How long does it take your company to conceive of a product, create it, and launch it? That’s your Time to Market (TTM) – and it’s essential to your success.
TTM affects your company and your stakeholders – including your customers. TTM also has a substantial impact on your competitors. Every person involved in the development of a product or service has an impact on TTM; in many cases, TTM is impacted by everyone, from the CEO to frontline workers.
At General Label, we offer a number of services to help you improve your TTM. By bringing us onboard as a manufacturing partner from the onset of your project, you’ll benefit from our decades of experience in materials converting and manufacturing. We’ll help you choose the right materials for your project, build quick turn prototypes, and assist in developing plans for high quality, scalable parts.
In this article, we’re going to cover everything you need to know about TTM: Its impact on your organization, the many ways it can be measured, the processes it can be applied to, how you can improve your TTM, average TTMs across industries, and much more. We value your time – so let’s dive right in.
Why you should improve your Time to Market
Improving Time to Market is (almost) always about reducing TTM. Doing so takes time, resources, and a whole lot of change. Companies are reluctant to commit any of the above – is improving TTM important enough to dedicate resources that could be used elsewhere?
Yes. Don’t underestimate the power of first-mover advantage:
First-mover advantage
Being the first to market gives you the first-mover advantage, a concept as vital in business as it is in chess. Having the initiative means:
- You can establish your brand before your competitors.
- You have a longer learning curve, so you can find and correct mistakes more quickly and with fewer pain points.
- You can set the pace with updates and interactions.
- It may be cost-prohibitive for your clients to switch to the next mover.
- You can secure contracts with suppliers and manufacturers before your competitors.
- And much more
Having the initiative means you get to set market expectations, improve on your product, and capture market share before your competition. The bigger the gap between the time you enter the market and the time your competition does, the bigger your advantage will be. Some businesses with the first-mover advantage gain such a substantial share of the market that they can simply buy out other companies with similar or complementary products.
How to measure Time to Market
At first glance, you might think measuring TTM is fairly straightforward: How many weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds does it take you to get your product to market? (We’ll be honest – you don’t have to analyze down to the second).
Realistically, however, there are a few things to consider when establishing your timeline: When the timer starts, when it stops, and the goals you want to achieve along the way.
The fuzzy front end
You might start measuring TTM as soon as you begin brainstorming ideas. You could start as soon as resources are assigned to the project, as soon as teams are formed, or even on an arbitrarily set start date. Sometimes, there’s a substantial time lapse between the time you conceive of a product and service to when resources are actually available to start development.
For these reasons, the start of TTM is often fuzzy and is sometimes referred to as the “fuzzy front end”. You can’t go wrong with any of the start times we’ve listed here – just be sure to pick one and stick with it.
The (less) fuzzy back end
The end of TTM is less arbitrary than the start, but there’s still a bit of wiggle room. You can decide to end TTM as soon as your product or service is available on the market or as soon as the first purchase has been made.
KPIs, milestones, and other goals
As you progress in your efforts to get your project to market, you’ll reach different thresholds: Completing market research, creating your first designs, developing your first prototypes, and much more. Creating KPIs and milestones can help you track your progress as you get your product or service to market, all while enabling you to compare and reflect on your performance in the future when you create new products and services.
How to reduce Time to Market
Reduce scope
The more features, variations, and functions your product or service has, the longer it will take to get it to market. Consider reducing the number of features, reducing the quality of the product, or even releasing a minimum viable product (MVP) in order to be first to market. These changes can seem harsh at first, but your market research may find that having the first-mover advantage is more important than a higher quality product with more features.
Commit resources
This option is fairly straightforward: Spend time and money, whether on people, machines, outsourcing, or anything else you need in order to get to market faster. As you’ll see next, however, adding people to a project doesn’t necessarily speed it up. What’s more, you may be able to make it to market before your competitors without committing additional resources. Trust your market research, and trust your gut.
Agile processes
“Agile” is a term that covers many different disciplines and ideas, including scrum, kanban, lean thinking, and more. The goal of an agile framework is to create self-organizing, cross-functional teams that can quickly adapt to changes in the market and consumer demands. Using agile development principles can lower costs and eliminate barriers to development, but it can also lengthen TTM if teams aren’t already familiar with agile work. As such, agile processes should be introduced on smaller projects, teams should be made up of trusted, competent, full-time employees, and the effectiveness of the agile processes used should be evaluated.
Measure and refine
As you continue to improve processes to speed up TTM, it’s important to measure the time it takes to reach key milestones and the market performance of your products and services, as well as how quickly your competitors make it to market with similar products or services. Keep refining processes as you learn.
Automate and outsource
Automation and outsourcing can be costly, but if you’re automating processes that are tedious and prone to human error and outsourcing activities that are outside your core competencies, you will see your TTM drop. Automation is particularly useful, as once certain processes are automated, you’ll be able to fall back on the automation the next time you need to bring a product to market – and you’ll have paid the upfront cost of automating already.
By outsourcing the manufacturing of parts to General Label, you can focus on the work your company does best. We’ve developed parts for projects in numerous different industries, including:
- Industrial
- Electronic
- Automotive
- Military
- Medical
- Agriculture
- Appliance
- Consumer
- Property/Asset
- OEM
- Transportation
- Aerospace
- Oil and Gas
Working together, our project managers and engineers will develop quick-turn prototypes and scale production when you’re ready to go to market. With our decades of experience working with suppliers, we can anticipate the amount of material that we’ll need to order, as well as any potential supply chain issues. By predicting the time it will take to acquire materials, develop parts, and manufacture them to scale, we can vastly improve your TTM.
Bring on key stakeholders early in the process
Agile processes focus on cross-functional teams. This is a focus we recommend you use throughout the product or service introduction process to lower your TTM. In fact, bringing on key stakeholders as early as possible is the cornerstone of many product introduction philosophies, including new product introduction (NPI). When stakeholders are involved early, you can eliminate information silos and predict and prevent costly delays.
We encourage you to bring us into the fold as soon as you begin your project; by doing so, you’ll be able to focus on your competencies while we focus on building functional parts. You’ll also be able to leverage our experience during the development and prototyping phase – this can help you avoid unforeseen delays.
Other factors to consider when evaluating Time to Market
How quickly you get to market isn’t the only thing to consider when evaluating TTM. You’ll also want to think about adaptability, consistency, and the disadvantages of being the first mover.
Adaptability
Some companies choose to extend their TTM in order to quickly modify the features of their product or service shortly before launch. Doing so allows you to respond to consumer demand more fluidly but can lead to delays and moving out-of-scope.
Consistency
Instead of opting to achieve the fastest TTM possible, some companies opt for scheduled releases. They might release a new product or service (or an iteration thereon) every 6 months, every year, or on some other consistent schedule. To achieve consistent TTMs, you’ll need a lot of data and a lot of experience – but once you’ve got your processes down, the marketing advantages of constant release cycles can be tremendous.
The disadvantages of being first to market
The advantages of being first to market almost always outweigh the disadvantages – but the disadvantages are still important to understand. It costs far less to copy someone else’s product or service than to develop your own. What’s more, if you sacrifice too many features and release a minimum viable product, you may only whet your consumer’s appetite for something more – something your competitors can deliver.
Partner with General Label and reduce your Time to Market!
At General Label, we specialize in manufacturing a wide variety of parts, including membrane switches, gaskets, and other parts created through materials converting and engineering processes. We also offer new product introduction (NPI) support. By bringing us on as a manufacturer early in the process, you can effectively reduce your TTM.