor of ten every 90 days. To the marketing professional, this looks like a great opportunity to establish a presence on a high-growth distribution channel.

Now compare it to this story:

"As an accounts receivable specialist, I want PayPal integration because the lack of PayPal support accounts for 50% of our abandoned carts, and resolving this will improve our sales conversion."

Looking at both stories, we can now have an informed conversation about what should be built first. The first question the Product Owner will ask is how much revenue we lose from abandoned shopping carts. If that figure is $2 million per month, recapturing 50% of those dropped carts ($1 million per month) represents an opportunity to generate an additional $12 million in annual revenue.

A Product Owner weighing these two initiatives can easily see that the PayPal functionality should move ahead. When we determine value, it must be a quantitative measure. In this case, $12 million in recurring annual revenue outweighs a one-time $500,000 credit from a new platform. With hard numbers in place, it becomes much harder for the HiPPO in the room to push through pet projects discussed on the pickleball court.

Value Beyond Direct Revenue

Not every story comes with a price tag attached. In many operational scenarios, time saved or risk avoided is just as quantifiable.

Here is another example:

"As a network engineer, I want to back up the servers to tape and to the cloud to limit our downtime to fifteen minutes if disaster strikes the organization."

This story does not measure revenue, but rather business continuity and risk mitigation. Having redundant cloud and tape backups minimizes office downtime in the event of a fire, severe weather, or power outage. This story provides a clear, measurable metric—fifteen minutes of downtime—that can be evaluated against other operational priorities.

Prioritizing What Matters

To drive business outcomes, user stories must be independent, negotiable, and articulate clear value. That value should be expressed in tangible, measurable units such as revenue gained, costs reduced, or time saved. When teams quantify value propositions, Product Owners can establish objective priorities, protect the team from HiPPO-driven distractions, and keep development focused on what truly moves the needle.

Until next time.