What is lead time?
Lead time is the elapsed time between when an issue is created (or first requested) and when it is delivered. It is wider than cycle time; it includes the wait before work actually starts.
Lead time vs cycle time
The two metrics overlap but answer different questions:
- Lead time: clock starts when the request lands. Captures the customer's experience: how long from "I asked" to "it shipped".
- Cycle time: clock starts when work begins. Captures team execution: how long from "we started" to "it shipped".
Lead time = backlog wait + cycle time. If your lead time is 30 days but cycle time is 4 days, the bottleneck is your backlog, not your team.
Need to compute lead time on real data? Use our free Cycle Time Calculator; same input format works for either metric.
What lead time tells you
- Customer-facing predictability: what to promise stakeholders for new requests.
- Backlog hygiene: long lead time with short cycle time = stale backlog.
- System bottlenecks: sudden lead-time spikes often happen upstream of the team (PM, design, requirements review).
Common mistakes
- Reporting average lead time: long-tail data; report p85 instead, same as cycle time forecasting.
- Treating lead time and cycle time interchangeably: they answer different questions; using the wrong one misleads stakeholders.
- Including cancelled tickets: destroys the metric. Only count delivered work.