Step 4: Build the Product

Great job defining your strategy! It’s now time to plan its actual implementation! Remember that success is 90% made from the excellent execution of a great plan!

Further along, you will discover some advantages and disadvantages of methodologies and technologies to help you define the building process that best suits your needs. 

4.1. When is your Launch Date?

Before taking any execution decisions, you need to have a clear, realistic launch date for your apps. Correlate the date around various marketing campaigns you have planned or significant business events that will happen. If there is none, create one.

Many clients we have worked with over the years came to us having no idea when they should launch their product. Having no launch date in mind will only leave you space for doubting your feature decisions so far, the timelines that will be created, the way the features work or the way the colors were chosen. If you leave too much empty space, you will try to make your product perfect, and the truth is… Perfect does not exist. You will constantly come up with improvements, tweaks, ideas, which will only defocus you from the plan, without adding real value to the product. We’ve seen this happen so many times and the countless iterations almost never brought significant improvements. 

I’m not saying in any way to rush the execution of your carefully crafted strategy. Leave enough space for 2-3 iterations, but you owe it to yourself, and all the hard work done so far, to not postpone its launch. 

4.2. What is your budget?

Alongside a Launch Date, you need to know your budget. Regardless of the way the execution of your project will be done, you need to put this constraint before starting to consume it.

If you plan to work with an agency, defining and stating your budget upfront will help you both in your future collaboration. They can tailor the execution process to your budget and needs, while you have a clear anchor to monitor progress down the road.

If you plan on building an in-house team of experts (or have it), you still need to clarify how many days you are willing to have them invest in the design and development of your apps.

Always keep a 10% buffer. Even if it’s never a good idea to change a plan once you start, it will give you peace of mind to have the buffer available for last minute changes.

4.3. Choose your Technical Stack

Many non-technical product people either get scared when they must take this decision or tend to overlook its actual relevance.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, choosing the technologies for your app is a business decision, not a technical one. It’s an important strategic move you need to take before hiring your team (in-house or agency) and you need to understand what the pros and cons of each one are. 

You can find below a detailed comparison of Native vs Hybrid Mobile Development. As a rule, Hybrid development is great when you want to quickly launch an app and prototype an idea, while Native development is the best decision for mature, feature heavy and UX optimized apps.

Over the last 14 years at mReady, we invested thousands of hours of research in comparing, benchmarking, and testing technological advancements in both approaches, and we are loyal fans of Native Development Technologies due to its Performance and UX Qualities.

Criteria	Native Development	Hybrid Development
Performance	Delivers superior performance as it’s fully optimized for platform-specific hardware and software. Offers direct access to low-level system APIs and device features without compromises.	Lacks the performance edge of native apps due to the extra abstraction layer, which can lead to slower execution in demanding scenarios.
Development Speed	Requires more time as separate codebases are developed for each platform (Android in Java/Kotlin and iOS in Objective-C/Swift).	Speeds up development with a shared codebase.
Cost	Higher upfront cost due to the need for separate Android and iOS development teams, but this results in a more polished and optimized product.	Reduces development costs by allowing for shared resources across platforms, but some compromises in functionality may arise.
User Experience (UX)	Provides the best user experience with full access to native UI components, ensuring a seamless, platform-consistent experience that takes full advantage of each platform’s unique features.	While good, the user experience typically falls short of native apps. Frameworks like Flutter attempt to emulate native UI, but subtle inconsistencies can affect the final polish.
Access to Native Features	Full, unrestricted access to all platform-specific features (e.g., camera, GPS, gestures) without waiting for third-party support, ensuring apps stay up to date with the latest platform innovations.	Limited by third-party plugins or workarounds, which may not support every native feature or can introduce performance bottlenecks.
Code Reusability	Limited reusability, as separate codebases are needed for Android and iOS, but this allows for deeper platform-specific integration.	High code reusability comes at the cost of customization and can restrict access to platform-specific optimizations.
Maintenance	Higher maintenance effort is due to the need to manage separate codebases, but updates and bug fixes can be more targeted and platform specific.	Simplifies maintenance with a shared codebase, but shared solutions can sometimes lead to bugs across both platforms that require complex fixes.
Community and Libraries	Established, extensive communities with a wealth of libraries and tools fine-tuned specifically for Android and iOS development.	Growing community, but support is still evolving, especially when addressing platform-specific edge cases that native development handles effortlessly.
Long-term Scalability	Ideal for complex, performance-heavy applications that require deep integration with the operating system and native features.	Sufficient for simpler apps, but scalability and performance may degrade as complexity increases, especially with apps requiring frequent native interactions.
Learning Curve	Higher learning curve due to the need to master separate programming languages and tools for each platform, but rewards developers with deep platform knowledge.	Lower learning curve, particularly for developers transitioning from web development, but may lack the depth required for high-performance, platform-specific apps.

If you are in the process of ideating or creating a mobile app you can Book a FREE Product Discovery Session here

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