Native Apps: A Digital Product Strategy

As a result of our ever-changing culture, more organizations are adopting a myriad of tools to serve the needs of individuals that interact with them. This change is part of the digital transformation many industries are currently experiencing—resulting in a portfolio of digital products for both internal and external audiences. 

This four-part series will explore how mobile apps fit into these larger portfolios. 

Planning for Personas

A digital product portfolio can span multiple channels and audiences to address your customers’ needs where and when they are most likely to complete transactions with your business or enterprise. When planning a mobile application, it is important to identify the personas for those you expect to use your app. Not all apps can be everything to everyone. There are cases in which multiple apps can be more useful than one app serving multiple user groups. 

Typically, an organization could have the following internal user personas: 

• Sales
• Operations and maintenance
• All-employees

Each of these groups has its own specific needs and there can be membership overlap between the groups. Let’s take a look at some example personas. 

One App or Many?

In this case, our sales group needs access to Salesforce for accounts and time tracking, Google Drive for documents and contracts, and specific content from the organization’s Drupal-powered intranet. 

Our operations and maintenance team needs access to Salesforce for time tracking, Jira for service desk tickets, and custom dashboards for monitoring uptime and traffic analytics. 

All employees including our two groups need Salesforce for time-off requests, Google Drive for documents, intranet content, and company-wide announcements from an email marketing tool. 
Combining these external and internal tools poses a challenge to creating a cohesive experience with the overlapping tools. 

One approach would be to create three separate apps for each user persona. Individual apps can be tailored for a very specific user experience. The downside is that three distinct apps create confusion for users searching in the app stores and frustration when users need to switch apps for a different use case. 

Another approach is to combine all of the features for the three user groups into one super app which, based on the context of the user, would make certain features available. This method does require a more robust identity management strategy. By leveraging single sign-on from Google Workspace or Salesforce, administrators can use existing data to inform which content should be available to each user. 

The advantage of this approach is that users will always see the most up-to-date features for their specific role. If a user changes groups, they can automatically gain access to the new features for their role. 

Next Time

In the next installment of this series, we’ll explore the need for mobile apps.

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