ROI Measures For Pipelines

We scored a client’s pipelines on cost against consumption. About 1 in 5 had a monthly bill and zero consumers.

The matrix is 2 axes: monthly cost per pipeline (from the billing export, allocated by job) and consumption (from query logs and dashboard views, counted, not remembered). Consumption is the axis teams skip, because everyone believes they already know what’s used. The logs disagreed with the room in every review I’ve run.

The four quadrants, with their moves:

Costly and consumed: your crown jewels. Optimize them, put SLAs on them, staff their on-call. Costly and unconsumed: the quiet scandal. Confirm with the supposed consumers, then kill. This quadrant funds the rest of the exercise. Cheap and consumed: leave them alone. Not everything needs attention. Cheap and unconsumed: batch-review quarterly, delete in bulk, feel nothing.

Two honest caveats. Consumption counts miss compliance and audit pipelines that are read rarely and matter most when they are, so tag those explicitly before the cull. And a zero-consumer pipeline sometimes feeds a system, not a person; check service accounts before celebrating a kill.

The habit that keeps it clean: the matrix re-runs quarterly from the same two queries. New dead pipelines appear constantly, because shipping is fun and deleting isn’t.

How many of your pipelines would survive an honest consumer count this month?