The AppyHigh Voyage From Ideas To Product Launches
A real lot goes into taking a good idea and turning it to a great product. Trust those words when they come from the horse’s mouth.
I work with AppyHigh, a mobile internet tech venture that launches new apps every quarter in the utility and social space, amongst others. Achieving this for a lean team like ours means moving at breathtaking speed on a path replete with as much excitement as challenges.
So here I’ve attempted to break the process down to share a glimpse of how my team and I do it at AppyHigh. This has allowed us to launch over 30 apps in less than 3 years and has propelled many of these to bust charts.
Let’s dive right in.
1) Ideation and screening
At AppyHigh, ideas can come from anywhere. You can conceive one while taking a shower, take elements from an aha-moment, from a discussion with a friend, from a piece of information you read, or from a statistical occurrence you discovered.
Then we go on to ask ourselves a lot of feasibility questions to eliminate and reduce the number of ideas to a valid and achievable few. Pitching the ideas to internal teams and external stakeholders, especially the potential users massively helps us refine them.
2) Research, research, research
Any product plan is incomplete without a deep understanding of the market. It is imperative for a PM to understand the TAM, market share of competitors, forecast the CAGR of the product category & most importantly understand the user personas.
Some frameworks that help us make this easier include Porter’s 5 forces Analysis and SWOT, wherein we plug in data from tools like Sensor Tower and various market reports.
“When we create stuff, we do it because we listen to the customer, get their inputs and also throw in what we’d like to see, too. We cook up new products. You never really know if people will love them as much as you do.”
– Steve Jobs
3) Designing User Interface & Experience
We now collaborate with our design team and conceptualize user flows, draw wireframes, and come up with a mood-board to finally get the UI ready. After this point, you can fully visualize & see how the final product will look.
4) Time to build
Next comes converting business requirements to technical requirements, sprint planning & liaisoning with the engineering team to get the product shipped. Prioritization becomes a big challenge — you want to optimize the breadth & depth of your feature set, keeping in mind limited man-hours available.
On the other side of some sleepless nights and more, the technology team will have converted coffee into a beautiful smooth product — just as you envisaged.
5) Launch & Monetise
Once a Minimum Viable Product or an MVP is ready, we shift our focus on the Pirate Metrics — the AARRR funnel. We go knock on the doors of our marketing teams to help us ‘go to the market’. Meanwhile, the product growth team refines the onboarding process and looks for ways to sell in-app subscriptions, optimize the ad revenues and more.
Needless to say, all teams learn from user feedback received from the MVP and continue to reiterate and make improvements on all fronts.
It is important to note that the product development process is a fluid and evolving one. Some steps may need to be iterated while others may be eliminated altogether.
Your business plan and how you manage the process are essential, but there will be so many variables that your decision-making, your determination, and the quality of your product vision will likely be the best indicators of your success.
