Is this engineering investment worth it?

Questions CTOs ask

How do you calculate ROI for engineering projects?

Engineering ROI is calculated as (Net Benefits - Total Costs) / Total Costs, expressed as a percentage. Total costs include developer salaries (loaded cost, typically 1.5-2x base salary), infrastructure, tooling, and opportunity cost of not building other features. Benefits include direct revenue from new features, cost savings from automation or efficiency improvements, risk reduction value (avoided incident costs), and developer productivity gains. For accuracy, model these over 3 years and apply a discount rate for time value of money.

How do you justify engineering infrastructure investments to leadership?

Frame infrastructure investments in business terms: quantify current costs of the problem (developer hours lost to slow CI, incident frequency and revenue impact, hiring costs from engineer attrition due to poor tooling), project the benefits over 2-3 years with conservative estimates, and calculate payback period. Executives respond to metrics like "this investment will reduce deployment time from 2 hours to 10 minutes, freeing 400 engineering hours per quarter" more than "we need to modernize our CI pipeline."