The most fundamental principle for reducing time-to-value is to minimize how much complexity is perceived by the user. Too often, developers force complexity downstream onto users by prioritizing “generic” functionality or avoiding the effort of building fully complete solutions. A good exercise here is to approach application design from the perspective of end users, thinking about what's the ideal way in which they would like to use the software, regardless of the internal implementation.

Another key point is to design applications so that common use cases are bootstrapped quickly. It applies not only to toy examples, but also to implementations that deliver tangible value to end users. This requires the developer to deeply understand how their users derive value from the software, which might not always be as originally intended.

Building on top of the previous principles is the practice of choosing sensible defaults to reduce the amount of configuration necessary for users to get their applications into a functional state. This also helps lower the learning curve, as users are required to reason about fewer options while they are operating the software for the first time.

Finally, maintaining stable and simple APIs ensures that users can rely on consistent interfaces over time, preventing additional overhead whenever dependencies need to be updated. Changes to APIs should be thoroughly reasoned about and purposefully designed to avoid breaking existing applications. Well-designed APIs that don't push complexity to end users will also tend to be a lot more stable, for this same reason.