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As with most things, isn't the truth somewhere in the middle? True cost/value is very hard to calculate, but we could all benefit by trying a bit harder to get closer to it.

It's all too common to frame the tension as binary: bean counters vs pampered artistes. I've seen it many times and it doesn't lead anywhere useful.

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Here I think the truth is pretty far to one side. Most engineering teams work at a level of abstraction where revenue attribution is too vague and approximate to produce meaningful numbers. The company shipped 10 major features last quarter and ARR went up $1m across 4 new contracts using all of them; what is the dollar value of Feature #7? Well, each team is going to internally attribute the entire new revenue to themselves, and I don’t know what any other answer could possibly look like.

Even if you could do attribution correctly (I think you can do this partially if you are really diligent about A/B testing), that is still only one input to the equation. The other fact worth considering is the scale factor - if a team develops a widget which has some ARR value today, that same widget has a future ARR value that scales with more product adoption - no additional capital required to capture more marginal value. How do you quantify this? Because it is hard and recursive (knowing how valuable a feature will be in the future means knowing how many users you have in the future which depends on how valuable your features are as well as 100 other factors), we just factor this out and don't attempt to quantify things in dollars and euros.

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