When it comes to mobile application development, it is easy to get bogged down in the details. Testing, creating, and debugging each component can consume much more time than you might expect. Then you enter the A / B tests and evaluate the comments of the users, and things become even more complicated. It is natural to want each piece of your application to be correct, but when you are in the middle of it, you can lose track of priorities, lose deadlines and waste resources, while your competitors get a new application in the market.
A digital product manager can help you organize your workflow and resources in a broader perspective. His job is to maintain the development and design team of the mobile application focused on offering a great product to consumers, not only through the first version or the next improvement of features but throughout the life cycle of the product. product. With the right approach to product management, you can ensure that every step you take to build, design, refine and launch an application will serve your company effectively.
Product management helps you climb
The barriers to entry for the development of mobile applications are quite low. Coding can be a lot of work, and good design requires practice, but it also does not need formal education. Anyone willing to spend time can learn to develop mobile applications, test and adjust their application, and even market and sell it.
If you make a mistake and launch a fiasco, or take a little more than you would like, that’s fine, you’ll learn some valuable lessons, and all you really will lose is the moment you immerse yourself in that application. You can build the next one better, or test it and market it more effectively. And once an application starts to work, you can also handle things on your own. You can receive comments from users, add new features, launch new versions, etc. And if it’s organized, you can do it all without really worrying about digital product management.
But as your company grows and tries to launch additional (or more ambitious) applications, it will reach a point where you will need a more formal approach to the development of mobile applications. Perhaps the team that builds your website and the team that develops the application are not coordinated effectively, and you have to spend a lot of time retouching the UX of the application to match the website. Perhaps its developers are spending too much time experimenting with new functions, while their competitors are taking their application to market. Perhaps your teams are spending too much time developing competitive ideas for the design and flow of users, when they really should decide on the product and build it.
It is easy to blame, but individual failure is not usually the main problem. Most likely, you have reached the point where you need a digital product manager to put all the pieces together. Product administration can help you return to the clarity of vision you had when you started, where everyone on the team understood the strategy, the user and the final objectives for the project.
Product managers help you understand your customers
Mobile application developers are good at understanding and meeting the technical requirements of a project. However, even though they spend a lot of time in the world of applications, they are not always good at understanding customers, or even the market. They are often motivated to face technical challenges or develop new functionalities, but from our perspective, the most successful mobile application developers are not always achieving these goals (although they often do).
For every successful application that does something that nobody has done before, there are dozens, maybe hundreds, who do something simple, in a way that users find satisfying. They are simple games with a retro appeal or programming applications with a particularly attractive workflow and attractive design. Getting those triumphs means understanding what your users want. And as Charles Liu, a user researcher at Helix points out, just asking users what they want will not give them useful answers:
“When you ask a person what he wants, you let him think within the realm of possibility, and that makes the user’s research more difficult than it should be, if he tries to create a new product or experience that still it does not exist, you’ll want to know what it is that makes people unable to do what they want with the tools they currently have, so you can design a completely new experience or a gradual improvement that helps them get the job done. ”
If you have your mobile application development team talking to your users or testers, they probably do not ask the right questions. They want to know what features to add and what new things to build: that is their goal. You may end up spending a lot of time and money building things you do not need, when you could solve the problem in a simpler and more effective way.
Your product manager is a good bridge between your customers, developers, and testers. They can put a right question to the users, work with the technical team members to analyze the best way to satiate the requirements of the users and create a product strategy so as to implement the solution. It will make better decisions, also allocate resources more efficiently and get better RoI.
Digital product managers ask the right questions internally
Most people plan projects as if they were the only ones working on it. In other words, if your developer has to add a sign-in process to a program and they understand how to do it, they will not take the time to make a flowchart at each step. They will treat the login process as a step in the project.
The same applies to your designers. If they understand all the pieces they have to design, and how they fit together, most will not write a list of 30 items: they are simply going to get to work.
But people make mistakes. They lose steps. They remember badly how they did something the first time and end up doing it inconsistently the second time. They receive confusing versions or forget to try things.
Those inconsistencies and forgotten steps can be a big problem in any project with complex dependencies. In case, you have a small error in a basic function of your mobile application, and then create many functions addition that glitchy function, it can have various serious consequences for everyone else’s work. You will have to spend more time debugging, which means a higher cost, a slower release and less happy consumers.
Your digital product manager (in collaboration with your project manager) is responsible for making sure that each step is carried out correctly and that all steps together achieve the goal of the project.
They take the time to ask questions about what steps to take at each stage, what controls and tests are needed at each point of the project, and how the different parts of the project fit together. With good management of digital products, your team spends a little more time planning things at the beginning, to save a lot of work later.
Good product managers can detect inefficiencies
The routine is comforting. Once mobile application developers find a workflow that works for them, they tend to stay with it. There really is a lot to do to spend more time worrying about the process.
Although this approach makes sense for workers, it tends to generate inefficiencies. People continue to perform tasks manually that could be automated. Companies have weekly meetings with all hands because that is how they have always done it, even if they could save time by having small department meetings in their place.
Digital product managers can use metrics to understand how the mobile application development program allocates resources and creates more efficient processes. Often, the mere fact of tracking how much time workers spend on various tasks can generate insight.
For example, an IBM study found that software evaluators are spending 30 to 50% of their time setting up test environments, more time than they spend on real tests! It is obvious, just from that statistic, that many companies need to automate part of the configuration process.
Product managers can also eliminate redundancy in their process. For example, many companies have sales and marketing teams that run independently, resulting in a large number of duplicate functionalities.
They may be creating reports on the same data, requesting similar content, creating overlapping strategies, etc. Actually, they could work more efficiently in cooperation. They created a report, coherent digital content and a marketing strategy that fulfilled both of its objectives, and so on. Not only would you be saving many hours, but you would probably have a more consistent brand strategy, with better performance.
Product management can take your business to the next level
The applications are complex. Under the bright exterior, there is a complex structure, with many pieces that need to work together in order to achieve a single purpose. Without testing and debugging, it can become unstable, inaccurate, and unreliable. A product manager is like the quality control team for your business, debugging and testing your workflow to make sure everything runs smoothly.
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