Time to market (TTM) is the total length of time it takes to bring a product from conception to market availability. Companies use time-to-market metrics during new product development (NPD) and new product introduction (NPI) as they strive to gain first-mover advantages (e.g., market share, sales revenue).Time to market (TTM) refers to the amount of time from the moment of conceiving the idea about a product through to launching the final product or service to customers. Everyone involved in the development of the product or service has an impact on the TTM achieved. The concept is most commonly used for new products or services, or new features of existing products and services. The term can also be used for the time for a new marketing campaign to get to market, or for a new process to go live. The concept might occasionally be referred to by the term speed to market (STM).
What is time to market?
Time to market refers to the duration it takes to bring a product from initial ideation to market delivery. It’s a critical factor in determining the success of your product release.If you move too slowly, you risk falling behind competitors who might capture the market before you do. If you rush, you could exhaust resources trying to push a product onto a market that isn’t ready for it. But if you get the timing right, you’ll be on track for success.
What factors impact your time to market?
Two main categories of factors affect time to market: those within your control and those beyond it.
The factors within your control relate to how you execute bringing a product to market, including the product development process, cross-team coordination, and go-to-market (GTM) strategy.
External factors usually related to the market — such as market readiness, health, and competitive risk — are beyond your control.
Understanding these differences is crucial when considering time-to-market strategies. In the following sections, we’ll delve deeper into each of these factors and discuss strategies for optimizing them without compromising product quality or customer satisfaction.
Why Reducing Time to Market Is So Powerful
Understanding time to market helps you create a more seamless development experience for your team. You can reduce the time it takes to launch products into the public, deliver continual value to customers, and build stronger relationships at scale.
When you improve TTM, you deliver value to customers faster. This helps you gain a competitive advantage and capture revenue quicker. Developing new products takes valuable time and resources, which you spend upfront. So being able to release your products faster helps offset those costs and recoup your initial investment.
Reducing TTM increases your release cadence as well. That helps you build a more consistent and predictable revenue model for your business and reminds customers of your value, which informs their overall satisfaction with your product.
Use your understanding of these benefits to refine your product development strategy. This understanding helps you think critically about how your team scales various processes and workflows and helps maximize resource costs for the best return on investment.
Improving your time to market makes these processes and workflows more efficient and easy to complete. That efficiency streamlines your developers’ experience and builds a more engaged and collaborative team culture.
How time to market offers a competitive advantage
In an imaginary market where there was no competition and your audience would be waiting to buy from you whenever you were ready, time to market would be rendered irrelevant. But that’s not reality. There are competitors in all markets, and your success depends not only on impressing your customers, but doing so in a manner that gives you an edge over the other players.If you are late to the market – that is, if your competitors beat you to the market with a new product or service – you’ll need to find a way to overcome that disadvantage. While not impossible, you’ll be playing from behind, and no business wants to be in that spot. Unless your product is so good that it simply can’t be ignored, you may never catch up with the competition that first gained the attention of the relevant customers or clients.With this concept of gaining a competitive advantage at the heart of why time to market matters, it’s easy to see a paradox developing. You want to get to the market quickly to gain an edge on your competitors – but offering the best product on the market is also a competitive advantage. So, something has to give. It’s striking the right balance between getting to the market quickly while still meeting quality and innovation expectations that is central to success with TMM initiatives.
Other benefits of improving time to market
- Explore more opportunities. As your time to market comes down, decision-makers in your organization may see an opportunity to test out more new product and service ideas. If there is only a six-month lead time to take a product to the market, rather than two years, for example, the barrier to trying new things is lowered. With a reduced time and financial investment demanded by each project, more projects can be given the green light. From there, it’s a simple matter of math to see how your organization can benefit – if half of your projects are a hit, and you launch 10 instead of 5 in a given timeframe, you’ll be left with twice as many strong products in your portfolio.
- Launch on time. Not only does a streamlined time to market process help you beat the competition, but it also helps you time your product launches accurately to meet customer demand. Have a new product that will be a big seller for the holiday season? With strong time to market procedures in place, you can be sure it will be available by November. Or, launching something that is primarily a summer product? Schedule the development and production process so it is available by April or May. When organizations don’t put an emphasis on time to market, they never really know when things will be ready – and this uncertainty can cause problems.
- Don’t waste resources. This is another benefit of being as predictable as possible with your product launch process. When you know what is going to happen when on your journey to the market, you can allocate resources strategically and cut down on waste. A less-organized, ad-hoc process for product development will inevitably be inefficient, and expenses will rise as a result.
Product development processes that can reduce TTM
Streamline the starting point. Depending on the size and complexity of your organization, there may be several rounds of approvals involved in getting anew project started. It’s understandable why management would need to thoroughly review any idea before investing time and money in its development, but those approvals take time. If there are even just a couple of extra weeks spent on approval, that could make all the difference if you are beaten to market by a competitor. Work on identifying any unnecessary steps or delays in the approval process so you can avoid falling behind right from the start.
● Outsource strategically. Getting a product to market quickly will likely require help from outside your organization. Knowing what elements of the process you will outsource, and when that help will be acquired, is another important piece of the puzzle. As you move through one product launch after the next, you can develop a trusted network of contractors that understand your industry, timeline, and requirements.
● Effective integration. Often, the friction that comes up during the product development process has to do with various departments within your organization not interfacing properly. When the project is handed from one department to the next, or when two or more departments need to collaborate, bottlenecks tend to form. Creating clear systems for how your departments are integrated, and investing in IT as necessary to improve those integrations, is another step toward getting to market faster.
● Leverage technology. Speaking of IT, utilizing modern technologies to handle repetitive tasks in the development process can improve TTM. For example, an automated system may ensure that everyone has the latest version of a development file, or it could be used to synchronize calendars and confirm that everyone is working with the same due dates, as any changes will be reflected in real-time across the organization. If too much of your product development process is still happening on traditional spreadsheets, or on pen and paper, it’s time to take a step forward and let technology speed things up.
● Continually adjust. Your time to market process is never “done”. This is one of those things that is always been improved, adapted, and adjusted to the realities of your business. If you come up with an initial TTM strategy and then leave that strategy document alone for years to come, you’ll be certain to lag behind. Remaining current on how modern products are developed, and integrating new strategies and techniques into your own process, is the only way to remain relevant in a competitive industry.
FAQs
WHY IS TIME TO MARKET IMPORTANT FOR BUSINESSES?
In the manufacturing world, time to market (TTM) refers to the time it takes for a product to get from initial concept to market availability. Since being late diminishes the addressable market in which companies must sell their products, time to market is extremely significant. A late product introduction can decrease the window of opportunity for revenue generation and accelerate the product’s obsolescence.
HOW DO YOU IMPROVE TIME TO MARKET?
- Establish real-time communication with your supply chain partners and gain greater visibility into part shortages and other issues that impact production
- Shorten your engineering change order (ECO) cycles through automated reviews and approvals
- Aggregate bills of materials (BOMs), quality documents, design files, and other essentail records into a single source of truth. This eliminates design and latest-build confusion for reduced rework and production delays
HOW DOES TIME TO MARKET HELP WITH NEW PRODUCT LAUNCH?
The more streamlined and efficient your company’s product development process is, the better you’ll be able to forecast when your product will hit the market. It can also help you plan how to launch the product at the right place and time.
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