5.7.1 General Profile
Educator apps locate in a moderate competitive environment and usually have state-of-the-art technology. Their feature is so innovative that there is less user demand on these apps. Therefore, cross platform support and intuitive user interface play impor-tant parts in making the product convenient to potential users. It is also necessary to educate target customers about their unique benefits and value. Since educator apps are market pioneers, feature performance is the key to attract followers in the new field.
For example, Evernote reinvents the way people remember things as being an exter-nal brain. The app helps improve productivity by saving and organizing user ideas in effective ways, such as web clipping, handwriting recognition, and audio recording.
5.7.2 Development Strategy
Since the functionality of educator apps go ahead of existing products, there is no ap-parent market demand and direct competitors. These apps need to know what core strength is and turn their advantage into a valuable product. Then they could educate customers how their innovative service improve user productivity. Except for useful features, convenience is the key to attract potential customers. Cross-platform support is also important for users to access this service everywhere.Through cloud integration, product value and customer stickiness would increase over time. When users store more personal data on cloud storage, they would heavily rely on the app to manage and access their massive and sensitive data. As a result, educator apps could accumulate a bunch of loyal users and gradually transfer them into premium ones. Figure5.5shows that the middle two stages constantly strengthen the product functionality to ensure the leading position in app features.
Figure 5.5: Development Flow Chart of Educator
Chapter 6
Conclusion
To wrap up the research, this chapter summarizes the lean perspectives based on the analytical result. The idea of lean development is then reviewed from its importance and influential factors. By viewing the matrix of lean development strategy, people could have a clear road map on how to implement a popular app. The research plays a leading role in building specific strategy for smartphone applications, and makes a contribution to thorough app analysis. Furthermore, related managerial implication is introduced as a practical guideline for the management. Possible extension of this research is finally proposed for future studying.
6.1 Research Finding
6.1.1 Lean Perspective
Based on the property summary of lean strategy matrix in Table5.3, some critical ideas about app development are clearly pointed out. Lean perspective in Table 6.1 shows what developers should pay attention to and keep in mind during the process of app development. Since warrior apps exist in an environment with high product diversity, they need to win customers’ hearth at the first glance. Their final work should precisely hit customer preference by iteratively getting customer feedback. To reach popularity, warrior apps have better aim at the general public and choose expandable topic like what Angry Birds did. While having general strength under intense compeition, coor-dinator apps should find out the best feature combination to meet customer unsatisfied need. Through market research which are closely related to world trend, they can de-cide product features and then focus on function optimization. Since landloard apps are located in the market segment which has strong user loyalty and needs large-scale
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Chapter 6. Conclusion 47
investment, they target at supporting customer daily activity like communication. To significantly increase the user base, they provide complementary features and deliver convenient access. They also design scalable and flexible system for future possible ex-pansion in the early stage of app development. Educator apps have to create demand for their innovative features. Since their target market has high professional demand, they should improve customer productivity and keep enhancing the functionality. In addition, they could integrate cloud services to increase customer perceived value.
Table 6.1: Lean Perspective
6.1.2 Lean Development Strategy
To help next-generation entrepreneurs succeed in app market, lean development strat-egy is worked out for smartphone application. Developers could make the best use of their strength based on handy resource and dynamically adjust app features to solve unknown customer demand. According to product strength and market environment, there is a matrix identifying four types of strategic roles in app development. They are warrior, coordinator, landlord, and educator. By analyzing their competitor impact repectively, the successful factors for each strategic role become more apparent under overall comparison and specific finding. Furthermore, cross review shows the correlation
Chapter 6. Conclusion 48
among different app categories. Statistical insight also proves the relationship between app attributes and real figures. As a result, lean development strategy of the smartphone application is clearly set out in Figure 6.1.
Figure 6.1: Lean Development Strategy
Lean development strategy supports flexibly future planning which traditional project management cannot achieve. While customer preference and technology trend change frequently, strategy must adjust over the app life cycle. For each strategic role in Fig-ure 6.1, there is a specific development process which takes app property and market demand into consideration. While warrior apps face strong market competition, app feature portfolio becomes more critical. A feedback loop between validated learning and minimum viable product helps precisely hit customer preference. Since coordinator apps rely on proven technology, they aim at cross-category innovation by following the evalu-ation loop. As for landlord apps, they focus on building a mobile applicevalu-ation ecosystem and finally form a loop to inrease additional paid service on the plaform. Being technol-ogy leaders like educator apps, they need to entice users to try their function and stay loyal by continuously improving cloud-based features.