How to roughly estimate as PM & Designer

We all want to build amazing features, but we don't have endless money and people. Therefore, we need to achieve maximum value for minimum money (and consider decreasing marginal utility of changing an existing feature) - money = effort.

Follow this checklist to estimate roughly how complex a feature or change is and consider it in writing specs and doing designs.

→ the more “No” you have to say, the more complex the feature/ change is

Consider effort early:

1. Do we already generate/ save this data somewhere in our database?

2. Do we already display this data somewhere?

3. Do we use similar logic somewhere?

4. Do we use similar processes somewhere?

5. Do we use this element, behavior, style already somewhere?

6. Has one of our current programmers ever touched the affected code?

7. Is it recent (<1 month) that the code was touched?

8. Do we have documentation?

9. Do we have automated tests?