The trade-off slider, a wonderful tool for simplification for the product owner
On my knew project working as a proxy product owner I discovered this simple yet powerful tool the Trade-off slider.
When in a project you sometimes need to balance competing objectives using the same available resources, it helps to clarify which are these competing objectives or critical axes to a project. Typically in FinOps for cloud projects, the three parameters of the trade-off slider are cost, quality and speed or performance.
While buying a house for example you need to balance out 1) the commute time from the city center, 2) the living surface, and 3) the cost of the investment, but you could also have in your decision-making parameters 4) the ROI on your investment and 5) the cash-flow. Typically in such a complex scenario, it’s difficult to optimize all the parameters and that’s where the trade-off slider helps to prioritize and identify which parameters are negotiable and thus simplifying a complex problem by chosing which part of the problem needs to be solved first.
