How to Make Sure You’re Building the Right App for Your Business

From a business perspective, doubling-down on tech in 2021 makes a lot of sense. Especially now when COVID has forced a lot of us to adjust to remote work and minimize physical contact. Spiceworks Ziff Davis study shows that 44% companies have significantly increased the pace of their digital transformation and over 30% of them have prioritized developing additional training resources for remote employees and improving their IT operations.

Speaking from our personal experience, nine out of ten big companies that we have talked to in these last 2 weeks find themselves in a situation where adapting to a “new normal” is harder than anticipated. They are wasting a lot of resources on things that simply don’t work in a remote setting or things that could be automated or improved with the help of various technological solutions. This is especially true for companies that have experienced rapid growth and now find themselves in a situation where they’ve outgrown their operations and need to quickly figure out how to properly scale up.

Even though investing in software is both mandatory and exciting (because creating a piece of software is both an expression of ourselves as a team and a reflection of what we feel is missing in the world), this is never a low-risk, sure-fire move.

A survey conducted by KPMG at the end of 2020 has brought disturbing information to light: 70% of organizations have suffered at least one project failure during the course of the year. If we translate these failures to dollars, the amount of money that has been wasted in this sector is disturbing.

That’s why we at Share IT go to extra lengths to ensure that our customers are investing their precious resources into the right thing. During our last internal meeting, we have discussed that this sort of information shouldn’t live behind closed doors. We have decided to bring the info we share with our potential customers to the web and make our latest blog post just about that.

So, without further delay, let’s dig in. Let’s look at some moves you can pull to make sure if the app you want to build is actually worth the effort.

Invest in R&D to See if Your Paper Plane Has the Potential to Fly Before You Start Building It

• What the company actually needs is not something that they’re asking us to do
• They want us to build something for them that already exists and costs less than the actual development of their request

At Share IT, we believe in doing business ethically. We don’t want to accept a project and start copy-pasting something that already exists just because someone is offering us money. Our core values are to be helpful and honest, beyond everything else.

In order to do that, we need to do business the way we like it: from the ground up. To do that, we need to come up with premises and test them.

This is the proof of concept stage. This stage is extremely important. This is where we test the ideas that we have and see if they actually make sense to execute. As a part of our most popular package, we do R&D before we talk about app development logistics.

Take Time to Build a Product Plan

Once the R&D work is done and we get our hands on some hard evidence that will make us super confident that the project we’re thinking about executing has a place in this world, it’s time to set things into action. This is where we talk about building a rock-solid product development plan.

Roadmap’s survey from 2019 has made it super clear that there’s still a lot of friction in the product/app development space. According to the results of the survey, over 50% of product managers expressed that they feel that their employers lack focus and clarity in their strategy. For a lot of companies out there, especially bigger ones, top-down directives often come in nebulous forms. The guidance teams need to move the needle isn’t always there.

That’s why, above all, companies that want to invest in the creation of software need to prioritize creating a well-defined product plan.

A detailed product plan sorts in-house priorities and makes it easier to build the types of app/product experiences that will be valuable to the end-user (internal and external). In addition to this, investment in a product plan helps minimize all issues related to communication from the leadership team.

Regardless of what type of product or app you’re building, the end-goal is always the same - get from point A to point B efficiently.

That, of course, requires a clear sense of activities and priorities. Creating a comprehensive product plan ensures the effort you put into developing new products isn’t wasted on tasks that don’t add value to the process.

What Exactly Do We Mean By “Creating a Product Plan”?

The goal of every product plan is to clarify all the moving parts that need to come together to help us get from point A to point B.

In addition to scoping the whole project and figuring out what’s realistic and what’s not from a resource perspective, the product plan should also include insights into potential roadblocks. Keeping detailed documentation about the potential bottlenecks that you’ve identified throughout the planning process is of great importance. Anything that could delay the development process needs to be known upfront and approached from a fresh perspective. Doing a poor job when it comes to assessing risks and roadblocks is nine times out of ten what causes software development projects to fail.

The main goal here is to see the full picture before you decide to “paint it” so that you can refine and optimize workflows at the right time and build templates for the different types of work that need to be done at each stage of the process.

Eliminate Tech Debt

On almost every project, timing is an issue. All customers, regardless of the niche and industry they operate in, are pressured by deadlines. In some cases, the deadlines are orchestrated by the leadership and that creates tension; in other scenarios, people are just impatient.

Regardless of the reason, most customers try to enforce rapid development because they believe that this is how they will stay afloat and remain competitive.

This type of pressure often does more harm than good because it creates tech debt. For those who are not familiar with this term, tech debt is a type of problem that occurs when fast delivery becomes the focus and quality falls behind. When pursued to produce something that “meets the deadlines” instead of “what is foolproof”, developers tend to burnout and create work that doesn’t fully represent their genius.

Tech debt is a problem that grows in severity overtime. When you try to scale what you made under super tight deadlines, roadblocks caused by sloppy code tend to surface their ugliness.

Feeling Overwhelmed? There’s a Solution for Everything

In the realm of product development, not everyone is tech savvy. Sometimes all you need is someone who will help you get your idea into the real world without worrying about the code. At Share IT, we believe different roles bring different values to the table. If innovators were required to be brilliant idea makers as well as their executors - we probably wouldn’t get too far.

You can count on Share IT for all your web and app development: just send us a message and we’ll get back to you ASAP.