Time-to-Market Experience
A lot of modern business approaches are built on the basis of the several fundamental ideas aimed on surviving on the market “battlefield”: cost, quality and speed. Time-to-market (TTM) concerns all of them. This is one of the most important metrics that have to be taken into account if you are thinking of high positions in your industry today.
Time-to-market (TTM) refers to the period that a company needs to develop an a vital part of an IT product on order to launch it. This period includes the generation of ideas, creation of mockups, design, testing, and presentation to consumers. The reduction of the time-to-market concept is becoming too important for the competitiveness of companies in almost any industry, from the automobile production to the financial sector.
IT Arms Race
Until 2010, leading companies invested lots of resources in the development of their software products, forgetting about its creation speed. For example, the average foodtech product release time in Europe was from one to two years. The customer needs were changed a lot during this period and the relevance of the offer melted away.
Today, the TOP companies issue two or three releases per month on average. Thus they set the requirements for other market players: not only to offer the new versions of the products with improved functionality to the customers, but also to reduce the time of their creation.
Time-to-market is often determined as an IT metric and is related with the software and mobile applications releases. Thus, there are several TTM features that have to be pointed because they are not so obvious for business owners:
- Time-to-market is not the same as the “team speed”. That means that the development team should not try to work faster in order to minimize the TTM and sacrifice the quality of the product.
- Time-to-market depends on the right MVP (Minimum Viable Product) identification and the ability to interact with the product owner. The importance of the functions established in MVP mush be determined correctly in order to create a valuable product. The clearer the MVP is identified, the less will time-to-market be.
- Time-to-market directly depends on the way of implementation and automation of the development and QA-processes. The result is — reduced TTM and more profits after the release date.
In spite of this, in business time-to-market will always remain the weapon of competition. The companies that will find a way to reduce time-to-market are going to win the race.
The more often new versions are released without compromising quality, the greater the customer loyalty and their commitment to the product will be. At the same time, urgent bug fixes allows you to optimise the costs of quality assurance and reduce the risk of any negative reaction from the customers.
How to Understand if my Company Should Reduce TTM?
There are several obvious conditions that indicate that your company has to think about time-to-market reduction:
- your product is used daily by a large number of customers;
- the product is promoted on a competitive market (there are analogue products or substitute products on the market that divide customers among themselves);
- you are planning to increase your market share;
- your company’s strategy is aimed at being ahead of the competitors.
By the way, some modern business concepts are build around the TMM and can’t survive without its: fintech, foodtech and game development.
How to Reduce Time-to-Market?
We reduce time-to-market on our projects by using Agile development methods, organizing the work of parallel teams, creating conditions for covering the analytical, development and testing processes, instead of strictly consistent work.
Sometimes we even decrease the number of changes in the release prioritising the TTM reduction in some projects, due to its high importance in that specific industry. This doesn’t mean that we refuse those features at all, we will add them to the soonest app update. In addition, we have gained a wide experience creating an IT infrastructure for frequent releases, changing the team culture, successfully resolving conflicts both within a team and between teams.
Here is an example: once, we developed a software for a network of healthcare medical centres. The idea of the project was that doctors in the clinics were to dictate information about the patients and their visits into special devices. There are several steps to follow, and at the final stage the patient receives a letter with all the info about the treatment.
Initially the architecture allowed 3 000 records a day. We optimised it and took away dozens of unnecessary database requests, changed the Entity framework to our own solution and improved the business logic. We implemented special unit-tests, automated the recording process and used a complete demo version of a project before putting it in production. That helped us fixing all the bugs and problems extremely quick. We got used to the practices of the frequent releases to address performance issues and ensure the smooth operation of the system. All those changes have increased the load up to 80 000 records a day and reduced TTM.
Since the cooperation began, the client’s annual turnover has grown up to 35%, and the product cost increased by 87% during last year. The full story of this project is described here.
In Conclusion & About Us
Modern companies show a 2–2,5 time-to-market reduction. Working in close cooperation with IT teams (in-house or outsourcing ones), they manage to supply new functionality with a frequency of 2–3 times a month. This pace allows you to quickly test new ideas, find exactly those that have received a response from the consumer and develop them, significantly ahead of competitors and, at the same time, raising the transition barrier. Remember that underestimating TTM almost equals the loss of your income.
SimbirSoft is a modern IT-company, specialising in the implementation of end-to-end software & mobile development projects. Within 19 years, we have developed more than 620 IT solutions: enterprise automation systems, highly loaded systems, mobile applications, Machine Learning & Data Science solutions, embedded software.
That’s how we work with apps that needed to become perfect and there is only a month for that: How to Bring an App Back to Life After Failed Development in Just a Month
What do you know about UX and UI? We wrote a really simple article describing these two terms: What is UI/UX and What is the Difference
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