How One CTO Uses Cost of Delay to Prioritize the Right Work

Tech Leadership with Fexingo: Engineering Managers, CTOs, and Technical Leadership Conversations · Jul 14, 2026 · 7m

In this episode, Lucas and Luna explore how CTOs use the Cost of Delay framework to make prioritization decisions that actually drive business value. Lucas walks through a real-world example from a mid-stage fintech startup that faced a classic dilemma: build a new compliance feature demanded by regulators, or invest in a performance optimization that would reduce cloud costs. Using the Cost of Delay model, the CTO quantified the urgency of each option by calculating the value lost per week of delay. Lucas breaks down the three components of Cost of Delay — user value, time value, and…