What's Your Cycle Time From Start to Impact?
Published on Feb 28, 2024 by Craig Sturgis
What's your cycle time of each attempt to positively impact a customer?
🧑✈️ Captain Obvious definition: the time in work days from when development starts on an item meant to positively impact customers to the time when it is impacting and hopefully delivering positive value to customers.
Not the time from start to testing completed or until deployed to production or until you complete a single task towards that goal.
How long does it take from from start to impact?
Can you measure that easily? Can you easily spot the outliers to determine what's getting in the way of it being smaller?
In my opinion, this is the single most important measurement of progress of a software product development team.
It's not the only important thing. There are so many other metrics you need to tell whether you're on the track you want to be on, but this is the key from an execution standpoint.
What would need to be true for the average or median or mode to be closer to a single day vs. weeks?
I see numbers in the 20s, 30s, and higher all the time. I also see many question marks where teams don't even know their numbers.
Low single digits is the benchmark of a great team firing on all cylinders.
You can get there. But you have to know where you are and diagnose what's in the way.