Another great takeaway from it is to prioritize things by cost of delay, or even better, what he calls Weighted Shortest Job First, where you divide the cost of delay by the expected length of the task." 

Perhaps an fq_codel like approach can be applied to complex product development tasks? i have always been highly influenced by "Getting Things Done", and both toke and I are huge advocates of org-mode in emacs, not that modern computing environments make this sort of flow easy.