Business Cases Are Stories About Money
How do you explain the benefit of your new project to an exec? Tell a story about how you're going to spend / make money
At some point, someone is going to ask you about the return on investment for your project. If they give you 1X, how many X should they expect in return?
There are many different ways to answer the question, from "I think it'll return 3X, based on gut feel" to deep statistical models that take in to account your total addressable market, the growth of your industry etc.
However, what I've seen over the years is that data very rarely wins. Stories do. That's why Rich Mironov's post "Business Cases Are Stories About Money" is so great. It puts into words something that I've seen happen time and time again.
You should read the full article, but in general business cases are one of the following:
- Stories about internal cost savings (work faster / hire fewer people)
- Stories about upselling current paying customers (increase Net Dollar Retention - this is a good thing. Look it up if you're not familiar)
- Stories about opening up a new market or segment (more potential customers = more revenue, even if you don't improve conversion rates)
- Stories about improved customer satisfaction or NPS (happy customers tend to renew their contract. Churn can kill a business)