"Dollarize the Prize" is Ching's framework for translating project value into rough financial terms before making prioritization or resource decisions. The technique involves asking a series of questions: What revenue does this project unlock if successful? What is the cost of delay? Are there value "cliffs" where hitting a milestone unlocks a discrete gain? What are the best-case and worst-case financial outcomes?
The method addresses a recurring problem in software organizations: projects are prioritized by political weight, urgency signals, or gut feeling rather than by financial impact. Ching's argument is that even rough dollar estimates -- "good enough" rather than precise -- transform decision-making by giving everyone a shared language for trade-offs. The value lies not in the numbers themselves but in "the conversations you have while trying to get them to good-enough."
This connects to Goldratt's throughput accounting tradition, which argues that management decisions should be evaluated by their effect on system throughput rather than on local cost reduction. Ching simplifies the throughput accounting apparatus into a practical diagnostic question: "YTF -- Why The [heck] are you doing this?" -- that forces teams to articulate the financial rationale before committing resources.
Dollarize the Prize is central to the-motorcade-method, where it determines which project deserves the motorcade treatment, and connects to cash-cows-make-the-best-burgers, which addresses CFOs using the same financial-framing logic. It represents Ching's maturation from a practitioner who helps teams go faster to a consultant who helps leaders decide what to go fast on -- a shift from operational bottleneck-thinking to strategic prioritization.