The business case, as a working product. Describe any manual process — reconciliation, onboarding, reporting — and see what the status quo costs versus automation. Every assumption is on the table, because a model you can't interrogate isn't a model you should fund.
The business case
Annual labor cost (manual)–
Annual error cost–
Cost of the status quo / yr–
Hours returned to the team / yr–
Projected annual savings–
3-year value–
Model: savings = (labor + error cost) × automatable share. It deliberately excludes build cost — in an interview I'd ask about yours.
The product thinking behind this tool
- Who it's for: an ops leader who needs a defensible number before asking for engineering time — and the engineer who has to sanity-check it.
- The key design choice: every input is visible and editable, including "share automatable." Black-box ROI calculators get ignored; transparent ones get debated, which is the point.
- How I'd validate it: pilot on one workflow for 30 days — measure actual hours logged, error counts before/after, and exception aging. If the pilot doesn't move the metrics, the model was wrong, not the team.
- What I'd measure post-launch: adoption rate, cycle time, error rate, and aged-item duration — the same metrics I used to prove a ~70% exception reduction in my case study.
- Deliberate limitation: this prices the status quo, not the build. A real proposal would add implementation cost and payback period — ask me about it in the interview.
Why this is on my portfolio: PMs don't just build products — they build the case for products. This tool is both.