App Dev is a Sprint, Not a Marathon

Talk to experts about how to achieve success and you’ll hear things like “it doesn’t happen overnight,” “change is slow, but the results are worth it,” and “it’s a marathon, not a sprint.” Solid advice for some goals, for sure, but we’re going to be honest, that is not at all how we work at Rocket Farm Studios.

When it comes to app development, for us, it’s all about the sprint—and rapid innovation. In fact, in some cases, changes CAN literally happen overnight. What’s more is that we’re not thinking about crossing the finish line at the end of a long race, because for us there is no finish line.

After all, stellar products—the ones that have the best chance for long-term, sustained success—are continuously tested, evaluated and improved. You see it everyday with the apps you love and use passionately. New features are rolled out and updates occur to eliminate bugs. It’s just part of creating something great and keeping people happy with the product.

Our approach to app development

It’s surprising to us that any person or business would want to be involved only initially and then have a design or development team come back months later with the final product. That hands-off approach is risky and it’s why we have adopted a much more collaborative approach.

We want you to have a seat at the table. Even the best developers can’t read minds and ongoing collaboration with stakeholders is essential to ensuring that the product we develop meets your expectations. To us, a failure would be getting deep into a project and finding out that we’re headed in the wrong direction. We don’t like rework and we definitely don’t like to start over.

An agile process produces quick results

In a previous post, we shared that at Rocket Farm, we detailed why we focus on building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), a great product that includes the core functions and features required to meet a specific need, first. And then test it in the market before we continue to fine-tune it. We have many reasons for doing so, including saving clients money and preventing unnecessary rework.

We want to get to the MVP as quickly as possible so our clients can put their concepts out into the world and begin to build a community of users. To do that, we live and breathe agile app development. Here’s why:

• We want to see rapid innovation. Our approach is about making quick, incremental changes that improve the product over time. We meet daily to plan sprints, resolve issues, and update design to keep the project running smoothly. We deliver builds at least weekly, and progress happens fast.
• We want to collaborate with clients often. We provide all stakeholders with complete visibility into our process and progress. We’re here to provide the expertise, but we want our clients to step in and tell us if something doesn’t feel or look right. We don’t want to wait until the end of a project to learn that we missed the mark. We’d much rather root out—and fix—the issues along the way.
• We want to test a lot. We deliver mobile or web builds to testers—including clients—weekly to gain feedback on how the product works and what needs to be improved. However, we want to do more than just test; we want to be able to act immediately on what we learn and address issues that could impact user experience.
• We want to stay nimble. Requirements and conditions change, and we need to be able to change quickly too to ensure we deliver the right product.

Ultimately, with our approach, clients see the product take shape and play a role in developing the product they want. There aren’t any surprises at the end.

Working fast doesn’t mean working sloppy

At Rocket Farm, we’re all about speed, but the quality of the work never suffers. So, if you are you are ready to turn that idea for an app into a reality, we’re ready to help make it happen. Contact us today to learn more.