Pedro Arantes
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# Cycle Time

If a company takes ten days to deliver a feature to its customer on average, its cycle time is ten days.
#agile
Zettelkasten, April 21, 2022
## Notes - Cycle time is how fast a team finishes some work, for example, a product or a feature. - It is the amount of time a task spends in the system. - The shorter the cycle time, the shorter the time-to-market. - If a company takes ten days to deliver a feature to its customer on average, its cycle time is ten days. - One goal of [business agility](/zettel/business-agility) is to reduce cycle time. - The product manager must consider the working and waiting times to measure the cycle time. For instance, if the team has worked on a feature for one day (active working time) and it has taken nine days to wait for some approval, its cycle time was ten days. - You can use the [Little's Law](/zettel/little-s-law) to find the average cycle time $W$ given the average WIP $L$ and the average throughput $\lambda$. $$W (\text{average cycle time}) = \frac{L (\text{average WIP})}{\lambda (\text{average throughput})}$$ ## References - [Principles of Product Development Flow](/books/the-principles-of-product-development-flow) - [Rethinking Agile](/rethinking-agile) ## Backlinks - [Flow Efficiency](/zettel/flow-efficiency)
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