Time to Market
The constraint that dominates most products, and how to trade against it.
4 to work through
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intermediate
A platform must ship a major capability quickly. Which architectural shortcuts are acceptable, and which create debt that compounds?
2 min answer -
intermediate
A retail business needs a new category live before a seasonal peak. Engineering says the correct architecture takes two quarters. How should the trade-off be made?
2 min answer -
intermediate
A retailer's new product category launches on schedule for the seasonal peak. The software works. Within two weeks, returns processing is a month behind, finance cannot reconcile settlements, and support handling time has doubled. What went wrong, and what does it say about time to market?
3 min answer -
intermediate
Your time to market is eight weeks. How would you find out where it actually goes?
2 min answer
4 terms in this topic
Lead Time to Value
The elapsed time from identifying an opportunity to delivering measurable benefit, which is usually dominated by waiting rather than by building.
practiceOperational Readiness
Defining go-live from the whole value stream rather than from the deployment, so the processes that receive a launch - returns, reconciliation, suppo…
metricSlip Cost per Week
The money a launch loses for each week it is late - and whether that money is deferred or destroyed - which is the only form in which time to market …
conceptTime to Market
How long from idea to customer value — an architectural property determined by coupling, batch size and the number of teams required.
Neighbouring topics
Business Architecture
General material on the business side of architecture.
Business Capabilities
What a business does, stated stably and independent of implementation.
Capability Mapping
Overlaying systems onto capabilities to expose duplication and gaps.
Business Processes
How work actually flows, including the handoffs nobody documented.
Value Streams
End-to-end delivery of an outcome, and where the waiting happens.
Domain Boundaries
Where the language of the business changes, and services should too.
Stakeholder Analysis
Who is affected, what they need, and who can block you late.
Product Thinking
Treating platforms and services as products with users and a lifecycle.
Business KPIs
The numbers a design is ultimately judged against.
Regulatory Constraints
Non-negotiable requirements that remove design options entirely.
Organisational Constraints
Team structure, skills and budget cycles as architectural inputs.
Build vs Buy
Differentiation versus table stakes, priced over five years.
Business Cases
Expressing an architecture proposal in the currency that gets funded.
Operating Models
How delivery, platform and governance functions fit together.
Team Topologies
Stream-aligned, platform, enabling and complicated-subsystem teams.
Platform as a Product
Adoption earned rather than mandated, with an owner and a roadmap.
Outcome Measurement
Knowing whether the thing you built achieved what it promised.
Portfolio Prioritisation
Choosing between investments with incomparable benefits.
Business Continuity
What the business does while the system is unavailable.