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?

  1. 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.
  2. Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
  3. 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 used23
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

  1. The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.