Surely you have already heard this story... Two inspired friends come up with a great startup idea, really the right idea at the right time. They spend months creating the perfect product and surrounding themselves with the best profiles, and yet when they put it on the market it's a failure. So either they give up or they start all over again. A bit of a shame isn't it?

Even more than any product, launching a mobile application can be demanding: on a smartphone, the value of the application must be perceived from the first minutes and it is then necessary to create a privileged relationship with its users to retain them over the long term.

How can you be sure that the application developed will meet this requirement? By taking into account what your customers want! This is what the Lean method offers you.

What is lean?

Lean is an agile principle that aims to:

• Eliminate waste

• Continuously improve

Several methods result from this, such as lean management, lean manufacturing, lean IT or even lean start up. It is the latter that is of particular interest to us.

Eric Riès, the inventor of Lean Start Up, defines it as follows:”The Lean Startup method makes it possible to put the customer at the center of thinking about new products and to verify the validity of the designers' intuition by confirming.“. To do this, we rely on small and quick iterations of the product in order to confront it very quickly with users and to easily improve it thanks to their feedback. This approach makes it possible to create the maximum possible value and to avoid any waste.

Lean takes the opposite approach to the traditional V-cycle method, which consists in writing specifications listing the necessary functionalities, then developing them and finally delivering a perfectly finished product to users.

The V-cycle favors planning and the implementation of processes that work in a stable environment, without uncertainty. Unlike lean or agile methods that put the customer and their evolving needs at the heart of thinking.

Why is the traditional V-method not effective?

1) The specifications will never correspond to the needs of users

There are no written rules to tell you what a good app is. Each application is a particular product that will generate a use by its customers that is specific to it. Before you launch a mobile app, neither you nor the developers can know what users really want.

And the users themselves will not be able to tell you what they want in advance! Indeed, we observe that once the application is in their hands, customers can have a completely unpredictable use of it.

2) Adapting an already complete product is a difficult task

Once your application is launched, you realize that it does not meet the needs of users. So what happens? You have to do it all over again! So we have lost time and money to develop a “perfect” product that ultimately brings little value and we will still spend money to undo what has been done and do it again... And when the product in question is already very complete, the task is much harder to perform.

A well-known example is Instagram: after spending a year developing a comprehensive product called Burbn, they realized that users found the product way too complex and finally decided to throw everything away except for three basic features that were enough to create Instagram and make it a success.

Co-founder Kevin Systrom explains:

“We actually got an entire version of Burban done as an iPhone app, but it felt cluttered, and overrun with features. It was really difficult to decide to start from scratch, but we went out on a limb, and basically cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities. What remained was Instagram,”

How does lean create value?

Above all, we seek to solve a problem that users encounter. To solve this problem, the lean approach involves defining hypotheses that must be validated or invalidated later. The result we want to obtain allows us to determine the success of the project, whose progress we will measure on a regular basis.

Concretely, the team starts by producing a MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that contains the priority functionality that addresses the problem you identified. We compare this MVP to the market in order to get user feedback that will confirm or disprove your hypotheses about their needs and then allow you to plan the following iterations to improve your product.

Chez BAM, each iteration lasts a maximum of one week and is put into production immediately in order to be confronted with the market.

The study “Chaos Report” by Standish Group shows the contribution of this approach, since only 11% of projects with the V-method are a success VS 37% of projects using the lean method.

An example of this Lean approach is Airbnb: the first version of the site that came out was really basic, and allowed them to realize that it worked in San Francisco but not in NY. The founders of Airbnb then asked users what was bothering them and it turned out that the poor quality of the photos was blocking them in their booking process. They then integrated an additional service into their application to integrate photos taken by professional photographers.

What more does lean give you

In addition to producing a functional and scalable application with a reduced time-to-market, here are the other advantages of the lean approach:

• Test your market and iterate on your business model
• Detect bugs quickly thanks to a large number of users
• Have early adopters who feel involved and who can therefore become true ambassadors of your brand

At BAM, we adopt a Lean approach to ensure that the mobile applications we develop in React Native respond to a user problem and will therefore be a real success on the market. In order to take into account user feedback quickly and to improve our products over time, we use the method Scrum.