Introduction about Time to Market
I still remember my first mobile phone – a Nokia 3310 in the year 2003! Nokia ruled the roost and had an almost monopoly. When I started my first job, almost all the corporate honchos were owning a Blackberry and it was a status symbol – a sure shot sign that you are someone important in the corporate ladder. As time passed by, I got my first smartphone – a very aspirational Samsung Galaxy One, this was the era of smartphones with Apple completely disrupting the market, followed closely by Samsung and the Android tribe. In a few years, both Nokia and Blackberry were out of the market. They saw the era of smartphones coming but they never quite picked up the right platform, features and technology. That’s because they missed the Time to Market (TTM).
In today’s fast-paced business landscape, time to market (TTM) is more crucial than ever. It’s the time it takes for a product to go from concept (when it is introduced, say in terms of business case) to launch (when the consumers may start using it). A shorter TTM enables companies to respond quickly to changing market conditions, customer needs and technological advancements. This blog will help in exploring the importance of time to market, strategies for reducing TTM and how to measure its impact on your business.
What is Time to Market or TTM and Why is it Important?
Time to market refers to the period between the initial concept of a product (based on inputs by any stakeholders or market research) and its launch in the market. It is a critical metric to determine a product’s success. A shorter TTM enables companies to gain an edge over their competitors, in generating revenue sooner from existing or new customers, pivoting fast, enabling longevity or shelf life of the product and also enhancing the brand’s reputation.
Lets explore these importance of TTM in detail:
Market Share
Capturing Market Share and establishing Your Brand – Nokia has excelled in convincing people on benefits of mobile phones but Samsung and Apple took that opportunity in making those phones smart enough to work like a mini-computer on your palm which became irresistible to the same users who switched brand loyalty from Nokia and opted for more efficient options.
When you launch your product sooner, you gain first mover advantage and more market time. This means you have a longer period to capture market share, establish your brand, and build customer loyalty. The sooner you enter the market, the more time you have to create brand awareness, generate buzz, and establish your product as a market leader apart from the novelty factor. This, in turn, enables you to build a customer base, tap new users who are early movers and thus influencers, command a premium and generate more revenue and topline and most importantly expand your market share.
Your brand reputation is one of your most valuable assets. It’s the perception that customers, investors, partners and employees have about your company. A lot of early investors consider this as a major factor while deciding to invest or acquire a product company.
Early Revenue Generation
When you launch your product quickly, you can start generating revenue sooner which is a crucial aspect of any business as it provides the necessary funds to continue investing in the product, marketing and other essential activities.
We always recommend our customers to understand the word ‘value’ pragmatically and attach the value with all the ideas or requirements that we intake in our product development. The variants of value that we have experienced so far includes revenue generated, retention of customers, new customer acquisition, customer satisfaction scores, ranking of your product and many more.
Almost all types of value directly and indirectly could be linked to revenue, as few may be aspired immediately and the rest may take time to attain.
This early revenue can also help you validate your product-market fit, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your business.
Maximising Product Shelf Life
Life of a product spans across its development to launch, growth, maturity and eventual decline when the organization decides to decommission it as they might have either reaped all the benefits as per their target or the product failed to add more value and caused disproportionate operational cost. Maximising a product’s lifecycle means extending its lifespan, increasing its adoption and generating revenue for a longer period.
With smartphones replacing the keypad and QWERTY phones, one leverage which the key players got was continuous upgrade of their software because of which the users do not need to switch to new mobile phones and experience the new features provided by the company.
I believe gathering feedback from early customers should be the most important purpose of the product launch and revenue generation could then become a by-product. We could then iterate on our product, improve its quality, add more features and continuously improve the user experience. This way we can expand the product’s reach to places where we are not performing well or untapped segments.
Competitive Advantage
Beating Your Competitors to Market – Beating your competitors to market is not a one time battle, albeit a daily hustle. By launching the product sooner, a brand has a chance to establish itself as a market leader.. This, in turn, enables you to build customer loyalty, expand your market share and establish your brand as a leader in the market.
Time to market is essential and in today’s continuously changing environment we have found approaches like ‘Agile’ which enables organizations to embrace the changing demands and at the same time mobilise the resources to focus on delivering value either ahead of their competitors or with a minimum time lag, developing the capabilities that your competitors have built first. Even when you haven’t built a differentiator, you still have created a ‘spoiler’ (already existing features by other market players) and possibly this way, the organisations will be able to retain their users.
Strategies for Reducing Time to Market
The technology landscape has evolved massively and with such abundance of automation tools the time to market has improved significantly. Here are a few strategies that have proven successful for many companies:
- Consider adopting an Agile development process. Gone are the days when we fix the requirements upfront and then take months or years to build and ship to customers, as following that approach will make your product or brand obsolete. Agile ways of working at its core promotes breaking down work, prioritizing, rapid iteration, continuous improvement by seeking feedback from customers, and welcoming changes instead of reacting to it. It is achieved by working on the organization’s fabric so as to change the mindset and the culture. Here, teams work collaboratively, respond quickly to changing requirements and deliver working outcomes in short cycles.
- Another strategy is to apply Lean principles to eliminate waste, optimize processes, and improve efficiency. You may never have enough of process or automation and declare that you have a fat-free workflow. Lean is all about streamlining processes, eliminating unnecessary steps, and focusing on value-added activities. This is an ongoing activity and inefficiencies could easily pile up in the system, if not paid attention.
- Automating everything is the need of an hour. Many organizations have already done that and are working on upgrading their capabilities further. It will help in reducing the manual interventions, errors caused, increase in productivity and more reliable throughputs. This is non-negotiable to attempt TTM.
- Consider outsourcing non-core functions to specialized partners. Outsourcing can help companies focus on core development activities, reduce costs, and deliver products faster. This is important because it might otherwise distract organizations from focusing on building their core competencies.
- Ruthless prioritization of requirements that is based on balancing the development of new features, continuous attention to maintaining your product or platform, innovating relentlessly to build new trends and focusing on simplicity, every time. If this is not done effectively, organization may end up building something which has no takers in the market.
Measuring Time to Market
Measuring time to market is like tracking your progress in a marathon – you need to know how far you’ve come and how much farther you need to go to reach the finish line. By tracking key metrics, you can gain valuable insights into your product development process and make data-driven decisions to improve it.
So, what all metrics should we care about? Let’s dive-in:
Launch Time or Lead Time
The time it takes for a product to go from concept to launch, helps in identifying areas for improvement and work to reduce the time it takes to bring new products to market.
Development Time or Cycle Time
The time spent on development activities, including coding, testing, and debugging, helps in identifying bottlenecks in the development process and optimising your workflow to improve efficiency.
Defect Removal Efficiency
The capability or maturity of the product team or organization in removing defects or production issues from your system.
Leading & Lagging indicators
Helps in identifying the criteria to fulfil at the time of launch and the true purpose realisation respectively.
The technique we could use to optimize is value stream mapping, which helps in identifying all the transitions that it takes from entry to exit criteria for a given request. It could help in highlighting the value-added and non-value added time and hence we could identify the process efficiency quotient which can be a basis for making changes in our flow. As an agile consulting company, we use VSM in specific engagements to visualize the flow of value and optimize it.
How to Build the Product-Market-Fit & Assure Time to Market?
There are lots of mobile apps that I have been using from the past 5-8 years and witnessed their journey over the time. They all start with building the just-enough product that could fulfil all the essential expectations as per their market research to feed the fundamental needs of the consumers, targeting to solve one or two specific problems or maybe a few more, and then launching the product, with minimum possible lag, to validate the market response. This is called the Product-Market-Fit.
The solution developed for the product-market-fit outcome contains primarily the most-important aspects of the problem and not everything. It assures the relief in the pain that customer is facing or the core capabilities that will elevate the customer expectations.
Even in terms of building non-features or internal product capabilities to enhance performance & other aspects, we need to focus on the most critical and incrementally developed solution so that we shouldn’t miss the chance to solve critical problems which might affect the positioning of our product.
Here are the few critical aspects to improve your TTM by building the Product-Market-Fit:
● Whom are you targeting? – By conducting market research we can understand the target audience, their needs, preferences and pain points. It helps in gathering valuable insights, identify market gaps, and validate your product idea. Market research is a continuous process and product managers should focus on collecting insights to draw the path of future development.
● Identify ‘Why’ – Defining clear objectives is crucial to developing the right product and releasing it at the right time. Clear objectives help you focus on what’s essential, prioritize your efforts and measure progress. When defining your objectives, consider the following:
- What problem does your product solve?
- Who is your target audience?
- What is your benefit hypothesis?
- What are your revenue and growth projections?
● Apply process that embraces ‘Flexibility’ and ‘Adaptability’ – An Agile development process is essential for developing the right product and releasing it at the right time, approaches such as Scrum or Kanban, enable you to respond quickly to changing market conditions, customer needs and technological advancements.
It involves breaking down your project into smaller, manageable chunks and prioritizing them based on customer value and business goals. This approach enables you to:
- Deliver working software in short cycles
- Gather feedback from customers and stakeholders
- Refine your product and make data-driven decisions
● Continuous Validation of Your Product Idea – Prototyping and testing are critical steps in developing the right product and releasing it at the right time. Prototyping involves creating a minimum viable product (MVP) that represents your product idea. Testing involves gathering feedback from customers, stakeholders and users to validate your product idea.
● Build Culture of Effective Communication – Effective communication is essential for developing the right product and releasing it at the right time. Not every aspect of product development requires email, documents and in-person meetings in today’s digital world. We have experienced a significant spike in productivity due to asynchronous communication and automation of the workflow. Hence, efforts should be put to modernise the ways of making information available to everyone at any time.
● Make the world know about your product – Marketing and positioning are critical steps in developing the right product and releasing it at the right time. Marketing involves creating a buzz around your product, generating interest and building anticipation. Positioning defines your product’s unique value proposition, differentiates it from competitors and what resonates with your target audience.
● Feedback makes us relevant – Feedback loops are essential for developing the right product and releasing it at the right time. This way we gather feedback from customers, stakeholders, and users, and use it to refine our product and make data-driven decisions.
● Measuring Progress and Success – The million-dollar question is, are we developing the right product and releasing it at the right time and do we know the ‘success’ criteria?. The metrics we consider should involve measuring progress and success, tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), making data-driven decisions and assessing your product’s performance, identifying areas for improvement and continuously refining your product and process.
Understand the Agile Software Development Life Cycle and its phases for improved team collaboration and faster delivery. Start your agile journey today!
Factors That Affect the Time To Market
So far we have explored the importance of the time to market and you might have realised that how important it is for us to embed it in our product development process but it is not easy and there are so many products that get shelved due to certain factors which they might not have considered or even if they have, it might have been too late. Let’s discuss some of the factors which could affect market time:
● Knowing & fixing the complexity of your product – The complexity of a product varies with changing market dynamics (what you are building suddenly gets obsolete), cutting-edge competitors (they come up with what you are building before you), higher cyclomatic complexity of code (may cause significant quality issues and delays) and many more. This needs to be proactively looked upon wherever possible, instantly addressed when required and we may have to re-evaluate the entire market positioning of the product. We need to hustle and continuously innovate to factor such complexities.
● Managing supply chain – For the products with hardware requirement, the new design and features require specialized components, which could result in short supply and the organization may face significant delays in delivering the product to customers, leading to lost sales and revenue. Managing the supply chain is instrumental.
● Adherence to Regulatory Requirements – Lots of companies have been asked to take back their products from the market if they do not meet the approvals from the authorizing bodies. Also, not adhering to regulations and lacking compliance may cause severe damage to consumers, which may cause more troubles to the organization’s reputation and legal standing. Time to market is essential but it shouldn’t be rushed for instant gratification or success without due diligence and adherence to regulations.
How does Agile Help in Time to Market?
Here are some ways Agile helps to speed up the time to market:
- Building just-enough maximum value outcome first, iteratively to seek feedback: Agile involves breaking down the development process into smaller, manageable chunks, called sprints or iterations. This allows teams to work on small, focused tasks and deliver working software in short cycles of typically 2-4 weeks.
- Continuous Improvement by failing faster: Agile encourages continuous improvement through retrospectives, where teams reflect on their processes and identify areas for improvement. This helps teams streamline their processes, eliminate waste, and optimize their workflow.
- Flexibility in usage of business offerings & tech capabilities and Adaptability to accommodate changing requirements: Agile methodologies are designed to be flexible and adaptable. Teams can quickly respond to changing requirements, customer needs, and market conditions. This flexibility helps teams stay focused on delivering value to customers, even in the face of uncertainty.
- Work together and Stay Informed: Agile emphasizes collaboration and communication among team members, stakeholders, and customers. This helps ensure that everyone is aligned and working towards the same goals, reducing misunderstandings and miscommunications that can delay time to market.
- Prioritization and Focus: Agile involves prioritizing features and requirements based on customer value and business goals. This helps teams focus on delivering the most valuable features first, reducing the time to market in agile for the most important features.
- Reducing Bureaucracy by reducing hand-offs: Reducing bureaucracy and unnecessary processes, allowing teams to work more efficiently and effectively. By eliminating unnecessary steps and approvals, teams can reduce time to market in agile and deliver value to customers faster.
- Early and Continuous Testing: Agile involves early and continuous testing, which helps teams identify and fix defects early in the development process. This reduces the time and effort required to fix defects, allowing teams to deliver high-quality products faster.
Conclusion
Time to market is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. It’s the difference between being a pioneer and being a follower, between disrupting the market and being disrupted. Ultimately, time to market is not just about speed; it’s about being responsive to customer needs, adaptable to changing market conditions and innovating in the face of uncertainty. By prioritizing time to market, companies can unlock new revenue streams, drive growth and stay ahead of the curve in an ever-evolving business landscape.
Embracing Agile ways of working helps organizations to speed up their time to market and ensure that they not only deliver fast but deliver the right product as well. Agile adoption, among many other things discussed in this blog, will help organization tailor strategies to align their businesses with business goals to thrive in uncertainty, seize new opportunities and consistently deliver value to customers. Benzne as an agile transformation and consulting company helps clients to contextualize their agile transformations and leverage the benefits of agile while focusing on their core business.
With this our blog on “How to ensure that you develop the right product and release it at the right time in the market?” comes to an end and we sincerely hope that the reading is worthwhile. Please write to us at consult@benzne.com for any suggestions or feedback.
Frequently Asked Questions About How To Market
1. How do customer needs impact my product’s timeline?
Customer needs help us prioritize features and create a product that meets their needs, reducing the risk of delays and rework.
2. How can I measure my time to market?
Metrics to track include concept-to-launch time or lead time, development or cycle time, defect removal efficiency, leading and lagging indicator realisation and others help in identifying areas for improvement and optimize the product development process.
3. What happens if I delay my product launch?
Delaying your product launch causes lost revenue, reduced market share and decreased customer satisfaction. It can also give your competitors a head start, making it harder for you to gain traction in the market.
4. How do market trends impact my time to market?
By staying on top of industry trends and customer needs, you can adapt your product development process to meet changing market conditions, and this way you stay competitive and ensure your product meets customer needs.
5. How does regulatory compliance affect my time to market?
Failure to comply with regulatory compliance can lead to delays, fines and reputational damage.
6. What is time to market?
Please refer to ‘what is time to market and why is it important’ in the blog above.
Time Estimation in Agile! Use agile time estimation techniques to enhance efficiency & meet deadlines with confidence.
