Does this feel familiar?
Everything feels… slow. You have a critical feature or an urgent bug fix, but it takes forever to get it through the process. Your engineering team feels crushed under a mountain of work—their calendars are full, their velocity charts look good, and they are busy.
But where are the results?
This disconnect, where “busy” doesn’t equal “delivery,” is one of the most frustrating and costly problems in software development. It’s a sign your company’s “ship” has a lot of little leaks.
The good news? There is one metric that exposes every single crack, bottleneck, and wasteful activity in your entire product development system.
It’s called Lead Time.
📈 The One Metric That Actually Matters
Lead Time is the total time from the moment an idea is requested to the moment it is live and in the hands of your customer.
That’s it. From “Hey, we should…” to “It’s live.”
It includes everything:
- The time it rots in a backlog.
- The time it’s “waiting for design.”
- The time it’s debated in a “prioritization” meeting.
- The time it’s being coded.
- The time it’s waiting for code review.
- The time it’s waiting for a “QA” team.
- The time it’s waiting for the “next deployment.”
This number is your company’s true speed. If your Lead Time is measured in weeks or months for bite-sized tasks, you have a blaring-red alarm.
🚨 Your “Agile” Metrics Are (Probably) Lying to You
“But wait,” you say, “our Cycle Time is low!”
This is the most common and dangerous trap. The “Agile” world has so confused these terms that they’ve become meaningless. Many teams now measure what I call “Troglodyte Cycle Time”—a useless vanity metric that only measures the active coding part of building software.
It conveniently ignores all the handoffs, the delays, and the “waiting” that happens before and after.
- Lead Time is the entire journey, from idea to customer value. This is what your customer feels.
- Cycle Time is just one subset of Lead Time—the actual production process. And, FYI, it should include dead time!
If your engineers code a feature in two days, but it takes 28 days to ship, your Cycle Time is 2 days and your Lead Time is 30. Which number actually matters to your business?
What Lead Time Tells You
When your Lead Time is long, it’s not an “engineering problem.” It’s a system problem. That Lead Time delay is the sound of your business breaking in four distinct ways:
- Your Best Ideas Are Rotting in a “Cemetery”: Your backlog isn’t a list of assets; it’s a list of broken promises. Every day an idea waits, it depreciates in value. By the time you build it, the market may have already moved on.
- You Are Paying Your Team to Play “Priority Hot Potato”: A long Lead Time is a classic symptom of leadership chaos. When every new sales call creates a new “top priority,” your team is constantly stopping, starting, and context-switching. Everyone is “busy,” but no one is delivering.
- Your Business Is Too Unpredictable to Run: How can you promise a feature to a major client when you have no idea if it will take two weeks or two quarters? You can’t. You’re not running a business; you’re running a casino, pulling the lever and hoping the right features come out.
- Your “Process” Is Strangling Your Product: The 2 days of coding isn’t the problem. The 28 days of waiting is. Your “process” has become a series of bureaucratic tollbooths: waiting for approval, waiting for review, waiting for QA, waiting for the “Friday deployment.”
💡 How to Fix It
This isn’t a “tech” problem. It’s a system problem.
Start measuring your true Lead Time. It’s the honest, and often painful, measure of your company’s ability to learn, adapt, and win.
To read the full, in-depth article on diagnosing and fixing your Lead Time, click here.
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