The Sprint Board has no numbers on it.
The first question every leadership team asks about their Sprint Board is some version of the same thing: what's the ROI ranking?
There isn't one. No dollar figures. No hours-saved column. No weighted score sitting quietly behind the order, waiting to be revealed if someone asks the right question.
That is deliberate, not an oversight. A spreadsheet ranking lets people hide behind the model instead of making the call themselves. Give a room a formula and the formula becomes the decision-maker. Nobody has to stand behind anything.
The order on the board is leadership judgement instead, and it has to be defended out loud, in the room, in front of peers who are allowed to disagree.
In practice that looks like this: someone puts a use case near the top because of what they believe it will unlock, not because a formula told them to. Someone else in the room has to make the case for why that's wrong, or why theirs matters more. The disagreement is not a bug in the process. It is the process.
A number lets you avoid an argument. A judgement call forces you to have it. The board is built for the second one.
This is usually where the real alignment inside a leadership team happens, not in a spreadsheet review afterwards but in the disagreement itself, while it is still cheap to have.
This is one observation from real AI Framing Sprint engagements, generalised and anonymised. There are more where this came from.
See what we've learned delivering it →