📌 ROI in Jira: What It Is and How to Configure It Using Dynamic Scoring

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Agile and product led teams often need a clear way to evaluate whether an initiative is worth the investment.

Yet Jira does not provide a built in mechanism for calculating Return on Investment (ROI), which leads many teams to rely on spreadsheets or external tools. This creates fragmentation, slows down planning, and makes decision making less consistent across the organization.

Dynamic Scoring for Jira addresses this challenge by offering a configurable scoring model directly inside the Jira issue view.

This article explains what ROI is, how Agile teams use it and how to configure an ROI model using Dynamic Scoring for Jira.

What ROI Is and Why Agile Teams Use It

ROI (Return on Investment) is a widely used financial metric that measures the expected return from an initiative relative to its cost.

Formula: ROI = (Value – Cost) ÷ Cost

In product and engineering organizations, ROI helps teams understand whether a feature, improvement, or project will produce enough value to justify the investment of time, budget, or engineering capacity.

How ROI Supports Agile and Product Decision Making

1. Clear economic justification

ROI provides a simple and transparent metric to explain why certain initiatives should be prioritized especially when communicating with leadership, stakeholders, or finance teams.

2. Better resource allocation

Product Managers and Engineering Leaders often face more opportunities than capacity. ROI highlights where limited resources should be invested to maximize returns.

3. Stronger alignment in roadmap discussions

By quantifying value compared to cost, ROI transforms subjective discussions into objective comparisons, making it easier for teams to reach agreement.

4. Helpful for evaluating large or strategic initiatives

When the team wants to validate whether a high effort initiative is worth pursuing, ROI provides a structured way to measure expected outcomes.

Configuring ROI Using Dynamic Scoring for Jira

Dynamic Scoring includes a Financial scoring model designed specifically for economic calculations.

It contains a built in ROI preset, making configuration straightforward.

1. Open Space Settings → Create New Configuration

Name the configuration: ROI

2. Select the Scoring Type → Financial

This model supports value cost formulas and financial expressions.

3. Add ROI Dropdown Fields

Value / Benefit

Represents estimated business impact. Options (example):

• Low

• Medium

• High

Assign appropriate base scores or numerical proxies (e.g., 1 / 3 / 8 or monetary ranges).

Cost / Investment

Represents the expected effort or financial investment. Options (example):

• Low

• Medium

• High

Assign scores that match how your team evaluates development cost, engineering capacity, or budgeting.

4. Select the ROI Formula Preset

From the Financial preset list, choose: ROI = (Value – Cost) ÷ Cost

Dynamic Scoring will automatically calculate ROI every time the fields are updated.

5. Save and Use in the Jira Issue View

The ROI components appear directly in each issue. When the user selects Value and Cost, the ROI score is calculated instantly and displayed inside the issue panel.

Perfect for

Teams that need a structured economic view of their roadmap, including:

• Product Managers

• Engineering Managers and Tech Leads

• Leadership and Strategy teams

• Portfolio and Program Managers

• PMO / Business Operations

ROI is especially effective when teams need to compare multiple large initiatives or justify roadmap decisions to stakeholders.

Beyond ROI

Dynamic Scoring for Jira also supports additional prioritization models, including:

• WSJF

• RICE

• ICE

• Impact/Effort

• Risk Matrix

• Basic Scoring

• Fully custom formulas

This flexibility allows teams to move seamlessly between financial, operational and product centric prioritization models all directly within Jira, with secure processing under the Runs on Atlassian standard.