ValueCast — Objective Backlog Prioritisation for Azure DevOps

Stop prioritising by whoever spoke loudest in the last sprint review.

ValueCast gives every backlog item a score your whole team agrees on — WSJF, RICE, ICE, or your own weighted model — and keeps those ranks live inside Azure DevOps automatically. No spreadsheets. No arguments. No separate tool to maintain.

28-day free trial on every install. No card required.

The problem every product team knows

Your backlog isn't ordered by value. It's ordered by whoever pushed hardest.

• Technical debt sits at the bottom forever
• The loudest stakeholder jumps their pet feature to the top
• Nobody can explain why item #47 outranks item #12
• Sprint planning becomes negotiation, not decision-making

ValueCast fixes this. Apply a scoring model your team agrees on and let the maths decide the order.

How it works

1. Choose your value model Pick WSJF, RICE, ICE, Value vs Effort — or build your own from scratch. Set parameter weights once. The whole team agrees on the criteria upfront, and every backlog item is judged by the same standard.

2. Score your items Click any backlog item. Move the sliders. ValueCast computes a normalised 0–100 score live and shows you the item's rank across the entire backlog in real time — before you commit a single change.

3. Watch the backlog order itself Items re-rank automatically as scores change. High-value, low-effort work floats to the top. The △ rank movement arrows show exactly what shifted since your last session, so you can explain every change.

Built for every role on the delivery team

Product Owners & Product Managers

Replace gut-feel ordering with a shared value model. When stakeholders push back on backlog order, point to the score — not your judgement. Refinement sessions end with ranked consensus, not political compromise.

Scrum Masters & Agile Coaches

Implement WSJF, RICE, or ICE without a spreadsheet that nobody updates. Value scoring that lives inside Azure DevOps — not alongside it in a separate tool that gets abandoned after the training session.

PMO & Portfolio Teams

Apply consistent scoring across every team and project. Define a model at org level — teams inherit it, or override for their context. Scores write to standard ADO fields, so existing portfolio dashboards and reports stay current without any extra work.

Delivery Teams

Know what you're building and why. See your item's rank in real time as you score it. Stop working on the wrong thing because it was loudest last sprint.

Value models built in

What makes ValueCast different

✦ Scores live in Azure DevOps — not somewhere else

ValueCast writes scores directly to your work item fields. Your existing queries, backlogs, dashboards and reports pick up scores automatically — no export, no import, no second source of truth.

Change the target field in Settings in under 10 seconds: Business Value, Stack Rank, Priority, or any custom field your organisation has created.

✦ Rank movement you can explain

The △ arrows show which items moved up or down since your last scoring session. One of the most common questions in refinement — "why did this move up?" — is answered visually, not from memory.

✦ Live scoring before you commit

See the normalised score and live rank position update as you move the sliders — before you sync a single change. Explore the impact of different scores without affecting the backlog until you're ready.

✦ Org → Project → Team hierarchy

Define a value model at org level. Projects and teams inherit it automatically — or override it for their specific context without affecting org-level reporting. Regulatory teams, product teams, and platform teams can each use models that fit how they think about value.

All features

Pricing

28-day free trial on install. No card required. After the trial, free tier remains available with one team.

Getting started

1. Install ValueCast from the Marketplace
2. Open Boards → ValueCast in any Azure DevOps project
3. Click ··· → Value model to choose your scoring framework
4. Click any backlog item and move the sliders
5. Watch your backlog re-rank in real time

First scoring session: ~2 minutes per item. Once your model is set, re-scoring after a sprint review takes less time than the meeting itself.

Requirements

• Azure DevOps Services (cloud) — any tier
• Any work item process template (Agile, Scrum, CMMI, custom)
• No additional infrastructure required

Azure DevOps Server (on-premises) is not currently supported.

From the team at OutcomeMet

ValueCast is built by the same team behind OutcomeMap — the OKR, roadmap and portfolio management extension used by organisations replacing Project Online with Azure DevOps.

We built ValueCast because prioritisation was the most common request we heard from OutcomeMap customers:

"OutcomeMap is great for the roadmap — but how do we get the right things into the backlog in the first place?"

ValueCast answers that question.

Questions or feedback? support@outcomemet.co.uk