Cost of Delay Template for Prioritization

Feature value tells you how much something is worth in total. Cost of Delay tells you how much value you lose per unit of time by not building it. Two features can be worth the same amount ($100K), but if one loses that value over 10 weeks and the other over 50 weeks, the first one has 5x the Cost of Delay and should ship first.

Use relative units instead of absolute dollars. Score each feature's weekly delay cost on a 1-20 scale relative to each other. This still produces a useful ranking even without precise financial data. As you get better data, convert to dollar estimates.

Estimate the expected cost of the risk materializing multiplied by the probability increase per week of delay. For example, if a security vulnerability has a 2% chance per month of being exploited and the expected cost is $500K, the monthly Cost of Delay is $500K x 2% = $10K per month.

Use Cost of Delay when time sensitivity is a major factor. Features with hard deadlines, seasonal windows, or competitive pressure benefit from explicit delay cost analysis. Use [RICE](/frameworks/rice-framework) when features have similar time profiles and you need to compare across reach, impact, and effort dimensions. You can also use Cost of Delay as the numerator in a WSJF calculation.

Recalculate monthly, or whenever a significant event changes the delay cost (a competitor launches, a deadline moves, a key customer escalates). Step function features need the most frequent updates because their delay cost can change overnight when a trigger event occurs.