Why apps

Monitoring engagement and retention metrics will help improve the lifetime value of the app, but arguably one of the most effective ways to ensure successful retention rates is to build a retention strategy into the core experience of the product. This recent article explains how to take a proactive approach to user retention and how it creates an uncommonly sticky mobile app. Identifying the right success criteria for your mobile app will help identify areas for improvement so you can adjust your strategy to effectively meet business and product goals.

While every app development project comes with its own challenges, there are a few that tend to surface repeatedly, regardless of the nature of the project.

Delays are one of the most significant challenges faced by companies trying to get a product shipped. This problem is universal but is particularly prevalent in larger-scale, complex projects. Delays happen for a variety of reasons but are often a result of poor processes, improper capacity planning, dependencies, and talent gaps. Budget overruns are often explicitly tied to product delays.

The longer it takes you to release a product, the higher the overall cost. Product delays and budget overruns are not easily avoided, but there are ways to reduce time and budget risks in projects:. Many organizations incorrectly assume that in-house development and QA teams are sufficient for mobile projects. In some cases, this assumption is very true. But more often than not, there are talent gaps, particularly when employees are not trained as mobile developers.

Generally speaking, there are two options when it comes to filling talent gaps: hire talent or source a specialized app development partner. Often, hiring new staff is not possible due to operational limitations, making sourcing a specialized partner the logical move. However, you need to ensure that the vendor you partner with can fill those talent gaps. Apart from project experience, you also want to look at aspects that include:. These considerations will allow you to account for concerns that include the ability to deliver on product requirements; the ability to manage change; and the reduction of risk time, budget, and personnel, for example.

This challenge is particularly difficult to deal with as changing priorities can throw off timelines, affect the project scope, and devour budgets. Effectively dealing with differing priorities and changing requirements comes down to being flexible and adaptable in your process. In particular, following processes that account for change allow you to adapt on the fly without losing project velocity. As a result, when priorities or requirements shift as the product evolves or stakeholders reevaluate, your team has the flexibility to pivot without wasting time or resources.

In mobile app development, change is inevitable. A product requirements document PRD is invaluable for supporting change management.

A PRD will demonstrate how complex your project is and in many cases, mobile app planning will reveal that most projects involve several systems, subsystems and functionalities. The goal is to minimize fluctuation between the initial requirements specified in the PRD and what is actually developed; however, external forces like user demand, technological advancement, and competitive threat emerge during the development lifecycle.

These unexpected realities can cause you and your team to think that development needs to make a U-turn, but rather than speeding up the implementation of new requirements, your PRD serves as a reference point to thoughtfully consider the necessity of change in relation to your product goals. Even with solid planning, experienced project teams, and seemingly reasonable launch goals, many products still miss delivery deadlines. While this is more common than teams and stakeholders would like, there are steps that can effectively mitigate time risk in product development and delivery.

Scope creep is pervasive in software development and difficult to manage because as the name suggests, it creeps up on you. Additional requests and added features strain resources and can affect the focus of the product vision, and without the proper controls, can severely affect project success.

In some cases, scope creep can be curtailed by strong project management and product ownership. With that said, the most effective way to manage scope creep consistently at least as it applies to the meeting of deadlines is to follow a process that assumes and allows for change, which brings us to the next major time risk. We talk a lot about the importance of process, and for good reason; poor process results in a myriad of project issues, including missed deadlines.

Process shortcomings manifest in different ways, but the results are consistent — an increased risk of project failure. If you can adapt quickly, you lose project velocity and miss target deadlines.

For many projects, requirements do and probably should change; the key to managing these changes is how you react to them. I think the restaurant space is one that folks are super familiar with. They probably have a decent idea of where the mobile strategy fits into how companies are approaching the relationship with their customers. There are two, I think, poster childs in this space.

Hall: Right. They're the ones that have certainly led this and for investors that have followed these companies, it's been pretty clear. I want to start with Chipotle because between the two this is the one that's more recent.

Brian Niccol was brought in as CEO in early He came from Taco Bell; it's part of Yum! Brands, he'd been at Pizza Hut for a while. He was part of their marketing, moved forward to move forward and took over at Taco Bell. The company was really lagging when he took over. Their menu was pretty stale. There was a lot of the same legacy stuff that I remember when I was a little kid and their menu just blew up and some of the weird crazy things that you saw, like flaming hot cheeto, burrito, all the stuff that they did, it's gimmicky got a lot of the press, but at the same time he was there, he was really driving a lot of innovation in terms of better leveraging technology.

It wasn't just about gimmicks and so-called food innovation. But at any rate, when he was brought in at Chipotle, the idea was he was going to drive menu innovation.

That was going to be the big thing he was really going to push. We've seen things. The queso, which is terrible. Lewis: Actually, Jason, the menu innovation thing I think is an interesting point because at a restaurant like Chipotle in particular, it's something that I think a lot of people saw as a major growth lever for that business.

There's been so much speculation about when they would offer breakfast, when they would be introducing new features and things like that into that assembly line approach. I think it's happened to some extent but it's not really where the growth and revival of that company started.

Hall: Honestly, the cadence of new menu items is not significantly different than it was in the three years before or the five years before Niccol came on board. Because again, this is a food integrity company.

They're focused on their core menu, which is sourcing ethically raised food, trying to source organic whenever possible, a simple menu, so the least amount of ingredients to deliver great food is possible. That's one thing they struggled with, the queso, to get that melty, cheesy thing in that environment where you need to have it for 10 or 12 hours to serve somebody that might want it and deliver without some food additives, it's hard to do.

But then there have been some great things. I love the sofritas, which are tofu-based. It's what I order every time I go in. But here's the thing, this was when Niccol took over, Chipotle was still dealing with the overhang of its food-borne illness crisis.

It was really a crisis that took a good year, and a year-and-a-half to play out. His first full year, Chipotle only opened a net of 83 stores.

This is a company that was typically opening stores a year. They actually closed 50 restaurants during that first year. There was a lot of refocus on Chipotle. Now, I'm just going to quote some numbers here as we go through this and remember, this was just a refocus on the brand and there wasn't a bunch of menu innovation happening. The first quarter after he was hired, and it was a few weeks after he was hired that they reported earnings, comps were up 2.

Comps are sales growth at existing restaurants, restaurants that have been open for a year or more. It's organic growth I guess is the best way to think about it so It's not growth coming from new locations, 2. It really is, especially if you're a growing restaurant. Hall: Yeah, entirely. It's not good because at that point, 2. His first full quarter, that was the second quarter of , 2.

Now the fiscal third quarter, so by that time he had been there about seven or eight months, comps grew 4. You're seeing a little bit of a cadence of improvement here. Chipotle also did something it had never done before. It broke out in its release digital sales results. Now, let's fast forward two years.

The third quarter of , so this is last year's third quarter, digital sales have grown to almost half of revenue. I must say, digital sales accounted for almost half of the revenue.

That's pretty impressive. Lewis: I think perhaps some of the best place investments they could've made. We know that the industry was moving in this direction and that restaurant businesses that had incredibly strong mobile offerings and rewards programs were generally going to be the winners.

But to have that coincide with a period where the pandemic is dictating that there is far more pickup and go in delivery type food consumption, they couldn't have anticipated it, but it was where the puck was going anyways.

Hall: Exactly, it's interesting. If you look at that period from his full quarter, there was enough time for the things he was pushing to start working their way through the business. Chipotle's only had two quarters when comps grew less than 4. You think about that first quarter comps, the first two months, January and February, were double digit comps growth. Then March happened, of course, and it was negative comps. But during those periods, again, because at this point it was a couple of years of pushing out, really focusing on the app.

Customers ordering from the app inside their stores using those second make lines, the prep lines basically in the back of the store. Bringing in technology to push those orders that people were doing on their phones or on their website, to push those orders to make ready lines in the back, so that it's not affecting everybody.

It's 12 o'clock, everybody's hungry and there's 30 people in front of you in your line. You don't want to be another 10 people digitally in line in front of you that you don't know. It affects the throughput, it affects the customer experience. They are leveraging that second make ready lines a lot more using technology to do that, but here's the key. The only two quarters we saw comps fall below that 4.

But like you said, Dylan, because of the timing, obviously they couldn't anticipate this. I almost said it saved the business, that's too hyperbolic. But it certainly generated substantial cash flow that the business probably would not have gotten otherwise.

I think Chipotle and Starbucks, I said before, they're the poster child of early innovation in tech and mobile ordering. You identified before, they have to be because of the nature of what they do and when people are going to them. There are surges for both of those businesses. Chipotle, it's going to be launched at dinnertime. Starbucks is going to be in the morning rush. To be able to effectively manage and maintain the throughput that you want to and deliver on the customer experience, you need to nail the technology.

Hall: Yeah, exactly. It makes a massive difference. The other thing too is because these are two businesses that if you look at the restaurant industry, there may be one or two other brands that just deliver restaurant-level economics that are on par with what they do in terms of the operating margins they can get at a restaurant. You're ecstatic if you can get that. These are brands that get double digit operating margins at the restaurant level consistently.

All very sensible. Often that maps onto different teams. Sound familiar? Everybody has analytics running on their mobile apps. Lots of charts, lots and lots and lots of data. When they churn then that really hurts. If the inflow is greater than the outflow, then some apps see that as a success. But with just a small percentage reduction in churn this can have a dramatically positive impact on the success of the app. Why do so many apps not have greater visibility of these vital signs of success?

What we see is a combination of factors. The numbers are just too difficult to get in an understandable, easy to digest format. Starting a journey without a clear understanding of where you want to end up, leads to an inevitable result.

We see this with mobile apps. To be fair, apps are usually launched with an objective in mind — increase worker efficiency, reduce task processing costs, increase brand engagement, or generate incremental revenue. All worthy and sensible objectives and things that mobile apps can definitely help businesses deliver. But how many start out with a very specific objective in mind. That way you have a much clearer view of the levers you can pull to drive success and meeting your objective. Churn is a fact of life.

Every app will have churn. Churn with those engaged with your app are the customers you most want to retain. It can be tough to get accurate churn measures for apps. But one very good measure of engagement is looking at the churn in your reachable audience. Those that have opted into receive notifications. And importantly tracking that measure over time to see if the trend is increasing or reducing is important. In that same vein, looking at the ratio of users that sign up and then also opt into receive notifications.

Having a digital middleman to plan out your day for you, remember your shopping list, reply to messages and emails en masse, and simply ping notifications back and forth whenever you need them means we rely less and less on our own memories. For a lot of people, this is a welcome break!

Reviews from top industry professionals are changing, and at the same time meaning less and less for the average consumer, meaning the app world is a complete buyers market.

People like to live at speed these days. Teenagers and students are being told more and more that they have to accomplish goals in their early years and having a productive day at work usually means how fast you completed your tasks. And by that logic, apps are keeping people at the speed they need, and bringing out new and improved versions of programs every day. We all can see the amount of new apps that are being released every day, and patches for any bug fixes can be implemented in a few hours.

Society is just trying to keep the pace.