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NEW CASE STUDY: How we built top-rated shopping apps for Crate & Barrel and CB2 
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NEW CASE STUDY: How we built top-rated shopping apps for Crate & Barrel and CB2
With the rapid evolution of app technology, including AI, new privacy standards, and user demands for accessibility, keeping your mobile app current has never been more critical. The pace of change in the mobile landscape continues to accelerate. From security to talent retention to the complexity of app data management, the mobile ecosystem has only gotten more challenging. In this environment, a strong mobile product lifecycle management team matters more than ever. One missed update can quickly snowball into bigger problems—and lead to issues like the accumulation of technical debt. Smart business leaders don’t need to be coders in order to watch out for the accumulation of technical debt. But they do need to know how to recognize the warning signs.
The mobile landscape is evolving at a furious clip. Operating system changes, legal requirements, hardware updates, and many other factors impact mobile product performance. As a result, native apps need to be updated regularly—at least monthly, and ideally twice or three times per month.
Failing to push new updates is a common cause of crashes and bad user feedback. As mentioned earlier, if one missed update turns to two or three, you start to accumulate technical debt. Which means that you’re setting yourself up for an expensive and burdensome overhaul in the future.
Keep an eye on the update history of your native app, including the release notes. Contrast your release history with that of your competitors as a check to whether your mobile product lifecycle team is on the ball or falling behind.
You should feel confident that your team has firm protections in place around user data. You should know that your servers are set up to scale activity and data processing, even during the busiest times.
Feeling uncertain about either of those things is definitely a warning sign. Huddle with your mobile product lifecycle team. If they can set your mind at ease, great. If they can’t, then existing safeguards and systems need to be revisited ASAP.
“In fact, proactive management should take up about 70% of your team’s time, with reactive maintenance only around 30%. ”
Are you always hearing about issues that have been fixed, and never about opportunities that have been seized? That’s a warning sign.
Managing a mobile product lifecycle is not a “set and forget” task. Your team needs to perform consistent maintenance (like bug fixes), but also proactive management. In fact, proactive management should take up about 70% of your team’s time, with reactive maintenance only around 30%.
Ask a few different team members what new features they’re working on. If they’re aligned, that’s a good sign. If they’re not, or they aren’t working on any features, it’s time to re-set.
There’s no question that you should be investing in mobile experiences. But there are some common misconceptions about what that investment looks like—and how to measure success. Investment in your mobile product should be similar to those for launching and managing an e-commerce website. And however much you spent to design, develop and launch a native app, count on spending at least half that amount annually for a team to properly manage its lifecycle across product strategy, design, engineering and growth.
That may surprise you. But in general, there is under-investment and large opportunity costs in mobile product lifecycle management. Brands need to re-invest at a level that keeps pace with depreciation and marketplace innovations to avoid costly redesigns—and ideally at a level that generates the ROI the CFO has forecasted.
Does your mobile product lifecycle management team know which business goals they’re working towards? Can they explain how your app is set up to deliver on those? Are they reporting results and making tweaks on a regular basis? As business goals evolve, do you feel confident that your team can manage the strategic evolution of the app? Think long and hard about these questions, and make changes until you can get a “yes” on all.
If one or more of these warning signs resonated with you, don’t panic. A smart first step is to perform an audit across the different disciplines of product management, design, engineering and growth. If you find that the issues with your mobile product lifecycle management team are small and contained, you should be able to fix them and continue on. On the other hand, if the audit reveals widespread issues, you might want to consider your other options, like partnering with a mobile product lifecycle management firm to course correct and find peace of mind.
From conceptualizing a new native mobile app to performance marketing to product roadmapping, every element of mobile product lifecycle management depends on a deep understanding of the product’s end users. The best way to achieve such understanding is by developing research-based personas.
Using a simple example, let’s say that you’re managing the mobile app for a grocery store. Who might your end users be? Working from assumptions, you might unveil a user experience that you think appeals to working moms, with language that emphasizes “families” and a layout that surfaces products on sale. But what if students from the nearby college—who aren’t shopping for their families—make up a greater percentage of your users than you thought? Or what if the women using your app actually prefer to see higher-end organic items than discounted ones?
Delivering an intimate, satisfying user experience that engages, informs and activates the customers who use your mobile app requires you to uncover and deliver on those customers’ unmet needs. Proper persona research is the key to seeing what’s below the surface and tapping into what your users are really looking for from an experience.
It can be tempting to use proto-personas for mobile product design. Compared with the time and budget required to do qualitative research, it takes little time and costs virtually nothing to develop an end-user profile based on assumptions.
For budget-conscious brands that like to move fast, slowing down and spending money to develop true personas can feel like a waste. But failing to do so actually increases the likelihood that budgets will be wasted and sales lost. When a new feature flops or a marketing campaign fizzles because they don’t resonate with end users, it’s back to square one—with a lot of time and money out the window.
That all being said, proto-personas are not entirely without value. Brainstorming a couple of possible end-user profiles with your team is a good starting point for your persona research efforts. If you know that working moms shop at your grocery store, then you know you should recruit working moms to participate in your interviews, focus groups and surveys.
Among the myriad tasks involved in mobile app lifecycle management, strict compliance to ADA rules, for most brands, falls towards the bottom of the to-do list. Achieving 100% accessibility coverage for a mobile product can be a Herculean task without an urgent pay-off. As a result, other priorities have come first.
Book a call and we can walk you through our process and case studies.
Book a call and we can walk you through our process and case studies.
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