Other companies prioritize on the basis of project profitability measures like return on investment (ROI). On the surface, this appears to be an economic approach, but this is just an illusion. By prioritizing, we choose to service one project before another. In general, it is best to delay the project with a low cost of delay. This suggests that we should not prioritize on the basis of project profitability, but rather on how this profitability is affected by delay. Of course, this can only be done when we know the cost of delay, information that 85 percent of developers do not have.
Donald G Reinertsen in The Principles of Product Development Flow