Product management is a discipline that continues to be hard to describe and define. There are particular approaches for doing product management "the right way," which was part of my motivation for writing App Savvy. At the same time, a portion of this role simply comes from experience. That may even be truer for app product management, which as of this writing is still less than a decade old.
We often address questions that focus on our experience in certain industries or with specific kinds of organizations. Although we have worked with companies large and small, commercial and non-profit, technology-driven and technology-challenged, we regularly emphasize that focusing on industry knowledge is not a good lens for selecting a partner.
Many customers come to us at Savvy Apps with a set of unknowns and an unclear path to obtaining their goals. Through the years, we've honed our discovery process to solve this problem. We start by casting a wide net, gathering as much information as possible, and then whittle things down into actionable takeaways. In this article, we've outlined why this process, which we like to call a “discovery kickstart,” is critical for your app. We run through the three stages of this process and how each stage is structured to set your app up for success.
You've gone through the process of finding an app developer. Maybe the relationship even started out well. Somewhere along the way though, communication has broken down, progress has come to a standstill, or perhaps the situation has become combative. Your interaction with an app developer or app agency shouldn't be any different though than working with any third-party contractor, vendor, or retailer. You should be kept in the loop, treated fairly, and all the work should be completed on time and with quality. But because most people have less experience with building an app than say doing a home renovation, their expectations change.
Development doesn't stop once a v1.0 app is live. Your newly launched app will need to have regular app updates to thrive. Whether it’s a new feature or a bug fix, it will be important to continue to develop and test these updates prior to shipping them to app stores. This can be challenging, however, as you need to develop these updates and distribute them to testers without interrupting the experience of users who are interacting with the live app.
App design specifications ensures an app designer's interface design and vision translates properly from the design to the development process. Yet design speccing is as tedious and time intensive as it is critical. It's prone to error, so we've tried a number of tools meant to simplify and speed up the speccing process. Many of those tools, however, fall short of making the speccing process easier and more accurate.
When a mobile app is first conceptualized, it's like a giant puzzle made up of a number of pieces of complicated, sometimes conflicting, information. At Savvy Apps, we start organizing these puzzle pieces in a meaningful way at the very beginning of the app creation process. This allows us to connect a number of complex, cross-discipline inputs before design and development begins so our team can hit the ground running with a clear vision of the app in mind.
One of the biggest issues at the start of any new app we design is thegap that exists between a contract being signedand when actual designs can be presented. There's little product momentum at this stage, leaving many designers to guess work for two primary reasons.