1 min lesson
Quantifying ROI honestly
Choose two examples from the table in "Quantifying ROI honestly" and explain what each teaches you to do.
Step 1 of 3
A CTO has seen a hundred "10x productivity" decks and discounts all of them. The business case that survives procurement is the one you build with the customer's own numbers and present as a range with stated assumptions.
Anchor on metrics the engineering org already tracks. You are not inventing a productivity science; you are connecting Cursor to measurements they trust and review in their own dashboards.
- Metric they track
- PR throughput
- How Cursor moves it
- More changes shipped per engineer per cycle
- How you'd evidence it
- Compare PR volume for adopted teams vs. baseline
- Metric they track
- Cycle time
- How Cursor moves it
- Faster ticket-to-merge on real tasks
- How you'd evidence it
- Track lead time before and during a pilot
- Metric they track
- Onboarding ramp
- How Cursor moves it
- New hires get productive on an unfamiliar repo sooner
- How you'd evidence it
- Time-to-first-meaningful-PR for recent joiners
- Metric they track
- Time-on-toil vs. deep work
- How Cursor moves it
- Less boilerplate, more time on hard problems
- How you'd evidence it
- Developer survey plus acceptance-rate data
| Metric they track | How Cursor moves it | How you'd evidence it |
|---|---|---|
| PR throughput | More changes shipped per engineer per cycle | Compare PR volume for adopted teams vs. baseline |
| Cycle time | Faster ticket-to-merge on real tasks | Track lead time before and during a pilot |
| Onboarding ramp | New hires get productive on an unfamiliar repo sooner | Time-to-first-meaningful-PR for recent joiners |
| Time-on-toil vs. deep work | Less boilerplate, more time on hard problems | Developer survey plus acceptance-rate data |
Pick two or three the champion already reports on. A metric they don't measure can't anchor a case.
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Full explanation
Build the case with the champion
Build the case WITH the championco-created ROI survives scrutiny
Interactive diagram. Step through it with the Next and Previous controls below, or Tab to a region to read its detail.
The gate is where the case has to survive finance - and where an inflated number gets the deck rejected.
Active-user percentage, suggestion acceptance rates and organic team-by-team expansion are the most credible evidence you have, because they are the customer's own behavior, not your slide.
When a CFO sees that 70% of a piloted team uses Cursor daily and pulled in two adjacent teams without prompting, the ROIReturn on Investment. The value gained versus what it cost, the language an economic buyer funds deals in. Press Enter for the full definition. argument is half-made before you open your mouth.
Never put a single inflated number like "10x" in front of a CTO. They will reject the deck and the relationship along with it.
Truth-seeking is a hiring signal here. Present ranges, name your assumptions and concede what the data can't yet show. Honest beats impressive.
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Optional practice