A 20-tool stack ships about 150 releases a quarter. Keeping one person current runs roughly 38 hours every quarter, near enough a full working week, four times a year.

20
7.5
8

tools × releases per tool × minutes per release = time to keep up. Everything below falls out of that one line.

150
releases hitting the stack each quarter
38
hours per person, per quarter, just to keep up
3.8
working weeks a year, per person
30
working weeks a year across the team

What a year of that effort actually buys

600 shipped · ~90 adopted
adopted into someone's workflow read, judged, waved past

Of the 600 releases that cross your stack this year, roughly 90 earn a place in a workflow. The rest still had to be triaged. That filtering is the tax nobody budgets for.

▸ Assumptions — adjust if you want to push on them
15
15%

Illustrative model. The three sliders are yours to set; the two assumptions are research-anchored starting points.

Grounded in published figures: Salesforce ships three seasonal releases a year, each with hundreds of features, plus monthly and weekly updates; HubSpot posts dozens of changes monthly; average B2B stacks run 12–20 tools (enterprise nearer 90); Pendo found ~80% of features are rarely or never used, so ~15% adoption is generous. Fifteen minutes per release is the blended average of a few high-touch evaluations and many quick glances.