Does your roadmap leave revenue on the floor?
Eight candidate features, 26 engineering weeks, and a dependency nobody prices. The plan that ranks by value leaves $150,000 of annual revenue on the floor.
SaaS Starter Optimization free
After you install, this is the model to open.
Which Features Fit the Quarter?
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
The answer
- Best use of 26 weeks
- $700,000 a year of revenue
- The plan in the room
- $550,000 committed item plus the two biggest bets
- Dropped
- SSO the biggest single number on the sheet
- The pair no ranking finds
- $350,000 reporting API plus usage billing, 14 weeks
Eight features, one quarter, 26 engineer-weeks, and a revenue estimate against each. Two of the lines are not free choices. The SOC 2 evidence automation is pinned at 1 because it is in a signed contract, and usage-based billing is tied to the reporting interface by the dependency line, which holds the interface flag minus the billing flag at zero or above.
That is how a dependency is written for an optimizer, and it is one-way on purpose: the interface can ship without billing, billing cannot ship without the interface. The sheet opens on the plan a roadmap meeting produces, which is the committed item plus the two biggest bets, using 23 weeks for $550,000 of annual revenue, with three weeks left over that nothing fits into.
Click Run and the optimizer returns $700,000 from the SOC 2 work, usage-based billing, the reporting interface and workflow automation, using all 26 weeks. It drops single sign-on, the single biggest number on the sheet. The reason no ranking finds this is that the answer is a pair. On its own the reporting interface is infrastructure with a middling number against it, and billing is blocked, so neither wins an argument.
Together they cost 14 weeks and bring $350,000, and once the interface is being built anyway, billing costs 6 weeks for $160,000, which is the best remaining trade on the sheet. Sorting by revenue per week does not find it either: that plan reaches $600,000. Run it again with the quarter set to 30 weeks and single sign-on comes back in at $740,000, which is one way to price what a contractor is worth.
What the sheet cannot do is tell you whether the revenue estimates are any good, and it treats a feature as shipping or not, with no half-built state and no sequencing inside the quarter. To use it, replace the eight lines with your own, set the capacity figure beside the engineer-weeks-used line to what your team really has, and add a line like the dependency one for every dependency you have.
The model
It arrives on a tab called Template: What Fits the Quarter, carrying these columns:
- Build it (1 = yes)
- Engineer weeks
- Revenue gained or kept a year ($)
- Value ($)
with the model computed beside the data:
| Engineer weeks used | 23 |
| Reporting API flag minus billing flag (must not go below 0) | 1 |
| Annual revenue this quarter buys ($) | 550,000 |
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- What will your ARR be in 12 months?SaaS ARR Forecast with Uncertainty
- What is staying put actually costing you?Switch Cloud Providers, or Stay?
- Will this market tip to a single winner, or stay split?Format War Tipping Simulator
- Should you sell the hardware below cost to win the platform?Platform Launch Pricing
- If you raise prices, do you come out ahead?If We Raise Prices, Do We Come Out Ahead?
- How long until a customer pays you back?How Long Until a Customer Pays Us Back?
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: Optimization in Google Sheets.