The Cycles Model: Replacing Cycle Time as the Primary Signal: PRINCIPLE 6 - Measure Efficiency to Gain Efficiency with Modern Metrics

Traditional cycle time measures how long a single work item takes from start to accepted completion. In a world where that window was days or weeks, cycle time was highly informative. In the AI era, cycle time for many work types is less than a day—making it a much weaker signal. The better AI-era measure is cycles-to-completion: how many start-to-accepted-complete iterations were required, and what was the total time consumed across all of them?