Bringing a new product or service to market always takes time, but the number of days, weeks, months, or years it takes to launch can impact your ecommerce business in significant ways. With factors like customer trust and profits on the line, it’s important to know when you expect to bring an initial idea to market and how you can stick to your time-to-market plan.
Learn more about how time to market works, why it matters, and what strategies can reduce your time to market and ultimately help you gain a competitive advantage.
What is time to market?
Time to market (TTM) is the amount of time it takes for a product to hit the market, all the way from initial brainstorming and market research through prototyping, production, marketing, and the final product launch. TTM impacts the entire product development cycle, and merchants with a clear understanding of how to manage their time to market can make smarter decisions about how to allocate resources and manage customer expectations.
TTM depends on the scope of your project and the resources you have available. For example, an ecommerce entrepreneur might take three years to develop and launch a new coffee maker, whereas an established coffee maker brand might take only a year to develop a similar machine.
Although you might want to get your product to market as quickly as possible, sometimes launching a product too soon can actually damage your company. Rushed quality assurance procedures can decrease customer satisfaction and harm your company, as can problems outside your control—sometimes the market just isn’t ready for a product. For example, launching a technology customers aren’t yet comfortable with can prove devastating to your product and business.
Benefits of reducing time to market
Reducing time to market can benefit your business in a variety of ways, including:
Competitive advantage
Getting your product to market first can make all the difference in highly competitive industries. Imagine you’re developing an innovative product like a smart suitcase with built-in GPS. You can gain market share in the competitive luggage industry by being the first company to offer this new feature. By moving to market faster than your competitors, you can earn sales that your slower competitors won’t have access to until they launch in a potentially saturated market.
Lower costs
By getting your product to market quickly, you can avoid the overages that can occur in long, drawn-out product development processes. An efficient and effective go-to-market (GTM) strategy can help you avoid the unnecessary costs that can arise in a disorganized product development process.
Improved brand reputation
An accurate time to market prediction can allow you to manage customer expectations and increase customer satisfaction. Ensuring the timely delivery of products is essential when you’re building trust with your target audience, especially if you’re using a crowdfunding model or preorders to fund production where customers have already invested in your product.
Factors that affect time to market
A wide range of factors can impact your time to market. Some are within your control and others are not, but understanding each will allow you to accurately predict your time to market.
Level of complexity
The number of moving pieces you need to manage in order to bring your product to life will impact your time to market. You’ll need to consider the relationship between your TTM and product quality to ensure you’ve struck the balance between delivering your product quickly and delivering value to your customers.
Budget
The financial resources you have available for product development and production are a critical factor in determining time to market. A large company with a dedicated budget for product development will likely have a shorter time to market than an ecommerce entrepreneur starting a lean business in their free time.
Processes
A company’s product development process can also impact time to market. A business with a long, time-consuming approval process for product development decisions will likely take longer to bring its product to market than a company with streamlined decision-making processes.
Market changes
Market demand can also greatly influence your time to market. For example, a company experiencing high customer demand for a new software update will likely fast-track that project and prioritize it over a brand-new product with no current competition or existing market demand.
Ways to reduce time to market
- Develop a go-to-market strategy
- Streamline your processes
- Gather clear data
- Create a minimum viable product
- Outsource and use helpful tools
Here are a few methods you can implement to decrease your time to market and get your product, service, or project to your customer faster.
Develop a go-to-market strategy
A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a detailed outline of how you plan to develop, produce, market, and distribute a new product. To create an effective GTM strategy, you’ll need a clear understanding of what you’re selling, your target market, how your product differs from that of your direct competitors, and how you plan to distribute your product to your target audience. With this information, you can create a product development strategy and a plan for distribution and marketing. The better your go-to-market strategy, the more information you’ll have for predicting time to market.
Streamline your processes
Evaluate your product development process. Are there any inefficiencies or redundancies in the process? What parts of the process take the longest amount of time? If your project or product requires input from multiple teams, make your communication and approvals processes as simple and clear as possible to avoid any confusion.
Use the agile framework to optimize your marketing processes with strategies like prioritizing data, emphasizing cross-functional collaboration, and focusing on outcomes rather than internal activities.
Gather clear data
Understanding and optimizing your product development, production, and distribution processes requires relevant and readable data. Avoid assumptions about why a certain process is working and instead prioritize qualitative data like customer feedback from surveys and quantitative data like average order value (AOV) and click-through rates (CTRs).
By keeping track of real-time feedback from customers, employees, and product testers, you can make informed decisions about which aspects of your product are working and which need improvement. As an ecommerce merchant, this could mean gaining insight into customer behaviors, warehouse inventory levels, and marketing efforts with tools like Shopify’s reports and analytics features.
Create a minimum viable product
A minimum viable product (MVP) is the most limited-capacity version of your product that is still valuable to your target market. By creating a saleable version of your new product with only the essential features, you can decrease your time to market and start earning sales sooner than you could if you delivered the product in its full capacity.
Creating a minimum viable product is a helpful strategy for ecommerce merchants using a lean startup model with limited resources. For example, on an episode of the podcast Shopify Masters, ecommerce entrepreneur Shanae Jones explains how a business accelerator helped create a minimum viable product for her tea company, Flyest. The accelerator allowed her to quickly produce an MVP and get it in front of customers in a competitive market.
Outsource and use helpful tools
Choose useful technology tools to help you deliver products and services to your customers in a timely manner. For example, you could launch an online store with an ecommerce platform like Shopify to save the time you would have spent creating your own website from scratch.
You could also consider investing in a customer relationship management software tool to streamline communications with customers and internal conversations between different departments like sales, marketing, operations, and customer service teams.
A warehouse management system could streamline your processes around picking, packing, storing, and shipping inventory. A suite of effective software tools can help you automate processes and ultimately decrease your time to market.
Time to market FAQ
What does “time to market” mean?
Time to market refers to the amount of time it takes for a company to make a product available to its customers, from the brainstorming stage, through development and production, to delivery.
What is an example of time to market?
Let’s say you run an ecommerce footwear company and took two months to brainstorm an idea for an eco-friendly sneaker, five months to develop a prototype, and three months to manufacture the sneaker before making it available on your website. In this example, your total time to market is 10 months.
How do you measure time to market?
Time to market is measured by the total number of days, weeks, months, or years it takes to bring a product to market.
