Defining Success for Your Mobile App Project
Posted on by Arnav K

Defining Success for Your Mobile App Project

[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid”][vc_column_text]Embarking on a mobile app project is a lot like planning a vacation.

Anyone who has ever planned a vacation understands that it can be a daunting task for a number of reasons: Where do you go? What can you afford? What experiences are available? Will there be free wifi? Who is responsible for the big stuff like tickets and documents? How many people are coming? Where can you find reviews of the destination? And most importantly, how will you make sure everyone enjoys the vacation and ends up with memories that will last a lifetime?

Ideally, you want the kind of vacation that’s so good it makes you want to come back again and again. You would even recommend it to a friend. It didn’t break the bank, but you had the most amazing time. All of this is the true measurement of vacation success.

Building a mobile app has a similar trajectory.

You need to know where you’re going, and where you’re starting. You need to know who will use the app, and which types of people you can group together. What’s the journey for each of these users? What do they need along the way? Who will be making the big decisions about what features are a must, and which are nice-to-haves? Who will decide when the project is done? Who controls the budget?

Much like with planning a vacation, planning a mobile app project that is successful, both during the development phase and once it’s live and launched, is about understanding your goals and laying out a process that achieves them. Once you truly know the goal of your app, you can set success criteria and project milestones to make sure you stay on target, no matter what aspect of the project you’re working on.

When you define success with your team upfront, it will guide you throughout the process. With the help of today’s blog, you’ll get clarity on who you’ll need on your team, how to know what responsibilities they should have, what different success criteria exists, and how to pick the right success factors for your app.

Internal stakeholder team

Whether you’re building an app in-house or working with a vendor, the most important task for determining your app project’s success overall is defining who all of your internal stakeholders are.

You’ll need to determine: who plays a role in defining the scope of the project, who is involved in funding or setting the budget, who will define what and how you will measure success, who is responsible for making the final decision when needed, and ultimately who will be the voice of the customer/client throughout.

Project Stakeholders – These are the people within your team that are representative of all key areas in the business. These include but are not limited to marketing/product marketing, finance, technology, data, operations, and design. This team should make up a small but autonomous group from all key areas of your business that will not only define project scope and needs but will also develop the measurement framework by which you define success.

Internal Project Manager – While this is essential if you are building the experience internally, it is of particular importance if you make the decision to work with a third-party vendor team. You will ultimately need to assign a Project Owner within your business to ensure that there is frequent and effective communication between teams that will be key to keeping your project on track and on schedule.

This person will be the primary contact for all vendor/stakeholder questions, requests for data/information and decisions needed, and is essential to ensuring there is no drift in the overall project scope. This person is an essential resource in determining the project build and ROI in particular.

VOC (Voice of the Customer) – It is important to assign the voice of your customer to a key stakeholder throughout the project. A well-thought-out app experience that leverages the state of the art technology and an advanced feature set is only effective if it serves your customers.

It is therefore essential that you make all decisions with your customers in mind. It should be the final “gut check” on everything you do:

  • How will this help them?
  • How will it remove accessibility barriers?
  • How will it surprise and delight them?
  • How will it make them want to come back again and again?

After you launch your app, your KPIs (key performance indicators) should be closely aligned to customer experience and the metrics that measure this.

Decision Maker – A key component of your primary stakeholder team is the person who is able to make decisions that are crucial to the success and progress of your project. This person ultimately owns the budget and is directly accountable to ensuring the project is on track and on budget. They are empowered to make the final calls on all key decisions. This is of particular importance as you engage with a third-party vendor to build your app.

While the day-to-day communications would still fall to the project manager, the decision maker is empowered to make final calls on behalf of the larger stakeholder group and the business to ensure you have velocity of decision-making, keeping the project on track and moving forward. While this is often the CEO or founder within the company, it may be a proxy who is empowered as part of the stakeholder team to perform this function.

Ultimately, you are looking to build accountability into your project as a measurement of success. When you have a key group of people from diverse areas of the business that are empowered and directly accountable to the outcomes and KPIs of the app project, your likelihood of success goes up exponentially. With regular communication, project review cycles, and customer experience checks applied to every decision made, you are setting up your project for success from the outset.

360-degree view of your target customer

Now that you have an engaged and – more importantly – accountable representative project stakeholder team, it’s time to get down to the essential work of defining your target audience for your app experience.

While you may have an idea of who your core customers are, few teams are able to communicate clearly who their top customers are, their needs, and how a mobile experience built for them will align with your business goals.

If you had to name your top customer/client and how much they spent with you in 2020, could you? If you were asked to clearly articulate the demographics and behaviours of your most loyal and engaged group of top customers, could you? If you had to name the top three things that are commonly communicated to your customer care teams by your customers, could you?

The only way to measure the success of your product or service is to fundamentally understand (and measure) everything about the people that use it.

Realistically, most teams in an organization are more able to communicate product/service benefits and company financial or growth performance and less able to articulate clear and concise customer/audience profiles.

Building a new app experience or building upon and improving an existing app experience is the perfect opportunity to nail down a clear and concise customer profile(s) and align this view across the organization with success KPIs. Companies who are making decisions tightly aligned to their customers and customer feedback loops are better able to measure success overall.

Customer KPIs

Below are some key benchmarks that will help your core stakeholder team determine who your target customers/audiences are and how you will define success by understanding the users in a meaningful way.

Available Audience – Who is the specific available audience and what does this audience look like in terms of numbers and propensity to download the app and use it? What is the market for this product and what is important to that market?

For example, imagine you are building an app that helps hockey parents in Canada connect with coaching staff, track schedules for games, track player stats, trade equipment amongst other users, and chat in-app with other parents in their respective teams. You first want to understand what the available audience is for this experience. Based on available data, how many parents are there that could/would use this type of app?

This will help you measure critical success factors like penetration in the market, market share overall if there are competitor products in the market, and give you a sense of the overall technology load that you are building for.

Existing/Known Data About Your Target Customer – This is an optimal opportunity for your core stakeholders (in conjunction with your vendor discovery team if you are working with a partner) to brainstorm and present existing data on what is known about your end user/existing customer base. Remember, you are building a technology-based platform to create a very specific customer experience, so it is important to understand what you concretely know about your customers/clients/end users

  • What demographics of your customers are essential to understanding your target audiences? Languages spoken, platforms used currently, devices used, frequency of use/demand for products and services, age ranges, geographical considerations, and accessibility considerations all come to mind.
  • Are they tech savvy?
  • Are they using another app currently?
  • Are there commonly shared and communicated challenges from your customers either directly or indirectly?
  • Have there been major shifts in their day-to-day lives (e.g. COVID-19) that have fundamentally shifted their “normal” behaviours?

Take a data set of your most engaged customers/clients and create a detailed profile of this optimal customer – what is important to them, how they shop or engage with your platform currently, the specific challenges they need solved, and how you will create real value that does not currently exist in the space.

This will also give you a clear understanding of what you don’t know but need to learn about your target audience and how you will ultimately create an opportunity for learning more (via data collection) as part of your app build.

Market Fit, Market Differentiation, Functional Differentiation – This is an important part of building your customer personas as the guiding framework for your app project. Once you have gone through the exercise of looking at your available audience, you now have to look at the “fit” for your product/service in the marketplace. This has huge implications when defining the scope of your project overall.

Essentially, here you’re looking at what problem or challenge your product/service solves for, how your product/service will solve these challenges or problems better or differently than competitors currently in the space, and what features, enhancements, and feature sets you will offer to bridge the gaps that currently exist.

Your stakeholders are looking for those key whitespace opportunities that create real value, a differentiated experience, and a competitive advantage compared to existing products in the market. These ultimately become the contributing factors for success.

Defining shared KPIs

With a solid understanding of your target audience shared across the organization, and a solid understanding of the experience you are looking to build, how will you definitely know that you have solved their “problem”? How will you correlate what you have built to what you deem successful? The short answer is KPIs. Choosing a clear set of data indicators that will not only measure but also inform all future decisions is integral to defining success.

Measure what we treasure and treasure what we measure

So what do you measure? The short answer is: it depends on who you ask in your organization.

As noted above, there are several ways to measure across various departments, but how does this help a team measure overall success of your app project? Ultimately, your stakeholder team will need to define and agree what you will measure, clearly communicate this across the organization, and set up a repeatable process where you are sharing and discussing what you are measuring over time. This also determines how data gathering is built into your app project so you can harness and leverage all of the raw data you will need to measure success in the future.

Aligning on an agreed upon “dashboard” of KPIs at the outset of the project is the glue that binds the stakeholder team, aligns internal resources and efforts, allows for experimentation and testing, and ensures that if you are working with a vendor partner to build your app experience, they are clearly aligned with how you will measure success and will align the build and maintenance of the app experience accordingly.

Everything you measure, regardless of the teams that are measuring, must map to your overall business goals. The company as a whole (in part the responsibility of the stakeholder group) will work together to clearly map out and define the business goals. Once that is done, all other measurements within departmental teams must directly align to these goals.

Three key areas of company (and app) performance

Most companies align overall performance against three key areas:

Growth: new audiences or markets, new ways to engage this audience and create resonance and loyalty, net new products or services to engage, new revenue streams or higher revenue from existing channels.

Profitability & Efficiency: The ability to increase overall profitability by doing things quickly, more efficiently across all areas of the business.

Customer Service, Retention, LTV: A customer/client base that is engaged and happy with the overall app experience will be loyal, spend more and prove valuable over time as your costs of acquiring new customers is pushed down.

While departmental teams will continue to measure success based on their areas of direct influence, it is essential to define these core and shared business goals to ensure that your shared dashboard is directly tied into these goals at every step of the process. The best and most effective way to ensure that this happens is to directly tie accountability (read: bonuses, salary increases, and promotions) to these app project metrics and KPIs.

Common team metrics

As a starting point, let’s look at some of the key ways that members of your stakeholder group and their functional KPIs would likely define measurement or measure the success of your app. Please note that this is a list of common metrics and is not inclusive of every way that teams are measuring success of their app projects

Marketing Teams

The marketing team will fundamentally be a strong voice of the customer and will look at all KPIs as they directly relate to customer behaviour. Some of these include but are not limited to:

  • Monthly/daily active users
  • Downloads (how many people have downloaded your app)
  • Opens (how many people open and use the app and what is the frequency of these actions)
  • Revenue (lift in revenue or change in revenue and recurring revenue)
  • Lifetime value of a customer (LTV)
  • Cost per acquisition
  • Engagement (how are your customers interacting, purchasing, frequency that they come back)
  • Conversion
  • Basket size (how much they purchase and changes or lifts over time)
  • Referrals
  • Reviews (direct product or service reviews as well as app store reviews or industry review platforms)
  • Customer service feedback or direct customer feedback
  • Direct response to offers or campaigns in market (coupon codes, loyalty offers)
  • New product or service testing and the associated customer feedback loop
  • Key demographics and traffic sources (where they live, their age, their average income, average purchase, how they found you)

Finance Teams
The finance team will fundamentally care about the nuts of bolts of the investment related to your app project, including profit and loss and maintaining a tight control over budget.

  • Revenue (net new or changes in revenue over time)
  • CPA (cost per acquisition and return on investment in these costs)
  • Cost reductions (efficiencies to be found across all company functions)
  • ROI (what is the direct return on all dollars spent, including labour costs associated with building and maintaining your app project, vendor costs, and efficiencies)

Technology/Product Teams
The technology or product team is going to closely watch the daily and weekly health of the app and the satisfaction of customers.

  • App store reviews
  • Monthly/daily active users
  • Downtime
  • Load times
  • Conversion rates
  • Bounce rates
  • Retention rates
  • User actions per session
  • Net promoter scores
  • Customer satisfaction scores and feedback
  • LTV

Design (UX/UI) Teams
The design team focuses on the in-app experience and how the app handles and feels to the users themselves. Instead of looking at quantitative results, they are looking at qualitative metrics to understand how best to improve the app for the user.

  • Abandons within features
  • Overall engagement
  • Path to conversion/conversion rate (can users easily navigate through to conversion points and are they converting as intended)
  • Accessibility feedback
  • Direct customer/user feedback and satisfaction
  • App store ratings/reviews
  • Referrals
  • Users are able to do more in less time overall (e.g. autofills, predictive experiences)
  • NPS (Net Promoter Scores) overall

The critical juncture exists here between what individual teams measure and what the company will measure to gauge success of the overall app project. Individual team metrics allow for a more detailed and in-depth conversation around specific behaviours, testing and experimentation, and – most importantly – direct feedback from your clients or customers. They provide the “whys” behind what you are seeing in your dashboard.

Don’t be afraid to evolve your KPIs over time

It is also essential to understand that KPIs can and should change over time. As your business, and more importantly your customers evolve, so should your benchmarks of success. For instance, you may look at the rate of adoption by your users as a KPI because you are launching a new technology into the marketplace as part of your app experience. As your customers (and the overall market) become more comfortable with this new technology, you would evolve your adoption metric into a retention metric.

Do not be complicit with a “set it and forget it” approach. Evolving how and what you measure will ultimately help you continue to define the success of your app over time and will inform crucial decisions around the next evolution of your app project.

Budgeting

Budget is perhaps the most often-used measure of success (although not always an accurate measure of success) when it comes to a project of this nature. Did you get your money’s worth? Did it further your business goals as a direct result of the spend? Can you clearly show a good return on the investment?

The biggest factor in using budget as a measure of success is ensuring you have set proper budgeting from the start as part of your app project goals. Good project scoping at this stage means fewer financial surprises down the road and ultimately a final product that is closely aligned with your business goals and KPIs.

Good budgeting is as much a measure of realistic expectations as it is a measurement tool for success. Essentially, it is the delicate balance between what you want versus what you can afford. So where do you start?

This is the first task of your internal stakeholder group prior to embarking on any next steps, including engaging a vendor partner or project team. There are a number of different variables to consider as part of your budgeting process.

Resources

This is the opportunity to look at all of your resources as part of your internal team and then compare them to the resources needed to complete the project. You’ll then assign a budget to bridge these gaps.

  • Do you have the development resources needed to complete the complexities of the project?
  • Do you have a design team that is skilled in both UX (User Experience – ensuring all aspects of the app meets the needs of your customers/clients and it is a seamless experience overall) and UI (User Interface – anything the user interacts with including screens and touchscreens, keyboards, sounds etc.)?
  • Do you have an experienced and skilled technology team that can match your needs to technology that will solve your major customer/client challenges towards meeting your goals?
  • Do you have experienced project managers, scrum masters who will ensure that the project is on track, on budget, and – most importantly – on schedule?

This is where your stakeholder team will need to be tough on themselves to ensure you have an accurate forecast of what is possible internally and what resources you will need to seek from an external vendor. The vast majority of organizations seek external vendor partnerships with app development companies for these projects as it is often challenging to allocate so many dedicated key resources to a new project without leaving gaps in the running of your day-to-day business.

A vendor who specializes in developing and building app experiences will have a well-oiled machine of talent that is deeply experienced in your industry and can leverage the 360-degree view of the project from the outset. This ensures that you are considering all major components of the project that will make it successful. This is what they do – every day – with clients just like you.

This is also an effective way to realistically budget for your project and have reasonable expectations about how much it will cost so you can go back to your company goal setting and align spend vs. expected benefits.

So how exactly do you get to a reasonable budget for your project and what goes into setting a budget that allows you to build a best in class experience for your customers/clients while ensuring that you keep the company efficient and profitable as part of the process? The answer is, it depends on what you are looking for. In the next section, you’ll see a list of all of the key considerations that your stakeholder team or vendor partner will take into consideration as part of the budgeting process.

Project Complexity

This is another important task of your core stakeholder team, and arguably the most important task. It pertains to not just budget but also alignment across your organization on what you are building and how it will help you meet your business goals in both the near and long term.

This task is essentially detailing all of your feature sets for your application. Some of these items include but are not limited to:

  • Brand new experience or building on an existing experience – Are you looking to build a brand new customer app experience? Or are you looking to build upon an existing app and what are you looking to improve, add onto, or change?
  • Chat – Do you want to provide your customers/clients with a chat function to be able to speak directly to customer service? Do you need the ability to have live chat functions between a health provider and patient?
  • Rating and Reviews – Do you want to be able to allow customers to access and write reviews or do you want to have integrations of reviews from other platforms?
  • Notifications – Do you want to be able to send push notifications to your customers about new products/services, sales, or events?
  • Map Integration – Do you need to have GPS or a live mapping functionality as part of your app?
  • AI Experiences – Do you have plans to leverage artificial intelligence as part of your platform, including “ virtual try on” or “virtual space planning”?
  • Photos and Videos – Do you have plans to include photos and videos as part of your platform? Do you want your users to have the ability to use this function?
  • Advanced Search – What will the search functionality look like? Do you want customers to be able to filter, provide multiple search terms, or save results?
  • Offline Support – What capabilities will you need with regards to automated support functions that will address preliminary or simplified customer queries when customer service/support is not available?
  • In-App Purchase – Do you require your customers to have the ability to purchase directly within your app experience? What integrations with OEMs/platforms will you need to make this happen?
  • Languages and Regional Functionality – where does your target audience live and what specific services will you provide for in-country language support? Are there regional requirements around privacy or accessibility?
  • Timing – What are the requirements for when you want/need this to be launched? If you need a complex, brand new app experience launched in market in six months or less, that requires an army of dedicated resources working through the process from discovery to MVP to launch in order to meet this timing. Discussing internally or with your partner vendor about go/no-go stages, blockers, and milestones will help you accomplish this and set realistic timelines.

Mapping all of this out in advance will be essential in determining what you want to build and what is required for development, and will help you stay aligned to the needs and wants of your customers. It should be stated here that this is a daunting and extremely challenging task as there may be conflicting requirements or asks/needs from your various stakeholders.

Ultimately, finding unanimous agreement from your stakeholder team is crucial as this provides the essential framework for what you are building and how/what you will measure as a benchmark of success for years to come.

This is also an opportunity to engage an experienced and skilled vendor partner, as they have deep experience in guiding the team through this process and creating an opportunity for alignment with all key project stakeholders. They will help you determine a realistic timeline, create a dedicated resource requirements list, and can provide a preliminary budget based on this scoping exercise.

How does this work in the real world?

So what does this look like in the real world? Let’s take a look at one of our clients as a means to understand how this works.

We recently developed a full-scale, brand new app experience for an international retail/ecommerce player in the direct-to-consumer food/grocery industry. Our client had existing brick-and-mortar locations as well as an online web experience, and was looking to expand their customer base by offering a digital-first app experience that also integrated with the in-store and ecommerce customer experience.

Discovery

As part of the discovery process, we worked with the client to clearly define company goals. The company goals were aligned to global growth (more customers globally), customer experience and satisfaction, and net new revenue from this new platform. By clearly defining these core measurements, we then built this into every part of the process and encouraged a frequent and transparent sharing of these measurements throughout the development process. This also included looking closely at how we could build in key data collection as part of the app experience to ensure that they were able to continue to look at key data as it directly related to user behavior.

We also spoke at great length with our client about the industry in general. What were their direct and indirect competitors, what did they currently have in the market, and were there critical considerations about when they wanted to launch this product into their customers’ hands?

With this information, we worked with the client to dig deep into who their customers are. We looked at:

  • Geography
  • Existing sales
  • How their customers currently engage with the online platform and with in-store technology
  • Key demographics of their customers (both existing and potential)
  • Revenue as it pertains to the most profitable products across the board
  • Direct customer feedback

We then spoke to all internal stakeholders to define the aspirational experience they were looking to build to meet and exceed their customers’ expectations.

How does this work in the real world?

The next biggest discussion came around what exactly they were looking to build. We had lengthy discussions that started with moonshots and all-encompassing brainstorm sessions around features and customer experiences. Together, we determined a clearly-defined set of features and functionalities that laddered directly to their overall company goals for the next few years.

We had deep discussions between the internal team and the project team around integration across all company assets, including the in-store experience and their online experience, and made the customer UX/UI a top priority to create a seamless and delightful customer experience from start to finish.

We helped our client get out of the way of their customers and allow them to do what they wanted to do – in this case, a combination of shopping across three different areas with the purpose of purchase and decision-support for purchases. It was the balance between what they wanted features-wise versus what they had budget for, and what would help them grow while deepening and evolving an exceptional integrated customer experience for existing and new customers.

Project plans and expectations

With clear information about what their company goals and KPIs were, as well as key info around timing, customers, competitor data, market gaps, and the essential features and experiences the client stakeholder team wanted to create for their customers, we were able to set a realistic timeline and a budget to suit.

This created some success benchmarks for us as well as the internal stakeholder team. Their KPIs became our benchmarks, and we focused the feature set, overall development, and launch timing on meeting and exceeding these benchmarks.

How did we know we were successful? We have a client who feels good about the process, the project was delivered on time and as outlined, and – most importantly – they are seeing a direct lift in the core KPIs and company goals that align with customer experience, such as growth, revenue, and customer satisfaction.

 

Measuring the success of your app project is about intrinsically understanding the process of building an app itself. It is about defining what a true return on investment looks like for your individual company or team by defining global company goals and how each team and project’s KPIs ladder to these global goals. It is about deeply understanding who you are building the experience for and a relentless commitment to making decisions as closely aligned to the customer as possible.

With a well-balanced and representative stakeholder team that is not only deeply aligned with each other on company goals, empowered to make key decisions, and is customer-centric, you are setting yourself up for success from the outset. It is the commitment to alignment, transparency, and accountability that will guide you through the process and help you to measure true success.

You need to commit to balancing what you want to build with what you can or are willing to invest financially, and you must prioritize your customers’ needs above all else – ultimately creating lifelong and loyal customers that fuel your company goals.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]