You can build anything this week. You still find out in a quarter.
AI made building fast. Finding out whether a bet worked still waits on customers, data and time. That wait is where the money goes.
This page puts a number on it for your team. Three steps, about five minutes. Every input is a number you already have or can count. We fill in none of them for you.
ROI Calculator
Step 1 of 3
What did finding out late cost you?
Think of one bet from the last year that did not work. A feature, a redesign, a new pricing plan. Pick one you remember well.
That money went nowhere visible. Nobody wrote it off. It is the time your goal stood still while the team built the wrong thing, then the next thing.
How much sooner will it be? We can't tell you.
It depends on whether the evidence reaches Shorter Loop and whether someone acts when it does. You know your team. Judge it yourself.
What Shorter Loop does to shorten the wait
- Every bet records what it assumes and what evidence backs each assumption.
- When new evidence arrives, an interview, a document, a number from your analytics tool, Sage checks it against the assumptions it touches.
- When something contradicts an assumption, its status changes, and you see which bets rest on it.
- The integrity check looks for the usual warning signs: work started without validation, experiments that contradicted the plan, research nobody connected to a decision.
The point is the month-2 signal from Step 1. It usually exists. It sits in a an unopened file.
What we left out, and why
Most ROI calculators lean on a few numbers. We dropped them.
- Hours saved per PM per week. Nobody measures this before or after. The hours rarely turn into shipped work anyway.
- Productivity gain %. You'd need a baseline nobody has. Productivity of what, measured how?
- Faster time to market. Shipping the wrong thing sooner returns nothing. Speed only pays once the bet is right.
- Industry-average ROI multiplier. These come from a vendor's happiest customers. Your roadmap was never in the sample.
- Tool consolidation savings. Real only if you cancel the tools. Count them when the invoice stops.
The numbers used in the calculations are all yours. Nothing from us other than the monthly price of Shorter Loop.
What we count but don't price
- The next bet the team couldn't start while this one ran.
- Customers who tried the feature, got confused, and trusted the next release a little less.
- Customers who tried the feature, got confused, and trusted the next release a little less.
- If you know these exist on your team, your real number is higher than the one above.
If you know these exist on your team, your real number is higher than the one above.
Where the idea comes from
Step 1 has a name. Product development writers call it cost of delay: what a goal loses for every month it waits.1 Most teams track how long building takes. Few track how long it takes to find out.
1 Donald G. Reinertsen, The Principles of Product Development Flow (2009).
Find out sooner on your own roadmap.
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