The Importance of Time to Market and How to Reduce It With Cloud Deployment
Changes in market demand can be rapid and unpredictable. The ability of a company to quickly adapt to these changes defines its future e-commerce success. To avoid a failure, waste resources, and ascertain your product relevance once it’s released, you shouldn’t neglect the concept of time to market.
Time to market or TTM is the amount of time necessary to realize an initial idea and deliver a finished product to consumers. In other words, it is the time between the start of work and the first sale.
Why is TTM so important?
The shorter time to market is, the more competitive advantage a company gets. No matter how brilliant your idea is, if it takes more time for you to bring your IT project to life, there is a higher chance your rivals will pull ahead of you and will surprise your target audience with a similar good much earlier.
According to the McKinsey & Co study, if a product is more than 6 months late to the market, a company earns 33% less profit during five next years.
Relationship between time to market, revenue, and cost
- Shorter time to market doesn’t require additional expenses and may cost the same, more or less than a longer TTM;
- Shorter TTM makes a company the first on the market;
- Faster TTM is often accompanied by higher revenues.
What does it take to be the first on the market?
Here are some working methods to speed up your time to market:
Optimize your workflow
Analyzing your working process should be your initial step on the way to improved time to market. It will give you the opportunity to identify activities that slow down product development (unproductive meetings, poor task allocation, etc.) and eliminate or replace them.
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Strike a balance between speed and efficiency
There are three basic modes that can describe a company’s workflow:
- Mode 1 is slow and inefficient. In this case, raising both speed and productivity is a reasonable goal;
- Mode 2 is moderately fast and highly productive. It is the middle ground;
- Mode 3 is increasingly fast and inefficient. In this situation, TTM can be significantly reduced, but at what cost? If you are ready to pay a double price to deliver your product faster, this option has the right to exist.
Automate your deployment
Choosing effective operational tools is one of the key factors in the success of your e-commerce business. Therefore, cloud deployment can positively impact a faster roll-out of your IT project, lowering product delivery cost as a pleasant bonus.
Due to automating your IT processes through the cloud, you will be able to cut your time to market in half without the necessity to pay a double price, adopting the innovative approach to the workflow: it will be both increasingly fast and highly efficient.
Other benefits of cloud migration:
- Data safety;
2. Peak load resistance;
3. No local hardware;
4. Scalability.
You can find more information on each point by reading this article.
Conclusion
Innovative solutions are frequently postponed by companies because of a tight budget or lack of resources. At the same time postponing innovations can lead to a wide range of problems, including a long time to market, missed opportunities, and loss of profit as a result.
Cloud deployment is aimed to break the vicious cycle, extremely minimize your time to market, and facilitate your e-commerce business growth in a flexible way.
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