Company A is a 20-year-old organisation that offers online trading on various financial instruments. While their web apps are responsive, native mobile apps provide a superior user experience and enable key features such as notifications.

The challenge for the organisation was that they had not built a native mobile app before, so frameworks and processes needed to be created or updated and integrated into the production lifecycle.

We will briefly go through the process of creating and launch the App.

Discovery

To launch the App, we took the following concurrent steps:

1. We conducted a competitor analysis to gain insights into what features were successful and which ones were not. This also showed us that we were late to the native app game.
2. We researched our external stakeholders, including affiliates who had personal relationships and dealings with our users. This allowed us to understand their usage behaviours and what features they cared about. For example, because a large number of our users came from countries where mobile data was expensive, we decided to launch a lite version of the app with only the core features to minimise data usage.

We learned a lot from this step and shared our reports with the relevant teams so that other product teams could learn from them and adjust their roadmaps accordingly

Define

In this project, we utilised a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) to break down the features of the app. This allowed us to work with our internal stakeholders to define different versions and iterations, as well as obtain necessary approvals.

This was the first time our organization implemented WBS, and it greatly improved the planning process for this product. It kept stakeholders informed and allowed us to collect feedback from all teams involved, minimising potential issues down the line. I highly recommend that all product managers include WBS in their toolkit.

Design

Due to a tight deadline, we decided to experiment with the Design Sprint framework outlined in Jake Knapp's book. This allowed us to quickly deliver wireframes and high-fidelity designs. Being able to produce such high-quality, relevant, and tested designs in just one week was a game-changer, and I would advise any product leader to try it out.