So, your company is ready to create its first mobile app. But, do you have a strong mobile app development strategy in place?
You know that the challenges of developing a mobile app are legion. And, the numbers support your assessment. According to Gartner research, fewer than 0.01% of apps are a financial success. This isn’t all too surprising. PMI data shows that 31% of ALL IT projects fail to meet their stated goals, 43% go over budget, and 49% are late. IT projects, as a whole, face considerable roadblocks. To combat this, many companies travel the app incubator route and take a venture-style approach to development. Generally, they spend years navigating failures in the hopes of finding the golden goose.
But, mobile apps don’t have to fail. In general, when mobile apps fail, they do so for one of three reasons:
- They didn’t meet the initial vision.
- They weren’t customer-driven.
- The developers didn’t create actual goalposts for development.
These three challenges can be solved at the intersection of the product roadmap and mobile app development strategy. But, how do you create a mobile app development strategy that doesn’t clash with that roadmap?
Understanding Your Roadmap and Mobile App Development Strategy
To develop an app, you need a vision, product roadmap, and mobile app development strategy.
Your product vision is a high-level overview of what you hope to achieve with your application. Meanwhile, your mobile app strategy is the framework of what your app can do, how it’ll work, and what it’ll look like. Finally, your product roadmap outlines the development stages your app will undergo to meet your vision and successfully implement your mobile app development strategy.
When creating your app development strategy, carefully consider how it plays around your product roadmap. Both of these interact heavily with other high-level strategies. Your development strategy should use your roadmap as a springboard to define iterations.
Here’s where things get tricky: your product roadmap and mobile app strategy touch on some similar points. Both require SWOT analysis, both define mid-horizon and granular details, and both outline the steps your development team will take during the development process. So, obviously, any minor frictions between both will result in confusion and ultimately, a product with reduced user functionality.
To prevent this from occurring, you must construct an optimal mobile app development strategy that takes into account your unique value proposition (UVP).
How to Create a Mobile App Development Strategy
At Entrance, we use a 5-step mobile app development strategy.
1. Envision: The first step is to identify roadblocks and create a mid-horizon goal for your app. This is where your vision and roadmap intersect. Use them as a springboard for development. If your roadmap is incorporated directly into your development strategy, you align them both with your vision framework and UVP.
2. Plan: During the planning phase, you’ll want to address UX, UI, and architecture goals. Think about the features you want and incorporate them directly into your plan. This is the guiding document for the build stage, so make sure that you completely map out your app here.
3. Build: In this phase, you build the app using the above plan. You can use agile, waterfall, SCRUM, or any variation of dev methodology to create the app. Generally, the development stage can be customized for your team. At Entrance, we leverage agile-based sprints with rapid iterations and constant feedback loops. But, this is a highly personal choice.
4. Stabilize: Once your app is built, you need to ensure that it’s deployable. QA testing and validation play a critical role during this stage. During the “stabilize” phase, you’ll want to examine your product roadmap to ensure that the app meets all of your company’s defined goals, features, and standards. For example, will it work on a diverse range of devices and OS platforms? If not, send it back to your development team for more iterations.
5. Deploy: Despite popular belief, deployment is the most difficult stage. Not only do you have to launch the app, but you also need to embrace change management, prepare for disruptions, and continuously release updates and patches.
Are You Ready to Build Your Perfect Mobile App?
Creating a mobile app development strategy that doesn’t impact your long-term vision and product roadmap isn’t always easy. But, you have options. Entrance designs best-in-class mobile apps using agile-driven mobile app development strategies. To learn more about how we can help you create the perfect app for your unique needs, contact us.