When to use this combo
Your roadmap has too many items and you need a rigorous economic framework to decide what ships first. You want to move beyond gut feelings and politics to make prioritization decisions based on real economic impact.
Is this combo right for you?
Use this combo if you're an economically-minded product thinker who believes every feature has a cost of delay and every backlog has a bottleneck. You want to maximize the economic value your team delivers per unit of time. If you think "what's the cost of NOT doing this right now?" — this combo speaks your language.
Step-by-step walkthrough
Calculate the Cost of Delay for each item — how much value (revenue, users, learning) do you lose for every week this feature doesn't ship? Items with high urgency AND high value should ship first.
Apply the Pareto Principle — identify the 20% of features that will deliver 80% of the value. Ruthlessly deprioritize the long tail of nice-to-have items.
Find the Constraint using Theory of Constraints — what's the bottleneck in your delivery pipeline? Is it design, engineering, QA, or deployment? Optimize the constraint before adding more work to the system.