Dollars per Story Point? Bad budgeting advice!
- Bill Holmes
- Jul 13
- 3 min read
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”— William Bruce Cameron
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”— Charles Goodhart (Goodhart’s Law)
Some ideas in project management sound useful at first—until you look closer. One increasingly common Agile budgeting technique is the idea of assigning a dollar value to story points.
The method is simple: calculate an average cost per point by dividing team cost over time by the number of completed points, then multiply that cost per point by the projected total in the backlog. It's clean, mathematical, and completely detached from the spirit of what story points are supposed to represent.
Story points were never meant to be currency. They’re a unit of relative effort, team-specific, designed for planning, estimation, and forecasting within a given team’s context. By turning them into cost metrics, this approach erodes the fundamental premise that story points are subjective and internally calibrated. A “5-point story” for one team might be a “2” or an “8” for another. The entire point is that the numbers only mean something within a team—not across spreadsheets or finance reviews.
And yet, once you attach a dollar value to each point, you invite every manager, finance lead, or stakeholder with a calculator to start doing the one thing they shouldn’t: compare cost per story point across teams. “Team A costs $1,200 per point. Team B is only $900. Why is Team A so inefficient?” Or worse: “Can we shift more work to Team B?”
This is how metrics become weapons. Teams quickly learn to game the system—inflate story points, sandbag estimates, or resist refinement—just to look better on paper. Velocity becomes a quota, not a measure. Collaboration gives way to protectionism. And Agile becomes just another dressed-up waterfall process, complete with misleading metrics and rigid targets.
What’s frustrating is that Agile already provides a better way. You don’t need to twist story points into accounting variables. You already have the two numbers that matter: team velocity and burn rate. Velocity tells you how many points a team typically completes per sprint. Burn rate tells you what it costs to run that team for a sprint. That’s your formula: estimated number of sprints × burn rate = projected cost. No need to assign a dollar-per-point value. No need to reduce Agile estimation to a billing model. Just use velocity to forecast time, and burn rate to forecast cost.
This approach flexes naturally as the project evolves. If the team’s velocity increases, your forecast improves. If scope changes, your backlog changes. Agile remains Agile—and finance still gets its numbers.
The Agile Manifesto reminds us that we value working software over comprehensive documentation and responding to change over following a plan. Turning story points into budget units leans hard in the opposite direction. It prioritizes false precision over adaptive planning. It tempts organizations to prioritize efficiency optics over actual value delivery. And it teaches new practitioners to misapply one of Agile’s most fundamental tools.
Story points are not a currency. Treating them like one might make your spreadsheet feel complete—but it breaks estimation, corrupts team dynamics, and undermines the Agile mindset. If you need numbers, use burn rate and velocity. If you need confidence, trust the cadence of delivery. But if you assign a dollar value to a story point, don’t be surprised when the point no longer tells you anything useful.
Let’s keep Agile practices grounded in what they were designed to do: foster collaboration, adaptability, and value-driven delivery. If you're guiding teams, focus on transparency and trust, not artificial metrics. And if you're shaping the next generation of project leaders, teach them to respect the intent behind the tools.
Coda
I bought my first digital currency years ago. I didn’t really understand what the “blockchain” was, or how mining worked. I just looked at government spending and realized that the most likely long term outcome was the dollar would be devalued. Since every government is spending more than it takes in, I recognized that everyone would be looking for a place to store wealth. This week, bitcoin hit $119,000. Will it continue to increase in value? I don’t know, but I do know the fact pattern hasn’t changed.
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