Tips on New Mobile Product Development for Tech Entrepreneurs

In this post, you’re going to learn tips on new mobile product development so that you can launch a custom mobile app that people love.

This quick guide contains information on the following:

Tip 1 – Create an Effective Product Strategy
Tip 2 – Identify Goals of Different Personas by Creating a Customer Journey Map
Tip 3 – Enhance Product Management by Leveraging Design Thinking
Tip 4 – Prioritize Individuals and Interactions with Agile Framework

If you want your new mobile product development process to be effective and improve the success rate of your idea, you’ll like this post.

Let’s dive right in.

Tip 1 – Create an Effective Product Strategy

There are three primary components of an effective product strategy – market and needs, key differentiators, and business goals.

Market and Needs

Before starting the new mobile product development process, make sure you have information on who the target audience is. For Instagram, the target audience includes brands and people of a specific age group (mostly millennials but not limited to).

Google has many products, such as Search, Analytics, Adwords, and more. Out of all the listed products, Search and YouTube might be widely used across age groups and countries. On the other hand, Analytics is generally targeted towards marketers and entrepreneurs.

Another vital component of an effective new mobile product development strategy is identifying the needs or pain points of the target audience. Consider Google Search and Microsoft Bing. While the algorithm of Google Search undergoes minor changes regularly, the frequency of updates in Microsoft Bing is comparatively less.

Businesses that follow good search engine optimization (SEO) practices expect their webpages to rank well in the search engine results page. This unique need is satisfied with Google Search. Fair play is also one of the many reasons behind the dominance of Google Search over its competitors. So, you need to identify real pain points (gathered through interviews and case studies and not just by browsing the Internet) that your new mobile product will solve.

Key Differentiators

There has to be a certain number of unique selling propositions (USPs) that can make the target audience choose your new product over the competitors. Carefully study your competitors and figure out different reasons where you can add value. Consider the example of two platforms – Android and iOS. Android gives more freedom for custom mobile app development as compared to iOS.

Brands are hyperactive to differentiate themselves from the competition. The restaurant aggregator, Zomato, banks on quick delivery and better visibility. The carbonated soft drink manufacturer, PepsiCo, differentiates itself from the competition by offering a wide variety of flavors such as Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Pepsi Zero Sugar, and more.

Business Goals

To understand how the new mobile product development idea will benefit you, you need to identify the business goals. New mobile product development business goals include:

• You have identified a need and developing a new product will generate revenue for your business
• You already have an existing range of offerings and the new product will compliment them
• The new product will add value by improving your existing brand image
• Developing the product will improve the operational efficiency and reduce the cost in the process

To elaborate this point further, let us consider new mobile product development examples.

The automobile manufacturer, Porsche, has a native mobile app – Porsche Golf Circle. The native mobile app can be used by Porsche clients to connect with passionate golf players from around the world. Furthermore, new content is produced regularly on subjects such as golf, travel, and more.

The toy company, Lego, recaptured their lost market share by launching the Ideas platform. By leveraging the Lego Ideas platform, fans can submit their concepts, and the selected ones are turned into sets for sale. The creator gets one percent of the royalties.

Click to enlarge

Before creating a flow chart of new product development strategy, consider taking a look at The Product Vision Board tool developed by Roman Pilcher.

Tip 2 – Identify Goals of Different Personas by Creating a Customer Journey Map

Creating a simple customer journey map involves identifying five whys and steps that a consumer may take on your new product to achieve a goal. Depending on your business objectives, the customer journey map stages will vary. Examine the importance of customer journey mapping with the following benefits:

Process Optimization – Customer journey mapping identifies those steps that add less value. For example – From viewing the product to placing the order, if an online shopper has to go through seven steps, then by mapping the customer journey, the number of steps can be reduced.

Become Customer Friendly – Adding value through customer journey optimization improves the user experience (UX) and engages the user across touchpoints.

Provides Context – To create a simple customer journey map, you need to consider the possible scenarios. This includes planning push notifications ahead of time, the tone of language in email marketing, marketing assets for a few months, and more.

The customer journey map removes the frustration and confusion for both – you and the user of your new product. One such area is onboarding. Creating a customer journey map improves first-time UX, which is essential to welcome a user and enable him to know more about your app-based product.

Tip 3 – Enhance Product Management Through Design Thinking

Businesses are continually making changes to provide improved UX and create new human-centric products. Design thinking steps are realized with empathy, as designers often don’t foresee how their new mobile product will tackle an ill-defined problem.

The design thinking project scope goes beyond creating human-centric products. It can be applied across sectors such as education, health, government, technology, and more to develop services that add value as well as products that reduce human effort. In a TEDTalks video, Tim Brown, an authority on design thinking, shares his views on the role of design thinking to answer more significant questions such as clean water access, and more.

The Hasso-Plattner-Institut at Stanford created the design thinking process to bring innovation in new products. The iterative design thinking process steps are – Understand, Observe, Define the Point of View, Ideate, Prototype, and Test.

Understand – In the first step of the design thinking process, you need to understand the problem at hand. After conducting thorough research, you need to fill the knowledge gaps. It would help if you define assumptions and consider insights gained through experience.

Observe – Using qualitative research methods from different branches in social science such as Anthropology, Psychology, and more; you need to understand the potential users of your new product. Ideally, you need to understand their expectations, current dynamics, and more. You can also consider reviews of products created by your competitors as an essential source of information.

Define the Point of View – In this step, emotions and target audience are of prime importance. By creating multiple personas and associating emotions with each can enable you to develop empathy in a context-specific situation.

Ideate – Your new product needs to include features that are appreciated by the target audience. Even greater importance should be given to the problems that your product solves. You can come up with many ideas, but after many iterations, you may come across one truly innovative idea.

Prototype – After many ideas are generated, a minimum viable product (MVP) is created to test the market. Based on the feedback of users, changes can be made in the MVP over several iterations. The prototype step makes it possible for you to convert your idea into tangible innovation.

Test – The design thinking process is iterative. The MVP developed in the previous step goes through in-depth analyses before more third-party integrations can be added to it. During the test phase, core functions are tested, such as usability, intuitiveness, and more.

Tip 4 – Prioritize Individuals and Interactions with Agile Framework

The ability to respond to a change can be leveraged through an agile development cycle. The framework is based on 12 guiding practices to ensure the timely delivery of a customer-centric product. Depending on your business requirements, different agile frameworks can be applied, such as scrum, lean software development, scaled agile, and more. Here are two agile frameworks used by FATbit:

Scrum Agile Framework

Scrum Framework Image

The term “Scrum” was first coined in 1986 by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka while writing a white paper titled – The New Product Development Game. This framework is commonly used to develop custom mobile apps. It complements the business goals of a startup or a large organization such as startup-friendly mobile product development cost and improved time-to-market (TTM).

The Scrum methodology complements the practice of continuous integration (CI) to make code changes in the repository. After gaining insights from the market, changes can be made in your new product in a matter of a few hours. Furthermore, CI decreases the number of hours required for bug-fixing as compared to other software development models.

In most cases, each sprint is around 2 to 3 weeks long. Large enterprises often approach FATbit with requirements that require long-term planning. So, how do you combine long-term projects with agile? Having worked with billion-dollar enterprises on projects exceeding a year, Scrum agile framework can be leveraged by creating smart releases and building a product roadmap that evolves.

Lean Software Development

The lean software development (LSD) framework was adapted from the Toyota production system. In 2003, Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck formally introduced the concept in their book – Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit.

Using lean development eliminates exhausting time and resources on features that are not preferred by the target audience, ineffective communication, multitasking, unnecessary use of complex solutions, and more.

By saving time and resources, leveraging a lean software development approach makes it ideal for the development of MVP.

The Road Ahead

Today’s business world is fiercely competitive. The Android and iOS app stores are filled with millions of products, but millions appreciate few. To develop a customer-centric solution, new mobile product development strategy formulation, and implementation, knowing your audience, speed, and flexibility are essential. To succeed, you can opt for a custom mobile app development service.