Cycle time vs lead time — which one tells the truth.

Definitions.

• Cycle time"IN PROGRESS" → "DONE"
• Lead time"CREATED" → "DONE"
• Wait timeLEAD − CYCLE

Cycle time tells you how long the team takes to complete work once they start. Lead time tells you how long a stakeholder waits from request to delivery. The gap is wait time — the queue.

What each surfaces.

High cycle time, low lead time — rare. Usually means very small backlog, work pulled immediately.

Low cycle time, high lead time — common. The team is fast, but work sits for weeks before anyone starts. This is the most useful insight in this whole article. If cycle time is fine and customers still complain about slow delivery, the problem is upstream prioritization, not engineering.

Both high — engineering capacity issue. Hire or simplify scope.

Both low — healthy. Move on to other metrics.

When to use which.

For sprint health — cycle time. It's what the team can directly influence in the next sprint.

For stakeholder commitments — lead time. It's what they experience when they file a request.

For roadmap forecasting — cycle time, fed into Monte Carlo. Lead time is too noisy because it includes prioritization queues.

Related.