Time to Value: how fast should your product deliver results?

While remembering milestones and tougher times, we'll probably forget details, but how we felt is what sticks. While this may read like a journal entry, it connects to how we build products more directly than it seems. Time and value, and how they relate to each other, sit at the core of building products people love.

In digital products, what matters isn't how many features are available or how good an app looks (though that matters a great deal too). It's how it makes users feel and whether it changes their behaviour. Does frustration give way to ease? Does overwhelm shift to control? Does guesswork turn into confidence?

These questions matter because most products never get the chance to answer them. Users leave before its value becomes clear. So how fast does your product need to deliver results to keep users around? The answer is: faster than you think.

Time as currency

Will Jenkins, now a Product Manager at Atlassian, gave a TED talk in 2017 that reframes how we think about value. His argument: throughout history, the tools we've valued most are the ones that made our tasks easier and faster. Time, not money, is the most precious commodity. When we understand what users want, what they need, and how much time they're willing to spend, we build better products.

Watch Will's TED talk

The trap of building more features.

Most product roadmaps operate as feature factories. The logic seems straightforward: more features should improve retention and growth. The thing is: users don't experience products as feature lists. They experience them as solutions to problems, and they're impatient. If products don't prove their worth quickly, whatever's buried three clicks deep becomes irrelevant. The window to demonstrate value is narrow, and competition and shrinking attention spans keep closing it faster.

This is where many products stumble. They confuse comprehensiveness with clarity, asking users to configure settings, import data, and learn workflows before delivering anything meaningful. By the time the product is ready to demonstrate value, the user has gotten frustrated and moved on.

The aha! moment.

Much like getting hit in the head with an apple, the aha moment is the inflexion point where a user understands why your product exists and what it does for them specifically. Users need to experience that value directly, often within their first session, rather than having it explained through onboarding screens or marketing copy.

Consider Duolingo. The onboarding is a language lesson, not a tutorial about how the app works. Within minutes, users are learning vocabulary, getting immediate feedback, and feeling progress. The aha moment arrives when they realise they're already learning before they've had time to question whether the app will deliver on its promise. The product proves itself before asking for trust, and only then asks users to create an account.

Spotify operates on a similar principle. Users don't start with an empty library and a search bar. They start with personalised playlists, curated recommendations, and instant playback after selecting only a few favourite artists and topics. In this case, the aha moment arrives when they realise the service already knows what they want to hear. Discovery and a personal soundtrack arrive immediately instead of after weeks of manual curation.

These products are designed around reaching that moment as quickly as possible. Everything else comes after users already understand why they should care and are relatively committed to sticking around.

Beyond revenue metrics

If the aha moment is about emotional and behavioural change, how do you know if you're delivering it consistently?

Learn more

Time to Value.

Time to Value (TTV) measures how long it takes for a user to experience meaningful benefit from your product. It's the gap between when someone first interacts with your product and when they reach that aha moment we mentioned earlier. The shorter that gap, the better your chances of retention.

Understanding what TTV actually means, and why it matters more than almost anything else you'll optimise for, changes how you approach product development entirely. When TTV becomes your priority, the question shifts from "Which features should we build next?" to "What's preventing users from getting value faster?"

You stop focusing on whether users finished onboarding and start measuring how quickly they reach meaningful milestones: completing a task, experiencing the core benefit, returning the next day. You question whether that new integration matters more than simplifying the core experience. You recognise that a product doing one thing exceptionally well and proving it instantly will outperform a product doing ten things adequately but taking time to demonstrate any of them.

This has financial implications. Digital products become viable when users stick around, and users stick around when they experience value quickly and repeatedly. The faster you deliver that first moment of value, the more likely users are to reach the second, third, and tenth. TTV functions as a growth lever, retention driver, and competitive advantage that compounds over time.

At Significa, we've seen this pattern repeatedly. Struggling products aren't always poorly designed or technically weak. They're the ones that delay gratification, assuming users will wait and invest effort upfront for promised returns later. Thriving products, especially in crowded markets, flip this completely. They deliver value upfront and earn the right to ask for investment later. That creates a fundamentally different relationship with users.

Questions worth asking.

What's the aha moment in your product? Can you describe it in one sentence?

If your team can't articulate it clearly, users probably can't experience it clearly either.

How long does it take users to reach that moment?

If the answer is more than one session, or if you're unsure, you're likely losing users before they understand why they should stay.

What's blocking it?

Sometimes the barrier isn't a missing feature but a complex onboarding flow, a signup asking for too much upfront, or core value buried behind features that don't matter to new users.

Google vs Yahoo.

The story of Google overtaking Yahoo gets framed as due to superior algorithms and infrastructure, but at its core, it was about Time to Value.

Yahoo started as a curated web directory, evolving into a portal designed to keep users on-site by offering everything: news, email, weather, games, chat, and finance. The homepage became cluttered, trying to serve every need simultaneously. When you visited Yahoo, the value proposition was unclear. Search? News? Stocks? The cognitive load was high, and the path to what you actually wanted was slow. Yahoo optimised for engagement and time-on-site, assuming more options and longer sessions meant more value delivered.

Google launched with a different philosophy: a search bar on a blank page. You typed what you wanted and got results, fast! The aha moment was instant: you searched, you found it. Of course, Google's PageRank algorithm made results more relevant than Yahoo's approach, but simplicity proved equally critical. All in all, Google did one thing exceptionally well and delivered that value in seconds. By prioritising utility over retention, Google built more trust and captured more market share. Users returned because Google respected their time and proved its value immediately.

By 2004, Google held 85% of the search market. Yahoo's traffic steadily declined, and by 2016, the company sold to Verizon for a fraction of its peak valuation. Technical superiority mattered, but so did respecting users' time from the first interaction.

Building for keeps.

Some products become habits while others get deleted after a week, and this pattern isn't new. Great brands have always understood what actually drives loyalty.

Nike built a following around courage and resilience with "Just Do It" and "Find Your Greatness." Patagonia, far more than an outdoors brand, built its appeal around environmental action and adventure. These brands succeed because they fulfil needs beyond the functional: emotional connection, social identity, or both.

Digital products work the same way. Slack provides relief from email chaos. Notion brings clarity to how you organise work. The products that stick deliver value across these dimensions quickly.

Ultimately, Time to Value is how you measure delivery on that promise. It represents a strategic commitment to respecting users' time and proving worth quickly, recognising that attention is the scarcest resource you're competing for.

So, as you plan for next year, ask whether the features you'll build bring users closer to their aha moment. Ask whether they clarify value or dilute it. Users won't remember everything you built. They'll remember whether you gave them something worth coming back for.