The first step towards creating a successful mobile app is to create a Product Requirements Document (PRD). This document contains a detailed project management plan stating the logic behind creating the app, the technical requirements and the responsibilities of stakeholders at each stage.
Let’s take a look at a few requirements that will help you manage scope creep from taking over your project:
Managing Business Requirements Constraints
While creating the business app, it is important to understand the organizational objective that you are trying to reach with the app. The main purpose of this app should be to solve the issues faced by the end user.
For instance, is your mobile app going to use a backend system from another application or is the app going to be coded from scratch. If the mobile app is going to introduce a completely new process, then you need to consider:
- The timeframe of the project
- The number of features that need to be added
- The resources required to complete the project on time
Here, the Product Requirements Document will help you gain more insight on what is feasible and what is not.
“De-scope” Your App
The only reasons that you would need to ‘de-scope’ your app would be:
New Idea/Untested Market: Making an app that is absolutely new to the market means that you need to go slow and get as much feedback and user data as possible. For example, when Uber launched it was a fairly simple app that allowed the user to book a cab over the phone. Over time new features like ‘Rentals’ and ‘Out station’ (fairly recent) were introduced in the app.
Meeting Deadlines: If you have a deadline that you can’t miss, you need to limit your app instead of overloading it with features that are faulty. Features that have bugs have more of a downside than not offering the feature at all.
Budget: Budgeting plays a huge role in designing an app. You don’t want to overshoot the budget and land in a soup, would you? Hence, scoping intelligently and improving it step-by-step would ensure that you don’t overstep your budget.
Managing Technical Requirements Constraints
The architecture of the mobile app is a blueprint for the entire system – a solid architecture should be able to have space for accommodating changes and user feedback if necessary. If you have created condusive mobile app architecture then it becomes easier to manage if there is a scope creep.
Making the Right Product Decisions
While creating an initial design plan for the mobile app, you must ensure that the core features of the app are not confined and compromised on while building the app. The team must sit together and ensure that there is minimal compromise.
Therefore, this process is all about making decisions to work towards a realistic and attainable goal of building a product that has a defined project scope, timeline and cost. There are a set of questions that we can put down before moving forward.
Duration of the Project
The date for the roll out of the project is important as this helps us to curb on the scope creep. We must determine the time it will take to build the features for the app, and thereby decide the duration of the project.
Reason to Build the App
As mentioned before, we need to determine the reason for building the app. We need to determine the features that are of utmost importance to building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
App Alternatives
We need to find out if the same type of app is available in the market. Then we need to fish out that one core feature that differentiates our app and highlight that to the user base.
Also, we need to determine if there is an alternative way to make the app features that would take less time and deliver the user experience that we wish.
Get to Market Quicker with a Product Requirements Document
A Product Requirements Document helps you manage the following:
- Costly product decisions
- Initial planning stages of development with a PRD protects your product from inflating beyond your project constraints
- Achieves a quicker time to market
- Compromise is inevitable, but with clear requirements on paper, the decision-making process is simplified
In the end, it all boils down to delivering a high quality application adds value to users, meets your objectives and that aligns with the budget and timeline kept in mind. Ensuring that you scope the project intelligently with logical milestones based on user feedback will help your application excel and widely used.
If you wish to get more information on balancing product ideas and avoiding scope creep, you can contact the App Scoop mobile app developers: https://app-scoop.com/contact-us.html
