Takt Time

Takt time comes from manufacturing and is old enough the origins aren't absolutely certain. If you imagine your demand was constant and spread out evenly, takt time is the cadence with which orders would come in. If someone buys your widget on average every 30 minutes, 30 minutes is your takt time. It probably seems like this is overly simple and not useful, but it's critical for determining whether you have production issues. Overproduction is the root of all waste. Not only is overproduction to be strictly avoided, if your production cadence matches your takt time, you also have achieved evenness.

Aha! but if my median is different from my average, and I produce at my takt time, I'm either having customers waiting or I have inventory which is also waste! You can't win, this is bullshit!

This sentiment is true, but the world is full of waste. You have to consider both of these factors and choose what's best for your organizations. Some customers are ok with waiting, some things are uniquely bad to inventory. Even within the category of restaurants there is variance in which trade off you would make. Customers may not want a sandwich from inventory, but they may not tolerate waiting for a freshly baked potato.

Let's say you get 30 orders for something a month, you need to produce one order per day - that's easy and intuitive. But, you don't work every day. You actually need to produce 7/5ths of an order per day if you take weekends off. The math won't always be that easy of course, but that helps illustrate how the thinking works.

Each individual copy of software sold is approximately free and instant to deliver. However, most modern software is not built, finished, and then sold infinitely. If your business has developed software, fired the engineers, and only has a sales team, this objection is probably valid. In that case the "product" is sales, and the sales team has to think about what they must do to close a sale. If they must do nothing, and as soon as someone finds out about your software, they buy it - then the "product" is marketing. If you don't even need to market, then yes you are the exception and you are reading this academically because you're making money hand over fist without doing anything. Good work if you can get it.

Realistically, most modern software is sold on a subscription model, or you pay for new versions. If either of those conditions are true, you aren't actually selling software - you are selling software features. And just like Subway doesn't sell infinite food items, you don't ship infinite software feature types. So, if you must add features to make sales, then you need to figure out what cadence of features you need to produce to fully saturate the sales pipeline.