Time to market (TTM) is the duration between the product or service’s conception to its final production and the accessibility of being sold in the market.
Likewise, knowing the right time to launch products or services at a reasonable date after they’ve been planned, conceptualized, and built is crucial for two reasons. For one, launching too late can lead to competitors outperforming your business. The opposite is also true. Launching too early might lead to a lack of preparedness for your product in obtaining customer engagement.
That said, there are benefits if you want to reduce the duration needed before marketing a new product or service. For one, it allows for more revenue, sales, and market share. Boosting business growth is also possible. One reason for these benefits is that launching new products or services immediately can provide new and unique solutions to consumer needs that may not have been addressed yet.
For more details about this topic, search no more, as this article will tackle how to measure it and three strategies you can apply to reduce time to market.
How To Measure Time To Market?
Calculating time to market may vary based on the business, product, and team. The start of the measurement period can be from the time the idea goes through conceptual design, development approval, complete funding, or when the designated team commences their work. The end date can be when the engineering or production team delivers the final product, when a client first purchases the product, or when the company reaches a specific production volume.
Some considerations you may think about when working on your time-to-market analysis are the project’s funding, manpower, market demand, possible production disruptions, level of risks involved, and innovation required to finish the project.
By analyzing your team’s performance data, you can compare your metrics with those of your competitors, and the standard metrics followed across your industry.
Strategies To Reduce Time To Market
There are various strategies to speed up your time-to-market process. Here are three strategies that can help your team reduce time to market.
1. Create Your First Strategy
To reduce TTM effectively, you should develop and implement the right plan. Your first strategy should be a tool to make things more apparent during the most crucial cases.
To start, you can review the idea, tackle it with experts and your team, and have a proper choice for what action to take. You can also generate the initial calendar for the process and set critical dates and milestones. Then, you can measure the probable time of the TTM process through your product’s specifics and statistics.
Likewise, take note of possible risks and have the right strategy and tool to solve those problems. Often, the most typical delay when creating a state-of-the-art product is having a severely complicated technical procedure that consumes a lot of time.
The issue above isn’t ideal, as this stage of the TTM process requires immediate outcomes and not a perfect service or product. Often, insufficient features and technical bugs can be addressed after you test and launch a mock-up service or product.
Lastly, try to partake in the TTM process. A common error is to go far from the procedure and assume that your team will do things correctly. Thus, do what’s possible to manage the production properly and don’t allow the process to happen on its own.
2. Automate The Time To Market Products And Services
You can improve your TTM by automating the process. For one, you can save time by automating some areas of the workflow procedure. This is possible as it reduces the chance of committing manual mistakes, such as missing deadlines and creating false versions of vital information.
Another advantage of automating the TTM process is that it can boost communication within your team. Your team can avoid sending queries about the steps that they must take. It also prevents them from following up on the areas where the TTM procedure has ended. This is possible whenever a system manages due data alerts and tasks. These are just examples, and there are other ways automation frees up time and resources regarding TTM.
3. Inject Supply Chain Expertise During The New Product Introduction Period
If your business creates a new product or service, it’s typical to emphasize product management and industrial engineering. Engineers put their attention on form-function, form-fit, and form-factor across the new product introduction (NPI) period. They do this while the product line managers zero in on market trends and sales strategies.
On the other hand, one risk in many NPI periods is the lack of emphasis on product sourcing, production, and distribution. This leads to significant problems when the product is about to be heavily produced.
It’s common to notice supply chain issues that cause delays in production lines. Luckily, seeking the help of supply chain experts to manage the NPI procedure can help. This step helps in creating value and provides the ability to reduce risks.
Final Thoughts
If you want to reduce the time it takes for your product to be launched after the product conception, it’s ideal to know some strategies for achieving such an end. This article outlined three of those. Ultimately, by reducing time to market, attaining more revenue can happen as your product can reach the right customers immediately.
