Who else wants to shrink their Time to Market?

Use Agile - the 'shrinking' Agent!

Time to market refers to the time it takes for an organization to take a raw Idea, build the product or service and take it to market. We all want to shrink ‘Time to Market’, and Agile can be a big ‘shrinking’ agent.

Reduce Time to Market by focusing on Concept to Cash - illustration by Nimesh Soni

Use Agile and shrink your Time to Market
illustration by Nimesh Soni

The illustration above shows this ‘Concept to Cash cycle’ in Agile landscape. Let’s visit each one in little more details.

  1. Idea

    Everything starts with an idea!  It could be an idea for a new product/service offering, or it could be a new market opportunity that you want to pursue, or it could be that you want to fix all the ‘holes’ in your existing product in order to gain better market share. Bottom line is that it all starts with a seed that we call Idea!

  2. Visioning

    Remember, you are not alone working on this idea! You will have teams working on this idea to drive it towards (becoming) a reality. You should be able to convey your vision about the product/service. We use this special format to describe your vision.

  3. Story mapping/brainstorming

    Now, armed with your Vision statement, you can start pulling all the right parties, the stakeholders into a conversation. You can lead a brainstorming session to uncover, unearth the work that needs to be completed in order to make this vision a reality. Don’t overwhelm yourself with a lot of details. Key here is to stay at 50K ft and capture high level (slices of) work that would need to be completed (don’t worry about how, when, who does it. For now, the focus is on WHAT.

  4. Roadmap

    Now that we know what work needs to be completed (based on the Story mapping exercise), we can start putting them together on a roadmap that will help us make the product a reality. At this point, we want to focus on next 6 to 12 months, and create a product roadmap; what features would be built, and when we would like to release them to the market. As we do this, stay focused on creating value with each product increment that we push to market.

  5. Release Plan

    With the roadmap in place, we can start pulling in all the teams that would be working on them. Complete some dependency analysis, identify all the teams, and get them into release planning session. Here, we are focusing on next two to three months, and what product increment we can work on and get it out to market. All the teams can discuss these features and functionalities, what it will take (effort) for them to make it a reality, what are the dependencies, and how they may impact the “Push to Production” effort. At the end of this session, these teams come out with an intended plan of HOW they will build this product increment.

  6. Sprints / Iterations

    Based on the intended plan that came out of the release planning session, teams go into individual sprints, get into more details as to what tasks need to be completed. Here, we focus on next two to three weeks at a time.

The key to success here is not to get hung up on getting the product to be ‘perfect’ before you go to market. WE focus on creating a version, an increment of the (ideal) product and push it to market; identify the minimum viable product (MVP) with which we can go to market. And, then repeat this cycle on a smaller feature sets, smaller increment of the product (that builds on the increment that we released to market earlier).
 
 
How long is your Idea to Market cycle? How long does it take for your organization to take an idea to market?
 

Republished with updates. Original post was published on April 2014.

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Category: Transformation