Calculating an Approximate ROI for Each of Your Roadmap Items

Most product teams prioritise by gut feel, stakeholder pressure, or frameworks that never quite stick. OKRs, RICE, MoSCoW: they all have their place, but almost none of them force you to answer the one question that actually matters to the business: what is this initiative worth in euros?

The good news is that calculating an approximate ROI per roadmap item is more accessible than most teams think. You don't need a finance team or a perfect dataset. You need a consistent approach and the discipline to apply it across every initiative on your roadmap.

Start With the Investment Side

We use a simple formula to put a cost on any roadmap initiative: expected number of sprints × €20,000. This is not a quote, it is a proxy. It accounts for team time, overhead, and opportunity cost in a single number that everyone in the business can understand.

A 4-sprint initiative costs roughly €80,000. A 10-sprint initiative costs €200,000. Suddenly, the conversation about whether this initiative belongs in the next quarter becomes a financial one, not just a product one.

Then Estimate the Return

For each initiative, pick the business outcome it is targeting. Is it reducing churn? Increasing conversion? Unlocking a new customer segment? Assign a monthly euro value to that outcome, even a rough one.

This is where the three types of business cases we use become helpful. At the back-of-napkin stage, you are only trying to establish whether the return is plausibly larger than the investment. You are not forecasting to two decimal places. A simple impact calculation (investment, return, and connection to a business goal) is enough to create alignment and start a conversation.

What to Do With the Uncertainty

When teams resist putting a number on an initiative, it is almost always because of uncertainty. They don't know what the impact will be. That is a fair concern. But uncertainty is not a reason to skip the estimate. It is exactly the reason to make one.

An approximate ROI forces you to name your assumptions. What would need to be true for this initiative to deliver the return you are estimating? Who needs to change their behaviour? What dependency needs to land first? Writing those down turns your ROI estimate into a testable hypothesis.

When uncertainty is high, that is a signal to invest in a small discovery phase before committing the full budget. Reduce the uncertainty first, then update your estimate.

Ranking, Not Forecasting

The goal of this exercise is not precision. It is relative ranking. If initiative A has an estimated ROI of 4x and initiative B has 0.8x, you don't need to be right to the decimal. You need to understand why A is ranked higher and whether the assumptions behind it hold up.

Teams that run this consistently across their full roadmap find something useful: a third of their initiatives have a clear positive ROI case, a third are uncertain and need more discovery work, and a third are hard to justify financially but exist for political or technical reasons. Knowing which is which is half the work of good prioritisation.

Key Takeaways

Use sprints × €20,000 as a consistent investment proxy across all roadmap initiatives. It brings financial language into product conversations without needing a finance team.

At the back-of-napkin stage, you only need a rough return estimate and a connection to a business goal. Perfect data is not required to start ranking.

Uncertainty is not a reason to skip the ROI calculation. It is a reason to make your assumptions explicit and decide whether to invest in discovery before committing.

The output is a ranking, not a forecast. Relative ROI across initiatives is what drives better prioritisation decisions, not decimal-point accuracy.