Timing is Everything: Mastering the Art of Time-to-Market Strategy
When it comes to a company’s success, we often attribute it to hard work and execution. However, timing is an equally crucial component that can make or break a product’s launch. Think about it – products that failed a decade ago are now resurging with full force, such as AI chatbots, PalmPilots, and even bell-bottom jeans. So, what makes the timing right to introduce a product to the market?
Understanding 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. Move too slowly, and you risk falling behind competitors who might capture the market before you do. Rush, and 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.
Factors Affecting 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 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.
Optimizing Time-to-Market for Controllable Factors
While it may seem like time-to-market is mostly about luck, many controllable factors come into play when considering it. These elements largely revolve around how you deliver your product – from deciding what to build and how to build it, all the way through distribution.
Product Development Process
Your product development process is one area where you have significant control as a product manager; it’s also key in determining your time-to-market. Simply put, if you build something faster, you’ll reach the market faster.
Tradeoffs
As product managers, we’re continually faced with tradeoffs. Speeding up in one area often means slowing down and sacrificing quality in others. When deciding how quickly something should be done, consider the following tradeoffs:
- Product scope: It’s essential not to rush this aspect because a poorly scoped product shipped too quickly will fail user needs.
- Quality level: Of course, things need to work, but how polished do they need to be? How smooth should the user experience be?
- Market competitiveness: Can you afford to take your time? If you’re late entering the market due to delays in production, can you still succeed?
Product Scoping
Product scoping is an essential tool for accelerating time-to-market. Including too many nice-to-have features will extend your timeline. So, if competition is fierce and speed is vital, focus on key features that provide maximum value.
Strong Project Management
Effective execution and project management are also critical when trying to achieve things faster and better. Agile and scrum are popular frameworks that lie at the core of faster decision-making processes and improved team communication.
The QA Process
Lastly, the quality assurance (QA) process is a crucial aspect when executing a product development plan. As everything becomes more agile, it’s likely that your product release is being shipped continuously, week over week.
Cross-Team Coordination
As product managers, it’s easy to focus solely on building a product. However, coordinating a product release across multiple teams is also vital to time-to-market. Beyond just working with engineers and ensuring that everyone is working on something important, you also have to communicate with business teams to ensure that the entire company is aligned when it comes to actually bringing your product to market.
Go-to-Market Strategy
While much of time-to-market consists of actual product development time, executing your go-to-market strategy can also speed up time-to-market. The faster you can get your product into your target user’s hands, the quicker your time-to-market will be.
Dealing with Time-to-Market Factors Outside of Your Control
Most factors beyond our control are external ones related to market dynamics. For instance, we can’t really control our competitors or how quickly they move. We also can’t control when the market tanks or when inflation skyrockets. And, despite our best efforts, we can’t control whether or not users are ready for our products.
Conducting market research – whether at a higher level via data analytics or large-scale surveys or at a more granular level via user interviews – is an excellent way to better understand market dynamics. Once you’ve researched competition and market dynamics thoroughly, there are many options for optimizing your time-to-market.
Example of Effective Time-to-Market: COVID Vaccines
A recent and impactful example of time-to-market was the rush to deliver a COVID vaccine. When we consider factors outside our control, there was clearly a market ready for and in need of the COVID vaccine. For controllable factors, all major players were moving as quickly as possible – not just in terms of product development, but also in partnering with government agencies to remove barriers and expedite product shipment.
Key Takeaways
Ultimately, many factors impact time-to-market – some within your control and some not. For those beyond your control, it’s essential to spend time understanding those factors so you can make informed decisions about how to approach time-to-market. For those within your control, consider adopting some of the strategies mentioned in this blog post to speed things up. Investing time in getting time-to-market right will only enhance your chances of building a product that truly makes an impact in the market.