Everybody measures time to first value. Almost nobody can tell you what the value is.
That sounds like a quibble. It isn't. It means two companies reporting a 30-day TTFV can be describing completely different events, and nobody outside either company can tell.
The Undefined Term
Value arrives two ways, and they're not the same event.
Sometimes it's realized. Something happened that hadn't happened before. The report ran. The deal closed. The hours came back. There's a result and you can point at it.
Sometimes it's recognized potential. Nothing's been delivered yet, and the customer can now see concretely that it's going to work. The system's configured, the data's loaded, the path from here to the result is visible. That's a real moment and it's observable, and it lands well before anything gets produced.
Both are legitimate first-value events. They arrive at different times, they need different instrumentation, and a company reporting one TTFV number has picked one without saying which.
Ask three people in the same company when a customer got first value. You'll usually get both answers plus a third that's really a setup step in disguise.
The Accounts That Break It
Here's where it stops being definitional.
Some accounts never receive a deliverable from you. Self-serve tiers. Platform-only customers. People who bring their own work product and use you as the thing underneath it. Ask what their first value is and the honest answer is that no realized-value event is ever going to happen, because you were never going to produce anything.
So one of three things is true, and most companies haven't picked.
Their first value is recognized potential, and the clock should be measuring that. Different instrumentation, different number, completely defensible.
They have no TTFV, and the metric excludes them on purpose. Also defensible, as long as somebody says so out loud and the denominator agrees.
Nobody noticed. Those accounts are either missing from the number without anyone deciding they should be, or sitting inside it credited with a value event that never happened.
The third one's the common case. It's how a company hits a 30-day target while a whole class of its accounts has no defined value at all.
Why an Undefined Metric Is Worse Than No Metric
A number you can't act on is worse than an absence, because at least the absence is honest about itself.
Miss the TTFV target and the useful question is what to change. You can't answer that without knowing what you were measuring. Was delivery slow, or did the customer just not see what had already been delivered? Those have opposite fixes. One's an operations problem and the other's a perception problem, and the second one is invisible on every dashboard you own, because a customer getting value they can't see files no tickets and reads as healthy.
So the number moves, or it doesn't, and nobody can say why. That's the same failure as a quarter nobody can read. A method makes a bad quarter readable. A definition makes a bad metric readable. Without one you've got a figure on a slide that survives every conversation, because there's no way to argue with it.
It costs you more than clarity. Expansion runs on the perception clock, so a company that can't say which event it's timing can't tell the difference between a customer who's ready to buy more and one who's had the value for months and never seen it.
What to Do About It
Pick which event you mean, write it down, and say it in the same breath as the number.
If it's realized value, name the first specific result. Not a stage, not a status. An outcome the customer would recognize as one.
If it's recognized potential, name what they have to be able to see, and be honest that nothing's been delivered yet. That's the harder one, and it's the right answer more often than people expect, especially anywhere the customer does the work.
Then go check the accounts that don't fit. Every business has a class of customer the standard definition wasn't written for, and that's where the number goes wrong without ever looking wrong.
And be careful what you conclude when TTFV improves. Speeding up the clock is only a win if the thing at the end of it stayed the same. A number that got better because the definition got looser isn't an improvement. It's a measurement that stopped measuring.
Lincoln Murphy formally named and popularized Customer Success starting in 2010 and has spent 15 years connecting it to expansion revenue and commercial outcomes. Read The Premise.