specstoryai.github.io/lead-time
A talk and companion artifacts for product leaders · 2026
Software has a measurement gap, and AI coding agents just made it expensive.
Today's dashboards each measure a different slice of the pipeline:
- DORA —
commit → production - Value Stream Management (Planview/Tasktop Flow Time, GitLab VSA) —
ticket → delivered - Engineering Intelligence (Jellyfish, LinearB, Faros, DX) —
ticket-in-progress → merged
None of them measure the part product leaders actually hire for: how long it takes a decision to become realized value. That umbrella is Lead Time to Value. The new bottleneck inside it is Intent Lead Time: the time from a product decision being made to the first commit implementing it.
Pre-agents, the bottleneck was implementation, so nobody noticed. Post-agents, implementation collapsed from days to hours and the gap became the dominant term in the equation. Measuring it is genuinely hard, which is exactly why it's a frontier problem worth a deck.
lead-time-to-value/
├── README.md
├── slides/
│ └── outline.md # slide-by-slide narrative
└── docs/
├── visual-reuse-map.md # which Stoa-website ILT-guide components to lift
└── sources.md # citations behind every claim
The deck itself (index.html) is not yet built. Outline first, then render.
ai-product-development— the parent deck on how product development works in an AI world. This deck zooms in on measurement.- Intent Lead Time guide — the visual vocabulary (Dovetail Timeline, ILT Composition, ILT Bands) is reused here. See
docs/visual-reuse-map.md.
slides/outline.md— the argument, slide by slide.docs/visual-reuse-map.md— which existing components carry which slides.docs/sources.md— receipts.