Great Products Consulting

Category: Grow

  • What happens after you’ve launched your platform or app?

    What happens after you’ve launched your platform or app?

    You’ve made it! You’ve launched your online platform or mobile app and you hopefully have a steady stream of new users and customers. Now what?!   This article will give you an overview of life after launch.

    If you’ve read my previous article on product development and product management, you’ll know that your launch is just the beginning of your journey. Your platform or app has to be managed through its lifecycle. There’s a constant cycle of updates and improvements that you need to make on your product and you’ve got to be actively involved in what these should be. You also need to manage the day-to-day running of your product. There are three main areas to look at:

    1. Operations and Fixes
    2. Maintenance and Compliance
    3. New Features
    Operations and Fixes

    A platform or app is a 24 x 7 x 365 day product. That means that you’ve got to make sure that your product is available to your users all of the time. If it’s a mobile app that resides solely on a user’s phone, then you may have a bit of leeway, but if you’re an online SaaS (software as a service) platform or if your app links to a database somewhere, you need to make sure your users can access it whenever they want. Areas to think about here include customer support (how do they contact you when something goes wrong?), backup and recovery (how do you get your platform working again if it falls apart?), and issue management (how do you track and fix problems that arise through the everyday use of your product?)

    Maintenance and Compliance

    If you’ve got a mobile app, then maintaining your app is going to be a regular and potentially costly activity. Since your app resides on a mobile phone, you’ve got to keep it up-to-date with the latest phone operating system. Otherwise, it might stop working! Every time Apple or Google releases new major or incremental software updates for their phones, you’ve got to determine what changes might be required for your app.

    On the web side, maintenance updates will depend on how your platform was built. If it’s using Wordpress, then you need to stay current with new Wordpress and plugin updates. If you’re using a framework, and this changes, then you have to decide whether to adopt the new change – and so on.

    There’s also something called “compliance” and this is stuff that you’ve got to address. If you don’t, there’s a risk that you’ll get fined from a government or regulatory body. Examples of compliance may include privacy rules (e.g. GDPR) or the way in which you accept payments on your site.

    New Features

    This is the fun one! These are the changes that you make to your platform or app to make it better. However, you shouldn’t just whack in any new feature that comes to mind. Go through the product development process again and evaluate all of the new ideas that you’ve got for our product. A proper review of your ideas will allow you to identify which features you should spend money on and which ones you shouldn’t. Think about the tangible and justifiable benefits that the change will have on your platform or app. Things such as return on investment (the profit you make on any money that you spend) and the payback period (how long it takes to cover the cost of the investment) are important to consider. Don’t just add it because you think it’ll be cool! Research shows that 80% of features in applications have low or no value based on how often they’re used. So, think about whether you really need to make the investment or not.

    Key reasons for adding new features might include:

    • Aligning with your company vision and mission
    • Improving an existing user experience
    • Matching functionality in a competitor product
    • Addressing a new market that aligns with your strategic goals
    • Generating new revenue via a new opportunity
    What does this mean to you?

    If you have set up suitable processes for managing your day-to-day operations and issue management, I would start there. You want to keep any disruptions to users to a minimum, so having these processes in place will give you some piece of mind and will stop the panic when things go wrong (because they will!)

    There are a lot of ongoing costs for running and maintaining your platform or app, so you need to do is set aside a budget for it. Generally, you’re going to spend about 15-20% of your original development costs on maintenance and updates. Some industries may be higher than others due to ongoing compliance changes, and you may spend more on improvements in the early years as your user base grows.    

    Make sure your developers stay on top of your maintenance updates. Depending on the updates required, you might need to tell them what changes to make. For example, if there’s new legislation around privacy, you have to figure out what that means from a business point of view, and then work with the developer to determine what updates need to be made to your platform or app.  

    When it comes to adding new features, you should think about how often you want to launch them. If you’ve got a few things on the list, you might consider grouping them together and launching them at the same time. Having a plan and a process for how you identify and validate new features will ensure that you’re choosing the right things to build.

    Launching your platform or app is actually the beginning of an ongoing exercise in operations, maintenance and enhancement. Make sure your platform or app is looking at all of these things to ensure that your business can grow.

    Are you ready to turn your good idea into a great product?
    My idea to launch checklist is your plain-English guide to getting there.
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  • The Story of the GPC Logo (and what it means to you)

    The Story of the GPC Logo (and what it means to you)

    For today’s blog post, I thought I’d share a story with you. This one, like most stories, comes with a lesson for you about building and growing your web platform or mobile app.

    The story begins about ten month ago, when a young (ahem) lady decided to go out on her own and start a new business. Even though a lot of people are shunning business cards these days, this lady decided that they were still worthwhile for handing out at networking events (and to give to family and friends!) So, to start, a logo and branding needed to be created.

    As most marketers will tell you, to create your brand, you need to understand a bit about who you are, what you want to do, what you stand for, who you plan to sell to, etc. All of these go to influence some important visual elements of your brand – the name of your business or product, the colours you use and the fonts that you pick.

    A logo – basically consists of some colours, and maybe an image and some text. Some might even have a picture. Seemingly a simple thing – but it says so much about your business, which is why it’s so important. You want people to say nice things about you!    

    There are lots of graphic designers out there who can help you come up with a brand and logo. However, if you’re even slightly creative or have a limited budget (like I did), then head to Canva where they have a category called “Logo” to get you started.  Canva basically allows to design and create visual things – think business cards, posters, presentations, social media images, product labels, etc.  

    People can spend ages coming up with a brand and logo. Lucky for me, it was fairly straight-forward. A flick through the available logo templates in Canva, some tweaking of colours, a change of font and voila, I had the start of a logo. I showed it to some trusted advisors (a.k.a. my artistic friends), updated a couple of things and I was done!

    What made it easy for me was that I knew I wanted a circle of some sort in my logo.

    “So why did you I want a circle in my logo?”, you might ask!

    Well, I wanted to reflect the circular nature of the software and product development processes. Most people think that you start with an idea for a web platform or mobile app, build it, launch it and then you’re done. In reality, the development never stops – which is why we call both software and product development – “lifecycles” (For more info on these processes, check out this article).

    Once you’ve launched your app, you find yourself in a constant cycle of updates. Some you have to do (e.g. operating system upgrades for mobile phones, new legislation, etc.) and some will be driven from your customers, and your business strategy and processes. If you’ve already spent a ton of money building your app and the thought of spending even more money on development makes you cringe, I’m sorry to tell you that you might have to revisit your numbers to fit this in. However, for the most part, these changes are actually a good thing – and it’s what makes software and product development pretty exciting.

    There’s a good bet that when you launched your product, the product that you ended up with is at least a little bit different from your original idea. You’ve learned a lot along the way and now it’s time to take your product to the next level! The cyclical approach to development ensures that you can continue to improve and grow your product. Pick the right changes to make, and your product will help you to achieve your goals.

    The circle in the GPC logo is not a solid one.

    Did you know that there are a lot of different ways that you can draw a circle? Canva certainly has a few! So, how did I end up with this one?

    Did you know that research suggests that only 16.2% of software development projects finish on-time, on-budget and with the features and functionality requested? (Chaos Report, The Standish Group, 2014) What an appalling stat!

    Despite the number of apps and web platforms that get created every year, software development is not a perfect science. There are so many places where things can go wrong – not defining your product well enough, picking the wrong things to build, hiring the wrong developers, testing the wrong things, not testing enough, testing too much… the list is endless. With so many potential points of failure, it’s definitely a tricky road to navigate.

    So, based on all of this, I wanted the GPC circle to reflect the imperfect nature of this process. It’s also why one of my main goals is to help my clients successfully complete their development projects.

    And that’s my story…

    The GPC logo was built to be simple, but meaningful.  I hope that my little story gives you some insight into building and growing your platform or app.

    The next time you see the GPC logo, think about how you’re going to prepare for the cyclical nature of developing your product, and how you can address some of the potential pitfalls along the way so that you can have successful development projects.

    If you want to discuss how you’re going to navigate the road to building and growing your app, sign up for a free 30-minute discovery session* to make sure you’re on the right track.

    * When you sign up for a discovery session, we’ll also add you to our mailing list so you can receive emails from us (with your consent). These emails will include news and updates, occasional offers and promotions, and exclusive content and resources to help you on your development journey. You may also receive follow-up emails in relation to the discovery session. We will not spam you. If you don’t wish to hear from us anymore, simply select the unsubscribe option at the bottom of any email that we send to you. To view our privacy policy, click here.