Developing an enterprise app can be very different from developing an app for a small business. With a bigger company and more stakeholders, it takes more work to integrate an app into your business’ standard work flow and to support as many employees or customers at your business as possible.
1. Get Management on Board
In today’s digital environment, most top-level managers in your company will agree on the general importance of having a presence on mobile devices. Still, they will need to be convinced about the specific benefits of a mobile app to put their support behind it. Answering the question of why your enterprise needs a mobile app vs. simply a responsive website, ideally supported by behavioral statistics about your target audience, can go a long way toward convincing management that a mobile app is the way to go.
And here’s the key: the convincing needs to be thorough. If you leave your management meetings with executives on the fence, you could run into the worst possible scenario: having funding or support pulled from you in the middle of the development process. If you get your company’s executives to be as excited about the prospects of a mobile app as you are, you’ll be off and running.
2. Find the Need
Next, you need to understand just what your mobile app needs to accomplish to be successful. This step is closely related to the first; again, behavioral statistics about your audience come in handy. But you may also want to run surveys and interviews that help you understand your audience’s online behavior, determining which situations would call for an app and which app features would be most used. You’re looking for the biggest pain points that affect a large number of staff or customers at your business.
As you probably know, products can only succeed if they meet a perceived unmet need in your audience. The challenge is that sometimes, your audience may not even know that this need exists. But with thorough research into your customers’ digital behavior, you can understand the need and develop an app that helps to solve it.
3. Partner with Experts
Now that you have backing and direction for your enterprise app, it’s time to start the development process. At this point, finding the perfect mobile app developer is crucial. You want your developer to become a close partner, keeping you informed about every step of the process and allowing input at every stage. This type of close-knit relationship ensures that your new app will be exactly what you’re looking for.
4. Test, Test, Test
Throughout and at the conclusion of your development process, you should keep testing your app and its various features to make sure that at its publishing date, you serve up a solution to your users that works error-free and exactly as expected.
We cannot overstate the importance of testing your app. This is the point where you check that your time and budget prove to be well-invested, making sure that the finished product will be one that executive leadership and customers alike will love. And testing is about more than just ironing out bugs: especially if the testing includes a beta version and early feedback, it may also be a good time for you to adjust your app’s features to best serve your audience and its unmet needs.
5. Conclusion
Developing an enterprise app can seem like a daunting challenge at first. After all, you have multiple stakeholders to satisfy, bringing to mind the old “too many cooks…” cliche. But by following the above four steps, you can ensure that the finished product will be one that all stakeholders love, ushering your company into the mobile age. And if you need further help with any of these steps, don’t hesitate to contact us!
