Time-to-Value

A question I keep running into when engineering organizations set their metrics is some version of: how do we improve time-to-market? It’s a reasonable instinct. But I think it’s often the wrong north star, and the organizations that use it uncritically pay a quiet price for it.

Time-to-market is an efficiency metric: it asks whether you’re delivering output faster. That matters. But efficiency is only half of what matters. The other half is effectiveness: are you building the right things? Time-to-market, on its own, has no answer for that.

The frame I prefer is time-to-value. Not a metric you compute directly, but a way of naming what you’re actually trying to optimize for. Conceptually:

There’s no formula that collapses this into a single number. The point is that changing one word (market to value) shifts what technology is expected to be: not a delivery function, but a business partner that co-owns whether the things it builds actually create value.

That distinction matters because metrics encode expectations. When an organization measures technology on time-to-market, it signals that technology’s job is execution. That signal shapes everything: who gets to define what’s worth building, who’s included in strategy conversations, how the technology team thinks about its own purpose. It’s not that time-to-market creates this dynamic from scratch. It usually reflects an existing culture that already treats technology as a service function. But encoding it into a north star metric cements that culture. Marty Cagan has written clearly about how much the role of technology matters for organizational success. It’s hard to play that role if you’re measured as a cost center.

So how do you measure time-to-value? With multiple metrics, because value creation is too complex to capture in one. On the efficiency side, metrics like DORA and DX Core 4 give you useful signal. Or frameworks that help you define your own metrics like SPACE . (These are sometimes called productivity metrics, but that term is convoluted enough that I prefer to stick with efficiency and effectiveness.) On the effectiveness side, the right metrics are domain-specific: DAU for growth, retention for engagement, revenue, cost, whatever outcomes your organization is actually trying to move. Together, they start to answer the question time-to-market never could: are we creating value, not just shipping faster?

The deeper question of how you actually structure the organization to do both is a longer conversation. The product operating model , continuous delivery , and investing in developer (and agent) experience are where I’d start.

The shift from market to value is worth explaining to leadership and the team. The conversation it opens is usually one you need to have.