“Our VP is very very strict about this like estimated impact any kind of vendor we have to bring in or anything that we have to do any kind of optimization he's like okay give me the estimated impact… the biggest ideas are the simplest ones… sometimes the simplest things like performance reliability file open speed size of the app those things matter a lot.”

Prioritize by Estimated Impact — Microsoft's VP Rejects Ideas Without a Number

With hundreds of millions of MAU, the Microsoft team rejects any idea that can't show estimated user impact. Every backlog item needs a number before it earns priority. Ramit's counterintuitive finding: the highest-impact ideas at scale are often the unglamorous ones — performance, reliability, transaction completion — not new features.