A Roadmap Designed for Your Mobile App Project

A Product Roadmap is a Key to Guiding the Strategic Direction of Mobile App Marketing 

A roadmap is designed specifically to gauge the “why” behind any product you’re building. Understanding that roadmaps are not permanent and can be subject to change as developments proceed is of strategic importance.

The process of determining what aspects of your mobile app will be the most valuable for your user base is complicated. Determining the same by identifying the primary goal of your product is the first important step in creating your roadmap strategy so as to achieve your goal.

What is a Product Roadmap?

A product roadmap is seen as a plan which maps out long-term and short-term business goals with a specific set of technology solutions. A product roadmap has several objectives;

• Defining your vision and strategy
• Acting as a blueprint for the execution of your plan
• Aligning external shareholders
• Assisting in scenario planning and discussion
• Communicating the status and progress of development
• Clarifying strategy to external stakeholders

One of the most important steps in creating a roadmap begins with the discovery of a product. This is the stage which determines the goals and vision of your mobile app.

Product Discovery and Strategic Planning

Product Discovery helps in creating and defending your product’s mission, its target users, citing the problem it solves and creating a unique selling proposition.

Strategic Planning, on the other hand, helps you focus with a high-level strategic vision that sets a plan for the why, what and who factors of your mobile app. Stressing on minute details need not be included, but assessing a strategic plan with targets as a whole needs to be in focus.

Establishing product goals helps transform your strategic vision into actionable insights for a more stratified approach.  Keeping these goals at a high-level and linking them to KPIs gives you a satisfactory product goal.

Few examples of product goals are listed below;

• Mobile Adoption
• Increase Lifetime Value (LTV)
• Customer Satisfaction
• Upsell New Services
• Reduce Churn

At the end of your path for product discovery, answering the question of “why are we building this product” would be a lot more simplified and comprehensible.

These strategic decisions of having a plan in place to better serve your product for a wider audience is an integral point of sustaining market success.

Data-Driven Roadmaps Are Better

Roadmaps that are data-driven set the core of the foundation for any successful development. A proactive decision would be establishing your team’s success early-on with metrics in the planning process. For the release of an MVP (minimum viable product), focusing on a limited number of metrics is essential.

Focusing on a business-oriented approach or a customer-centric one depends upon the type of app you’re building. Focusing on a customer-success app would mean honing on metrics such as retention and churn metrics, adoption rates, UX and product quality, featured usage or a percentage usage of users that have taken-up actions which matter.

Focusing on a business-oriented approach would mean focusing on LTV, revenue, acquisition costs and conversion metrics.

These metrics are actionable and are bound to your product roadmap, this roadmap consisting of a strategic direction and initiatives. After the necessary data collection, the goals can be revised accordingly. When the understanding of user engagement with qualitative data and product occurs, you will be in a better position to understand the products and its features that should be changed in a subsequent release.

Important Tip: Competition needs to be kept closer than the team. A lot about the penetrating market can be understood by simply following your competitors. Although, do not collate information via a time-tested way. Look for unexpected places. Monitor digital mediums to read about what interactions are happening around the competitor’s product. By leveraging these channels you are in a better position to understand the likes and dislikes of users, their preferences et al. This is also influential to understand what features users look for in a product so that you, as a stakeholder can incorporate it in your next product release.

Giving Priority to Features for Development

After goal defining, vision creating and researching- it is easier to decide what features can be incorporated in an app. In cases where only an MVP is being launched, it is more important to prioritize taking your app in the marketplace. Hence, at this stage, product features can be kept at a bare minimum.

Products should be developed lean. This can be achieved by making a master list of features that you see inclusive in your product. Later, features can be skimmed as per the product’s final vision. MosCow metrics is an excellent way to prioritize features.

MosCow stands for –

• Must
• Should
• Could
• Won’t

This method helps sequence what product features need to be implemented at the stage of product development and which ones to get disposed of entirely. If you try and stuff too many features in your product it may jeopardize project budgets, timelines, and business goals.

The MosCow model ensures that your project stays on track.

Important Tip: Deliverables should be organized thematically. Groups of features, epics, and initiatives that you intend for your product’s user to attain, quantify as themes, at least on a higher level.

As an example, consider your theme to result in the end-goal of ‘saving check-out time by thirty minutes.’ In order to achieve this, you will procure several resources like new features & feature enhancements. You will also resolve bug issues if any. Themes are extremely beneficial to switch out features out of it. This ensures that it does not endanger the overall strategy of your roadmap.

The Importance of Gathering Feedback; Then Measuring It and Iterating It

Exact insights about where your product is doing well and where it needs to be improved can be achieved via customer feedback. This will be the deciding factor for you to keep going or to turn back and start over. User feedback is a gold mine and analyzing it you would be in the position to easily include your customer’s wants and needs.

Other than communicating the strategic purpose of a mobile app, a roadmap is also essential to make strong decisions that revolve around benefitting user experience upon every product release.