Slow time-to-market is one of the biggest threats to software revenue growth. But that’s not a development problem; most delays happen after code is done.
Siloed product, engineering, and pricing teams slow go-to-market more than any technical challenge does. Better outcomes are possible when product, engineering, and monetization teams work together.
Year after year, I see technology companies grapple with delayed time-to-market as a significant blocker to growing their annual recurring revenue (ARR). The good news is that core product innovation can move beyond these delays.
A MVP-first approach, which incorporates early customer feedback, aligns stakeholders, and defines a clear minimum viable product, accelerates innovation, improves product/market fit, and reduces unnecessary work and rework.
Reflecting on the growth I’ve seen, here are best practices that leaders can implement to get their software products to market faster.
On your marks: See Where Product Releases Are Broken
Collaboration and automation unlock the fastest gains. Manual workflows, unclear ownership, and release complexity all contribute to persistent time-to-market delays. Be aware of these challenges and evaluate the role each plays at your organization:
- Complex Q2C and monetization processes: Fragmented monetization and licensing systems rely on siloed systems, which slow launches, especially across acquired products or diverse portfolios. Similarly, disconnected quote-to-cash processes create bottlenecks (across sales, finance, and operations) occur in the quote-to-cash (known as Q2C or QTC) process, increasing delays and errors.
- Legacy, manual processes: Outdated, cumbersome processes limit agility, reduce visibility into usage, prevent adoption of modern pricing models, and restrict revenue. Legacy processes may not scale sufficiently to meet contemporary software licensing and entitlement management needs.
- Execution delays and inefficiencies slow fulfillment and degrade the customer experience. Development projects run behind schedule all too frequently, indicating systemic execution issues and widespread delivery inefficiencies that delay product releases. Processes such as physical delivery and manual activation exacerbate the issue by hindering product adoption, degrade the overall CX, and prevent optimal revenue realization.
Get set: Improve Your Go-to-Market Strategy
By automating licensing, using AI agents, and integrating systems, companies can reduce launch time, eliminate bottlenecks, and capture revenue earlier. Start with these recommended tactics.
- Standardize and centralize licensing & entitlement management. Replace fragmented systems with a unified platform to enable “paved road” approaches that create repeatable processes for faster product releases. I’m always pleased to see real-world successes, such as Toon Boom, which achieved double-digit revenue growth by implementing new product packaging and pricing to improve the efficiency of getting products into the hands of its customers.
- Automate and integrate the Q2C ecosystem. Connecting CRM, ERP, billing, and entitlement systems can eliminate manual handoffs and accelerate revenue realization.
- Eliminate waste: Adopt the Value Stream Mapping technique from lean-management methodology to visualize, analyze, and improve the flow of materials and information required to deliver a product or service. Its primary goal is to identify and eliminate waste to maximize customer value and efficiency.
- Digitize fulfillment and enable flexible monetization models. Enable instant delivery, support hybrid pricing (such as subscription and usage-based), and offer agile packaging to improve your scalability and speed.
Adopting a true MVP approach requires focusing on the best practices above, while honing essential practices. The result can help dramatically accelerate launches potentially reducing the time to enable a new product’s licensing and entitlement by 90% while improving agility, scaling more easily across new and acquired products, and capturing revenue opportunities faster.
Remember that scope creep;every addition to a product adds complexity and delay to a product release. Prioritize essential functionality to remain focused on your MVP, prevent sprawl, and accelerate initial launch cycles.
Define clear ownership and governance. Using a project management tool, such as a RACI chart, helps align stakeholders with a structure (which defines who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and/or informed) to avoid delays and confusion in product delivery.
And be sure to engage early adopters and beta customers. One of the best ways to reduce the chance of post-launch rework rework is to validate the product-market fit early. Beta customers can help you test and refine products and capabilities.
Go: Monitor and Measure Impact and Scale
- Speed to market is a revenue strategy, not just an engineering goal. Eliminate bottlenecks, organization-wide. Practice continuous improvement.
- Monitor and measure initiatives, which may result in significantly faster time-to-market; a substantial return on investments made into licensing and entitlement management platforms; and increased revenue, both through new revenue and revenue that’s recaptured through improved license compliance.
- Faster Q2C cycles can improve the accuracy of revenue recognition. Paired with reduced delays and fewer errors, a software company’s overall improvement with cross-functional execution can support the efficacy of internal processes.
Siloed teams and manual processes are fixable problems. That’s where the revenue is waiting.
