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Module
Module 3 of 6Lesson 2 of 2~14 min

When time costs money: cost of delay, CD3 and WSJF

How to estimate what each month of waiting costs on a piece of work, and turn that into a sequence you can defend. This reasoning helps you weigh a pressing project against a more ambitious one, talk about lost value with finance and avoid missing an imposed deadline.

Lesson objective

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to estimate the cost of delay of several streams of work and its urgency profile, order them with CD3 or WSJF, and spot the fixed deadlines these calculations do not show.

Questions this lesson answers

  • How do you calculate the cost of delay for a product initiative?
  • What is CD3 and how is it different from WSJF?
  • How do you prioritize a small urgent project over a more profitable one?

Topics covered

  • cost of delay
  • CD3
  • WSJF
  • urgency profile
  • value-based prioritization

Where it fits

Prioritize with method

Out of all the possible bets, which ones come first, and with which method?

Lessons in this module

  1. One method per question: RICE, ICE, Kano, opportunity score
  2. When time costs money: cost of delay, CD3 and WSJF (this lesson)

What you will learn in this module

This lesson is part of the course Prioritize and build an outcome-based roadmap

  • Choose and apply a prioritization method suited to the question at hand (RICE, ICE, Kano, opportunity scoring, cost of delay, WSJF), taking its limits into account.