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Classic WSJF Prioritization

Whether you’re new to agile WSJF or looking to refine your prioritization process, using WSJF can help your team embrace a financially driven approach to backlog management and product delivery.

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Classic WSJF Prioritization table ranking tasks by importance, cost of delay, duration, and WSJF score.

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Maximize economic benefit

Decentralize decision-making

Financial-driven prioritization

Ignore sunk costs

WSJF Prioritization (Weighted Shortest Job First) is a proven method for ranking work items in agile product management based on the cost of delay and job size. By using WSJF in agile frameworks, teams can focus on delivering the highest value features sooner, maximizing ROI, and improving time-to-market.

What Is WSJF

The Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) framework lets you quantify the financial costs of developing or not developing specific items when making your prioritization decisions. Sequence your development process to continuously provide the best return on your development time. Quantify the cost of delaying an item and then estimate the time it will take to develop it. Then, to calculate your WSJF score for each item, divide the cost of delay by the job duration. You can customize the weights for either metric to reflect the needs of your organization.

When to use WSJF

Use WSJF during quarterly or PI planning, roadmap prioritization, backlog grooming, and portfolio selection to create fast, economically sound delivery sequences across product, engineering, and go-to-market initiatives. WSJF is commonly applied in Program Increment (PI) planning to sequence features and enablers across Agile Release Trains.

WSJF Prioritization, Making Smarter Decisions in Agile

Classic WSJF Prioritization offers a clear, data-driven approach to making smarter, faster product decisions. By quantifying the cost of delay and balancing it against effort, teams can focus on what delivers the greatest value first. Whether you’re running PI planning, refining your backlog, or aligning cross-functional priorities, WSJF ensures every decision supports your business goals.

FAQ

How do you calculate WSJF?

Divide the Cost of Delay by the job duration. This gives a score to help prioritize the highest-value work first.

What is the WSJF technique in agile?

WSJF in agile ranks backlog items by value versus effort, ensuring teams deliver the most impactful work sooner.

What is the difference between CD3 and WSJF?

CD3 measures the cost of delay divided by duration. WSJF uses the same formula but is a structured agile framework for prioritization.

How should I use Classic WSJF prioritization?

First add the cost of not developing an item to the appropriate column, for each item. Next step is to estimate how long it will take your team to develop the item. The Classic WSJF score is calculated by dividing the cost of delay by the development time. You can add weights to either cost of delay or development time to reflect your organization’s priorities — cost or resources.

Who are the relevant stakeholders for this view?

Product leaders developing their plans are highly relevant stakeholders for this view. In addition, executives interested in seeing why one item was prioritized over another can see the objective justification in this view.

What outcomes should I expect from using this view?

You should expect to receive an objective score that reflects the cost of delaying the development of an item, for each item.

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