Lead time vs cycle time: what's the difference?

Cycle time runs from the moment someone starts working on a ticket to the moment it's done. It tells you how fast your team moves once they pick something up.

Lead time runs from the moment the request enters the system — a PO writes the story, a customer files the ticket, it lands in the backlog — to the same "done" point. It tells you how long the person who asked has been waiting.

The gap between the two is queue time. If lead time is much longer than cycle time, most of the wait happens before anyone starts working. That's not a speed problem, it's a backlog or prioritisation problem.

Jira has neither a lead time nor a cycle time field natively. Both come from the same raw material: the status transition history of each ticket. You need to decide which statuses mark each boundary for your workflow.

Cylenivo reads that history via the Jira API and lets you configure it explicitly. You pick which statuses count as lead time start (typically "Backlog" or "To Do") and which count as cycle time start (usually "In Progress" or "In Development"). The end point — "Done", "Closed", or whatever your team uses — is shared.

From there both metrics come out together: percentiles, distribution charts, trends over time. You can see the queue time directly as the gap between the two.