Ever get stuck deciding whether to work on a big, flashy project that promises huge returns or a smaller, less exciting task that’s quicker to complete?
Every project manager faces this dilemma, and it often feels like there’s no clear answer.
That’s where weighted shortest job first (WSJF) comes in. It offers a data-driven approach to help you make smarter prioritization decisions.
So buckle up as we break down how WSJF can drive your prioritization process in the right direction!
How to Use Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) for Prioritization
TL;DR
- WSJF helps prioritize the shortest job by considering the cost of delay and job size to focus on high-impact tasks
- Components of WSJF include the cost of delay (value) divided by job duration (effort), which determines the priority of tasks
- WSJF enhances prioritization in agile frameworks by aligning tasks with strategic goals, incorporating stakeholder feedback, and using visualization tools like
- WSJF streamlines decision-making, reduces bias, and increases alignment with business objectives
- To calculate WSJF:
- Set up cost of delay in Custom Fields
- Use Time Tracking for job duration
- Automate calculation with Formula Fields
- Integrating WSJF into product roadmaps ensures alignment with business goals and promotes clarity across teams
- Common issues like estimating value and inconsistent scoring can be overcome by standardizing processes and involving stakeholders
- WSJF is often more data-driven and objective compared to other prioritization methods
What is Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF)?
Weighted shortest job first (WSJF) is a prioritization model used in Agile, particularly within the scaled Agile framework (SAFe). It helps teams decide which tasks or features to tackle first.
This agile prioritization technique helps teams focus on initiatives that deliver the most value in the shortest time.
WSJF considers key factors like user and business value, time sensitivity, and risk reduction, making it easier to align efforts with business goals. WSJF ensures you’re working on tasks with the highest impact, boosting efficiency and reducing delays.
⭐️ Fun Fact: The ‘Shortest Job First’ approach was first utilized in the 1970s, when resources were scarce and expensive. The goal was to make the best use of this in the most inexpensive way.
Applying WSJF in Agile and SAFe Environments
Before we understand how to use WSJF in Agile and SAFe, let’s understand what a SAFe Environment is.
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) was designed for organizations running complex, multi-team Agile projects, often across departments or entire enterprises. Unlike smaller Agile setups, SAFe provides a structured approach to managing large projects, enabling teams to work collaboratively while keeping goals aligned across multiple levels—like portfolio, program, and team.
Within SAFe, Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) prioritizes work based on economic impact. It allows teams to identify features that provide the most benefit in the shortest time, maximizing the return on effort.
Applying WSJF at various levels—portfolio, program, and solution train—ensures alignment, collaboration, and focus on the highest-value work, directly supporting Scrum pillars like collaboration and transparency.
While WSJF can be applied in any Agile product management framework, it’s especially useful in SAFe due to its scale and complexity. In high-risk or high-value projects, WSJF helps teams make data-driven prioritization decisions. This is key in large projects where stakeholder input, collaboration, and clear prioritization are essential.
Some common uses of WSJF in Agile include:
- Product roadmap planning: Sequencing features to meet business goals
- Feature prioritization: Identifying high-value features
- Development timelines: Aligning time-sensitive work to avoid delays
❓ Did You Know: WSJF is resource-intensive, making it less ideal for minor tasks like bug fixes. It’s best suited for high-impact work that drives business outcomes.
Benefits of Using WSJF for Prioritization
WSJF is a powerful prioritization framework that helps teams make informed, data-driven decisions. Here’s how you can benefit from WSJF for Agile projects:
- Focus on value and speed: Prioritizes tasks that deliver the highest value in the shortest time, increasing productivity and enhancing customer satisfaction
- Efficient resource allocation: Ensures resources are directed to the most valuable tasks by evaluating user value and time criticality, resulting in better project outcomes and minimizing time spent on low-impact activities
- Transparency and team alignment: Encourages openness in prioritization, helping teams align on shared goals, and fostering collaborative decision-making
- Data-driven prioritization: Makes decisions on economic impact by using a quantitative approach, providing a thorough prioritization process rather than simple ranking methods
- Continuous reassessment: Enables teams to adapt to new information and re-evaluate priorities to stay aligned with business objectives
- Improved stakeholder alignment: Promotes stakeholder alignment by making clear prioritization criteria
- Reduced risk: Reduces the chance of misallocating time and resources by emphasizing high-value, high-urgency work, lowering the risk of focusing on less impactful items
- Alignment with business goals: Keeps product development aligned with the company’s vision and strategic objectives, ensuring each task supports broader business goals
- Adaptability to market changes: Encourages flexibility by allowing your teams to quickly pivot when market conditions or customer demands shift, keeping priorities aligned with real-time needs
- Clearer prioritization of technical debt: Provides a systematic way to address technical debt by assigning priority based on its economic impact, ensuring tech debt doesn’t impede future growth
- Scalable for large teams: Supports cross-functional teams by providing a common prioritization language, making it easier for large groups to align on task importance and sequence
The Components of WSJF: Breaking Down the Formula
Understanding the components of WSJF helps you prioritize tasks more effectively. The formula breakdown shows how each factor helps identify high-value tasks.
Let’s explore the key elements of the WSJF formula and how they work together to optimize task prioritization.
1. Cost of Delay (CoD): CoD captures the impact of delaying a task.
It’s calculated by combining three elements:
- User/business value: How much value the task brings to users or the business
- Time criticality: How urgent the task is—some work loses value if delayed
- Risk reduction/opportunity enablement: The potential to reduce future risks or open up new opportunities
Together, these elements give a clear picture of how crucial a task is to complete soon.
2. Job size: This is the estimated time or effort needed to complete the task. Smaller tasks with a high CoD score are typically prioritized since they deliver value faster
The figure below demonstrates how prioritizing jobs using Reinertsen’s WSJF can significantly impact economic outcomes.
The shaded areas represent the total CoD for each scenario. Jobs with the highest WSJF prioritize the most valuable work, leading to better financial results. As shown, selecting the next best job, rather than the next easiest, can have a substantial financial impact. (© Scaled Agile, Inc.)
The WSJF score is calculated by dividing the Cost of Delay by the Job Size. Tasks with higher WSJF scores are tackled first, ensuring that teams focus on high-impact, quick-to-complete work that maximizes value.
💡 Pro Tip: The level of effort should also be considered when evaluating CoD. It can influence the overall impact of delay.
How to Calculate WSJF
The WSJF prioritization model allows you to weigh various factors, so high-value tasks with low time requirements naturally float to the top. Here’s a step-by-step guide to calculating WSJF using .
Step 1: Calculate the cost of delay
To calculate CoD, rate each factor—value, time criticality, and risk reduction—on a scale (usually a Fibonacci scale). Sum these scores to get a single CoD value.
For example, if a task scores 8 for value, 5 for time criticality, and 7 for risk reduction, the CoD would be 20.
You can set up Custom Fields to input and calculate these values for each task. This makes it easy to track and update CoD as project priorities evolve.
Step 2: Calculate job duration or size
Next, estimate the effort or time of each task. This is often measured by ‘job duration’ or ‘size’ and is key to determining WSJF.
The Time Tracking feature is a great tool to calculate hours worked. You can monitor how long similar tasks take, use historical data, or make estimations based on team feedback.
Keep in mind that using a consistent scale is essential for fair prioritization. For example, an easy task may get a duration score of two, while a more complex task may get a score of 20.
Step 3: Divide the cost of delay by job duration (or size)
Now that you have both CoD and Job duration, divide the CoD by the job duration to get the WSJF score:
WSJF = Cost of Delay / Job duration
For example, if a task has a CoD of 20 and a job duration of five, the WSJF score would be 4. Higher scores indicate higher priority tasks.
📌 Example
Consider two initiatives:
- Initiative A: CoD = 15, Job Duration = 3. WSJF score = 15 / 3 = 5
- Initiative B: CoD = 8, Job Duration = 4. WSJF score = 8 / 4 = 2
In this case, Initiative A has a higher WSJF score, which should be prioritized above Initiative B.
To make this calculation easier, you can use Formula Fields to automatically divide the CoD by the Job Duration for each task. This automation ensures that your prioritization stays up-to-date without manual calculations and human errors.
All you need to do is:
- Add a Formula Field
- Click the plus icon in List or Table view
- Choose Formula and name it
- Set up the WSJF formula
- Click the ƒx symbol, then select fields like Cost of Delay and Duration
- Use operators (e.g., division) to calculate WSJF. Use Advanced Editor for more complex formulas
- Auto-calculate across tasks
- Auto-update Formula Fields, helping you prioritize tasks effortlessly based on WSJF scores
What’s more, you can try the Prioritization Matrix Template to evaluate and prioritize tasks based on their impact.
Using WSJF to Prioritize Items on a Product Roadmap
Building a successful product roadmap requires careful prioritization, often involving tough decisions on what to tackle first.
WSJF ranks items in your product backlog based on impact and effort, ensuring high-impact tasks rise to the top and get the attention they deserve.
The Product Management Software streamlines WSJF prioritization with customizable scoring, visual roadmaps, and feedback tools, helping you weigh the business value, time criticality, and job size.
With simplified WSJF scoring, aligns your team’s priorities, promoting faster, data-driven decisions that maximize value. Let’s explore how.
Step 1: Align WSJF with your business objectives
Before diving into calculations, align your WSJF framework and overarching business goals within an Agile Scrum environment.
Think about what your organization values most right now—whether it’s increasing revenue, improving customer satisfaction, or reducing operational costs. This clarity ensures that WSJF prioritization directly supports the company’s broader objectives, making your roadmap actionable and meaningful.
Identify the top business goals and make sure everyone on the product team understands how they impact prioritization.
Use the Product Roadmap Template to structure your roadmap around these goals, ensuring alignment from the start.
Step 2: Gather stakeholder input
Your stakeholders—whether from marketing, sales, or customer success—have valuable insights that can refine your WSJF prioritization. Collaborate with them to understand which features or improvements will impact your customers or the business the most.
Host a workshop or use Assign Comments to discuss and engage stakeholders and decision-makers to assess each feature’s business value, time sensitivity, and reduced risk benefits. This approach can capture feedback directly on your roadmap items for transparency.
📌Example: When stakeholders provide input, use Assign Comments to @mention the relevant team members or yourself. Once the feedback is addressed or a decision is made, resolve the comment or reassign it for further clarification.
With all comments centralized in one location, stakeholders can easily refine WSJF prioritization based on the latest input without confusion.
Step 3: Calculate the WSJF score
To calculate WSJF, refer to the previous section’s guidance on scoring factors.
Assign each task a score for business value, time criticality, and risk reduction (or opportunity enablement) using a consistent scale, like Fibonacci. Add these to find the Cost of Delay, then estimate the Job Size based on the task’s effort or time requirements.
WSJF Formula: WSJF Score = Cost of Delay/Job Size
📌 Example: Let’s consider the product roadmap of a productivity app:
| Feature | Business value | Time criticality | Risk reduction | CoD (sum) | Job size | WSJF score |
| Task reminders | 8 | 7 | 5 | 20 | 3 | 6.67 |
| Automated reporting | 9 | 5 | 6 | 20 | 4 | 5.00 |
| Team collaboration tools | 10 | 8 | 7 | 25 | 5 | 5.00 |
| Goal setting dashboard | 7 | 6 | 4 | 17 | 2 | 8.50 |
- Add scores for Business Value, Time Criticality, and Risk Reduction to get the Cost of Delay
- Divide the Cost of Delay by Job Size to obtain the WSJF Score
- Prioritize features based on WSJF scores—higher scores indicate higher priority
You can use this approach for other products, services, or project tasks.
Step 4: Rank and prioritize your roadmap items
Once you have WSJF scores for each item, it’s time to rank them. Place the highest-scoring items at the top of your roadmap for maximum impact.
Keep in mind that prioritization is an ongoing process, so you may need to adjust rankings as new information comes in. WSJF scoring helps your team prioritize features that enhance user experience and team collaboration.
offers several ways to visualize your WSJF-prioritized roadmap, making it easy for everyone—from team members to executives—to stay informed.
For instance, Board View lets you visualize tasks in customizable columns based on their priority. Drag and drop items to adjust the order, making it easy to communicate changing priorities on a Kanban Board.
Use Timeline View to map out tasks over time, making it easy to see where high-priority items fit into your overall roadmap. This view helps you manage dependencies, track progress, and meet key milestones.
Step 5: Review and reassess regularly
The priorities you set today may change tomorrow, especially in dynamic markets.
Regularly review your WSJF calculations and rankings to make sure they reflect current conditions, business goals, and customer needs. This step helps keep your roadmap responsive and relevant.
The Prioritization Matrix Template offers a clear way to organize tasks using WSJF for agile roadmap planning. It’s a 3×3 matrix with Impact and Effort as axes, where tasks score low, medium, or high. Color-coded cells make prioritization easy:
- Red: Do now
- Orange: Do next
- Green: Do last
Add Tasks as sticky notes to Whiteboards, assess their impact and effort, and drag them into the appropriate cell. This flexible view lets you link Tasks and Docs and add visuals, giving you a creative, interactive workspace for WSJF prioritization.
💡 Pro Tip: The WSJF approach also enhances collaboration between different departments. Marketing teams can adjust their campaigns based on the prioritized features determined by development teams, which further leads to better resource allocation and timing.
Adopting WSJF in Your Organization
Introducing WSJF to your teams can drive better prioritization and alignment across the organization.
In the Agile framework, WSJF helps prioritize features and capabilities at various levels, ensuring that resources go to the most valuable tasks, aligning product development with business goals.
Strategies for introducing WSJF to your product teams
Getting your team on board with WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) can streamline prioritization and create a shared understanding of what drives value.
Here are some practical strategies to introduce WSJF effectively:
- Organize a WSJF workshop: Start with a hands-on workshop where you explain WSJF’s fundamentals—business value, time criticality, risk reduction, and job size. Walk your team through examples relevant to your current projects to show WSJF’s real impact on prioritization
- Set clear criteria for scoring: Agree on specific definitions for each WSJF factor. What does ‘business value’ mean for your team? What makes an item ‘time-critical’? Setting consistent criteria aligns team members in scoring, improving fairness and accuracy
- Sort your task by priority: Use Task Priorities to implement WSJF by flagging tasks based on impact and effort. Categorize tasks as urgent, high, normal, or low priority to focus your team’s efforts on high-value work
- Involve stakeholders early: Include stakeholders in initial WSJF sessions to align on expectations. Having input from other teams (e.g., marketing, sales, or customer success) ensures the priorities reflect broader business goals, creating buy-in and reducing potential conflicts
- Emphasize data over intuition: Reinforce that WSJF is about objective, data-driven prioritization. Highlight how it minimizes bias and helps teams focus on high-impact work, creating more value for customers and stakeholders
- Use Docs for collaboration: Create shared Docs to capture WSJF guidelines, scoring criteria, and real-time examples. Use it as a central resource where everyone can review WSJF fundamentals and refer to definitions for each factor
Common challenges and how to overcome them
Here are some common challenges in WSJF and how to overcome them
| Challenge | Solution |
| Difficulty in estimating value | Break down large features into smaller components. Use data, customer insights, and stakeholder feedback to make more informed decisions |
| Inconsistent scoring | Standardize scoring methods and criteria across teams. Hold workshops to align on evaluating value, risk, and other key factors |
| Overemphasis on speed | Balance time with value. Prioritize both short-term speed and long-term strategic impact, ensuring alignment with overall business goals |
| Lack of alignment with business objectives | Regularly review WSJF prioritization to ensure alignment with evolving goals and strategy. Involve stakeholders for alignment using scrum workflow |
| Unclear dependencies | Use tools like to map dependencies early. Visualize tasks and interdependencies to avoid blockers and ensure proper prioritization |
| Overcomplicating the process | Simplify the WSJF process by focusing on key factors (value, time, risk). Keep the model straightforward to facilitate faster decision-making |
| Resistance to change in prioritization | Encourage flexibility and continuous improvement. Communicate the benefits of WSJF to stakeholders, emphasizing a focus on high-impact tasks |
❓ Did You Know? In his book, The Principles of Product Development Flow, Don Reinertsen highlights that roughly 85% of product managers don’t know the answer to the question, “What would it cost if we delayed this thing a few months?” Companies that put extra effort into quantifying ‘the total expected value with respect to time’ and calculate ‘Cost of Delay’ make better decisions
Now we know, it’s essential to understand the role product managers play in task and feature priortization. Let’s tackle that together.
Role of product managers in WSJF adoption
Product managers play a vital role in implementing WSJF within teams by driving prioritization, communication, and alignment.
As a product manager, you’re the anchor that keeps your team focused on what truly counts. When it comes to prioritizing tasks and features, look at each one’s business value, urgency, and risk. This way, you’re channeling resources into the projects that drive the most impact.
Beyond prioritizing, you’re the go-to person for keeping the team organized and energized. It would help if you also tried to motivate everyone to stay aligned with strategic goals, making sure WSJF integrates smoothly into the everyday flow.
Communication is also crucial—keeping cross-functional teams updated on product status, release timelines, and roadmap changes ensures everyone’s in sync with any shifts.
Collaborating with engineers and QA keeps WSJF decisions practical and grounded in technical reality. And don’t skip the market research—understanding customer needs and trends helps you keep priorities spot-on.
At the end of the day, you’re shaping a vision everyone can rally around, with a clear, aligned roadmap that drives real success.
Phew! We have covered a lot of ground, but before that, let’s also see how WSJF compares to other popular frameworks.
WSJF vs. Other Prioritization Techniques
WSJF stands out for its focus on maximizing value and minimizing delays. However, it’s important to compare it to other popular prioritization tools to understand its advantages.
- MoSCoW (Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, Won’t Have): MoSCoW is more qualitative, helping teams decide which features are crucial and which can be deferred. Unlike WSJF, MoSCoW doesn’t explicitly account for time and cost, making it less effective in prioritizing based on business impact and speed
- Eisenhower Matrix: The Eisenhower Matrix categorizes tasks into urgent vs. important. While it’s great for personal task management, it doesn’t always capture the complexity of multi-team product development, where time-to-market and value delivery are key
- Kano Model: The Kano Model focuses on customer satisfaction and feature delight but doesn’t emphasize time and resource constraints as WSJF does. This makes it useful for understanding customer preferences but less practical for determining which feature to prioritize within limited resources
- Value vs. Complexity Matrix: This method evaluates features based on value and complexity. While it’s useful for identifying quick wins, it doesn’t offer the same level of strategic value as WSJF, which balances time-to-delivery with value and risk
- Rice Prioritization: The RICE method evaluates features based on Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. While RICE prioritization can help teams prioritize based on data, WSJF goes a step further by incorporating time-based considerations (cost of delay) and value, making it a more holistic approach to prioritization
WSJF shines in environments where time is critical, and business value must be maximized. It allows teams to prioritize work that has the highest value-to-time ratio, making it particularly suited for fast-paced product development.
Get Your Priorities Straight with
WSJF is an effective method for prioritizing tasks and features based on their value and required effort.
Whether you’re tackling a product roadmap or making strategic decisions, WSJF helps ensure you’re maximizing value, minimizing delays, and optimizing resources.
makes integrating WSJF seamless.
With powerful templates, customizable fields for calculating the Cost of Delay and Job Duration, and collaborative features like Docs and Assign Comments, you can optimize the entire process.
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