{"id":21255,"date":"2025-04-15T12:38:59","date_gmt":"2025-04-15T11:38:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.equalexperts.com\/?p=21255"},"modified":"2025-04-17T09:22:21","modified_gmt":"2025-04-17T08:22:21","slug":"how-to-improve-your-time-to-value","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.equalexperts.com\/blog\/our-thinking\/how-to-improve-your-time-to-value\/","title":{"rendered":"How to improve your time to value"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Equal Experts, we often work with stakeholders frustrated by capacity limits slowing their time to value. I\u2019m a delivery lead for Equal Experts South Africa, and I\u2019ve seen this situation before. I\u2019d like to share how a team improved its time to value from months to weeks, by focusing on what matters most.<\/p>\n

Introduction<\/h2>\n

A while ago, I worked at a financial marketplace. I was on the product details team, which owned the customer-facing product details page and some backend APIs. When I joined, the head of product was challenging teams to maximise capacity and improve time to value – the time from having an idea to its realisation as customer value.<\/p>\n

Another supplier proposed engineers spend more time on estimates, and log their work hourly for accuracy. I warned that would create a mountain of admin, and said it\u2019s not a capacity problem, it\u2019s a value problem. I outlined the Equal Experts approach to improving time to value:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Measure value-add time<\/li>\n
  2. Prioritise what matters<\/li>\n
  3. Reduce unplanned tech work<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I started to measure where my team was spending capacity, and we generated some powerful insights that helped us to speed up our time to value.<\/p>\n

    Measure value-add time<\/h2>\n

    In why unplanned tech work kills team capacity<\/a>, my colleague Steve Smith showed how to measure capacity as product work and tech work. I implemented that model on my team by tagging completed Jira tickets per month, to categorise our work as:<\/p>\n

    \"\"
    \nI was on the product details team for over a year, and I ran an analysis each week to calculate what percentage of our capacity was value-add time, i.e. actual time spent on value-adding product work. Here\u2019s our flow distribution chart.<\/p>\n\"A\n

    My product manager originally expected 80% value-add time, but this chart showed the impact of non-value-adding work. January was only 40% value-add, March was 50%, and September and October were 45%. Non-value-add doesn\u2019t mean unimportant, the tech work usually had to happen, but it was time away from product work. And when we looked deeper at our value-add time, it was clear we had a significant prioritisation challenge.<\/p>\n

    Prioritise what matters<\/h2>\n

    Here\u2019s some more detail on how I modelled product work.<\/p>\n\"A\n

    Prioritising unplanned product work was straightforward. Teams sometimes needed new attributes from our backend product APIs. Ideally, that would be planned product work, but teams often asked for changes at the last minute, and we handled them immediately.<\/p>\n

    Prioritising planned product work was difficult, as user needs came from our product manager, and business initiatives from a portfolio management team.<\/p>\n\"A\n

    The variation in our value-add time (January was 30% user needs, 5% initiatives whereas November was 5% user needs, 65% initiatives) highlighted our prioritisation challenge:<\/p>\n