5 ways to reduce the cost of app development

One of the first questions we get from our clients is: What is the cost of app development? Our short and quick answer is: Go to our app calculator and find it out in a minute.

But for those who insist on getting an instant rough estimate, this is what we say: A small, simple app with minimal features can cost anything around $15,000, whereas a highly complex app with deep integrations can cost anything around $100,000.

The long answer, however, is that the cost of an app can be negotiated and reduced significantly by taking into account these five basic measures:

1. Use React Native

React native is a perfect platform for developing mobile apps for both iOS and Android because its building blocks can be reused as native components. It helps you save an incredible amount of time and reduce the cost of app development significantly. You don’t require separate developers for iOS and Android. And you don’t require two separate code repositories either.

So far we have had amazing success with React Native. It allows you to create apps that are similar to their native analogs, both in design and performance.

We encourage our clients to first get their app developed solely for one platform, either iOS or Android. Once that version of the app is launched and tested, we advise them to build the other version.

Since each version has its own User Interface features, the cost for frontend creation can be very high, as you would need to hire several teams for each platform. One option is to go for a hybrid or cross-platform app. But in our experience, such apps have been lacking in performance capabilities.

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2. Use Minimal Design

It’s an outdated approach to spend months on planning and developing all the features, testing and then optimizing the app for the market. Chances are that you might end up investing a lot of time and money into developing features that the users may not eventually care for.

That’s why we recommend minimal design. By using design sprint, you can compress months of work into a single week – a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Instead of waiting to launch a finished product, you can get customer reactions from a realistic prototype very early on without making any expensive commitments.

And by using Agile methodology, you can split an entire project into small sprints while keeping the long-term vision intact. Based on your consumer reactions, you can keep adding new features with newsprints. And if changes need to be made in a project, the team can respond to them quickly and fix the bugs simultaneously.

There is no need for re-planning or restructuring the entire project to fit any changes, thus helping you save a lot of money and time and reduce the cost of app development.

3. Launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

We always encourage our clients to launch the first version of their apps with minimum functionality and keep all the secondary features for later development. This will help you keep the cost of app development low. It’s only after you have identified the demand for additional features that you must start investing in them.

MVP fits in perfectly with agile methodology. It reduces costs and helps you avoid failure at a later stage.

By launching an MVP, you can test your core idea at a very early stage and in a very low budget. You can identify improvements and bugs in advance, without losing too much time, money or resources.

Not only does it keep costs down and speed up the development process, but it also allows you to develop your app with real user feedback when launched. By launching an MVP, you shall never be faced with the problem of users wanting something different from your ideas.

So don’t waste your time developing detailed interfaces and branded designs. Instead, implement an early version of your app. Fail fast and learn fast.

4. Outsource first, hire later

If you do not have in-house expertise in app development, don’t waste time and money building a team from scratch. Instead, outsource your work to gain speed. But make sure that you keep the code review process internal so that you don’t end up with an unstructured code. You could even rent a code reviewer if you don’t have one internally. But once you have reached the stage of finding a product-market fit, you should build a team for scaling up.

Meanwhile, for outsourcing purposes, go for a company that offers you end-to-end services and access to a large talent pool. If you have too many different hires from different places involved in the same app development project, you might end up losing hours of sleep coordinating with them in different time zones.

We recommend you hire a company that takes full accountability of testing, developing and fixing bugs, and employs best practices from design sprint, Agile and UX. All these factors will significantly reduce your cost of development and time required in building your app.

5. Use readymade solutions

A completely original and authentic software foundation for an app can increase the cost of app development and take a lot of time. To reduce the cost of app development, we encourage the approach of re-usability, either through the online tools or through a company that can provide you so.

There is already a huge glut of reusable libraries available for React Native, and a lot more is being added to the community by top companies such as WIX.

We are doing our bit too. Having built over 100 apps reaching 10 million users in the last four years, we are creating multiple reusable components to add to the libraries for web frontend (React JS), mobile app (React Native) and backend (using Java, Sprint-Boot).

We have already created generic components such as those required for registration, login, authorization, CRUD screens, notifications, analytics, payments etc. to shorten the development cycle. This way we don’t have to build these components from scratch for new apps each time. We code a lot less and create a lot faster. Our goal is to reach a point where we can develop 70% of the requirements through our reusable components list, and only code the rest 30%.

Keeping these hacks in mind, we recommend you go back to the app calculator and find the cost of your app again. We guarantee you that this time your estimate would be much lower. If not, give us a holler to negotiate the cost.

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Clutch lists Top 10 Mobile App Developers in Germany

At Lean Apps, we’re all about speed. We’ll take your idea, formulate a strategy around it, and deliver a product that exceeds your expectations, all within a 6-week time frame or less. We understand that businesses don’t have the time or luxury to experiment with different development teams until they find the right one for them. When a client wants a project completed, they want it now – and at Lean Apps, we work hard to make sure our deliverables match the business need on the first try.

Our hard work hasn’t gone unnoticed. Clutch, a ratings & reviews website for B2B service providers worldwide, recently included Lean Apps on their list of the best app developers in Germany in 2018. Clutch ranks companies according to their industry expertise, market presence, and most importantly, client reviews. But unlike other reviews sites where users can submit feedback anonymously, Clutch takes the time to speak with and verify the claims of our clients, publishing their feedback as full-length reviews that have been published to our Clutch profile.

Lean Apps collected our first few reviews recently, and some highlights from their comments are below:

“They do a great job of encompassing the lean startup methodology and agile methods.” – CEO, Academy for Corporate Entrepreneurship (AfCE)
“Through the iterative process, we were able to see immediate results.” – CEO, Evivecare (Online Health Startup)

In the mobile app development space, having an iterative and agile approach is extremely important to a project’s success. It ensures a proper channel of communication, which helps both the client and the app developers execute the desired mobile application or software. Our team of developers at Lean Apps has honed in on the agile method over the years, and we’re incredibly proud that our hard work has earned us a spot on Clutch’s directory, along with a feature on their sister-site, The Manifest, as one of the best app developers in Germany in 2018 as well!

Moving forward, we will continue to produce mobile apps and software projects at an accelerated pace that still exceeds our clients’ wishes. Thank you to our partners for supporting our team through the years, we look forward to seeing what else 2018 brings.

Test: 8 Questions Every CEO Must Answer

Digital Transformation is reshaping every industry. And there is not a single CEO who is not losing sleep over keeping up with this change.

Here’s a simple test devised by Lean Apps to determine a company’s digital maturity. Answer these eight questions to diagnose the gaps that you need to fill to digitally transform yourself.

(Note down the options that resonate best with your business. And keep your answers handy to calculate your score in the end.)

Is innovation part of your company culture?
- We have dedicated resources to implement structured cycles of innovation.
- We have regular meetings to discuss innovation but not enough resources to implement it.
- Anyone is free to come up with ideas of innovation and if they are good, we sometimes implement them.
- We don’t have time and resources for innovation.
2. Does your business strategy sound something like this?
- a) We have a clear vision with a compelling value proposition. We depend on data to make decisions, decipher demands and analyse competition.
- b) Every department has its own strategy. And all our strategies include an action plan on how to overcome the challenges we face.
- c) Our strategy is to primarily achieve our financial goals.
- d) We may not have a written strategy but we know what we want.

3. What kind of company structure do you have?

a) We have small, cross-functional teams dedicated towards achieving strategic goals.

b) We have some teams that are traditional and some that are very entrepreneurial, both in their goals and behaviour.

c) We have standard departments such as IT, HR, Marketing and Finance that operate independently and follow a corporate strategy.

d) We have a hierarchical structure with a top-down decision making process.

4. Are you agile?

a) We anticipate the need for change and adapt quickly.

b) We react when necessary to cope up with change.

c) We find it hard to change our methods.

d) We don’t need to change.

5. How accessible and scalable are your processes?

a) We have iterative processes that can be adapted based on our learnings and existing demands. These processes are managed on a digital platform allowing scalability across the company and external supply chains.

b) Our managers have created dynamic processes that allow them to control high quality delivery.

c) We do have set processes, but they are reviewed once in a while and are usually used to reduce risk.

d) We don’t enforce any processes in our company.

6. How do you hone the skills of your employees?

a) We have the best programs to impart knowledge and education to our employees so that they can excel in their respective fields.

b) We encourage our employees to participate in workshops and trainings, but they may not necessarily help them achieve mastery in their respective fields.

c) We do offer trainings when a person starts a new job.

d) We believe in learning by doing.

7. Do you use any innovation management tools or techniques in your company?

a) We use a data-driven, collaborative approach to meet strategic challenges. Innovation management tools are used rampantly across the company.

b) We have some teams that use innovation management tools, but they are not applicable across the entire company

c) We have an idea jar and whenever someone has a bright idea, he/she puts it in there. It’s not regularly checked.

d) We don’t have any kind of structure to collect new ideas.

8. Do you use data to improve your customer journey?

a) We depend on data to test our assumptions and value propositions. Our decisions are backed by evidence/data that helps us engage with our customers more closely.

b) We engage with customers on a variety of social media platforms, but this data is rarely dissected to drive any strategic actions.

c) We are trying to be more active on digital platforms that touch our customers’ journeys.

d) We don’t use data to make decisions.

Option a) carries 10 points

Option b) carries 6 points

Option c) carries 4 points

Option d) carries 2 points

If your score is a perfect 80, then you are probably already leading change in your industry.

If your score falls anywhere between 48 and 80, then you are on your way to becoming a Digital Master: A winning organisation that attains competitive advantage by building both digital and leadership excellence.

If your score falls between 32 and 48, then you are a Digital Survivor: An organisation that strives to adapt to the transformation happening in its industry, but is unable to lead it. Typically such an organisation leaves its digital transformation in the hands of IT and Marketing departments.

If your score falls between 16 and 32, then you are a Digital Beginner: An organisation that has basic digital capabilities and lags behind its competitors at multiple levels. Shrinking revenues is its first sign of obsolescence.

If your score is a measly 16, then you are a Digital Disaster: An organisation that has no digital capabilities and is accelerating toward obsolescence.

How to achieve 10x speed in your company?

In most companies, business and IT teams work in silos. They often perceive each other as inefficient working units that have poor grasp over their mutual functions. What could ideally take a few weeks to achieve generally takes months in a set-up where there is no IT-business partnership.

The first step towards building technology leadership capabilities in a company is to foster a strong relationship between IT and business leaders. The strength of this relationship determines how fast you can drive change in your company’s digital health.

Both business and IT teams need to work together to bring innovation culture in your company’s processes. If the relationship between the two teams is robust, then you can move much faster in launching new competencies and updating older platforms.

Emulate the model of Digital Masters

One thing common to the journey of Digital Masters is that their IT and business leaders cultivate deep respect and trust for each other. They clearly define their roles to drive digital transformation together.

And once their relationship is rock solid, they are able to align their respective knowledge and skills into one single unit. This allows them to have a shared understanding of their customer needs, products, organizational skills, processes and their own competency.

Break the culture of silos

What usually happens in companies is that IT and business teams work in silos, often communicating in their own jargons. The decision-making process is awfully slow. Getting project approvals and execution can take months.

It is therefore not uncommon to see offshoring of IT projects, especially the ones that require short delivery cycles. This creates further hostility in the IT team towards business leaders, leading to a deadlock kind of situation for innovation culture to happen.

This must be resolved at any cost because technology is a key enabler of many a transformations in business.

Create a new lifeline in your IT unit

Creating a solid IT-business relationship might take years, if not months. Most companies cannot wait that long to start their digital transformation. So they resort to usual shortcuts: building digital skills in another department rather working directly into IT.

Such shortcuts can cost the company a lot of money and deteriorate their existing digital platforms by adding more complexities. Security issues can be an additional risk factor.

A more sophisticated approach would be to create a new lifeline within your IT unit. This lifeline will ensure that one part of the IT unit continues to function in the traditional way and the other part meets the more advanced digital needs of the business.

Start at an informal level

In the traditional setup, IT projects have well-structured project plans with monthly milestones. But when it comes to digital activities such as the ones that touch on customer engagements, the traditional setup fails abysmally. For such projects require real time testing, experimenting and learning. And based on these interactions, features are either added or dropped.

With the help of a new lifeline, the digital part of IT can modify processes to suit the urgent needs of a project without compromising the existing projects running under the traditional setup. This could also be a great start to developing business and IT partnership on a more informal level.

But building such a relationship requires the right kind of leadership on both sides. Business leaders need to be well-versed with technology. They need to grow comfortable about being challenged by their IT colleagues. Similarly IT leaders need to broaden their perspective beyond technology to incorporate the needs of business performance.

Do a thorough needs analysis

The team leaders need to be effective communicators so they can have more transparency and share a common vision. It is essential that both IT and business have a shared perspective on the value of speed. Some digital efforts might demand more speed and urgency than others.

Executing big implementations in an experimental or do-and-learn style can turn out to be very expensive for a company, adding security risks and a lot of rework.
But the same implementations could be fast and agile if the company has a robust digital platform.

The idea is to do a proper needs analysis: assess what sort of demands a particular project puts on your team and resources; whether your existing capabilities can support it; what sort of speed and delivery cycles are required to fulfill the project.

And for such a judgment, you require the right kind of IT to team up with your business leaders in order to excel.

Use DevOps for speed and accuracy

In this age of digital speed, few businesses can afford to wait for software release cycles at the end of the month for any of their applications. Companies are using DevOps to make better speed possible.

What DevOps does is that it demolishes barriers between development, operations and quality-check teams, thus allowing them to work together cohesively in a more agile environment. This leads to a) improved speed of execution; b) consistent way of application development by standardizing processes.

DevOps is primarily driven by automated tools used to perform tasks generally done manually. For instance testing, configuration control and deployment. When done manually, such tasks can be slow and error prone.

DevOps also requires companies to cultivate a innovation culture in which different IT groups are flexible in their ways of working and are willing to accept/adapt to the changes that make the processes more effective.

At Lean Apps, the use of DevOps has helped us release software applications/features more quickly and with fewer errors. We are able to monitor our performance more closely and resolve issues more effectively than before.

A few key takeaways:

Do not let IT be perceived as an inefficient cost unit in your company
Bring about transparency in all your micro and macro processes such that every unit’s performance, roles and value are clearly measured and defined
Train your IT team to think beyond technical skills. Get them out of the silo-mode. Help them understand the vision of the company and how they are working towards it
Show them how they add value to a particular project and help them assess the gaps that exist in bringing about quality delivery
Change the way IT and business leaders make investment decisions and engage them in the assessment process of what returns each project brings to the company
Encourage IT and business teams to work together to drive innovation culture and speed in their processes

Graphics by Nishant Jain

What is the secret to turning a vision into reality?

There is no set process to create a digital vision for a company. And there is no guarantee of success either. But as long as you build your vision on your company’s strengths, ensure that your employees are engaged at all levels, and keep evolving over time, you are most likely to be on the right track.

First off, you need to identify what you want to achieve and how you picture yourself on realizing your vision. And in the process of achieving that, you must engage with your workforce, your customers and your investors.

Let’s start with a few fundamental steps that can help you turn your vision into reality:

1) Identity your Assets

You need to analyze your strengths and figure out what sort of assets you possess, which can broadly be divided into four categories:

Physical assets such as shops, retail outlets, manufacturing units, factories etc. can either be imperative or redundant to your new digital vision.

Competency-based assets such as expertise of your employees, effective operations, product design etc. may or may not need to be revisited, depending on the processes they support in forming your new vision.

Intangible assets such as patents, copyrights, brand image, company culture etc can either facilitate or inhibit your pace of transformative process.

Data assets could potentially turn out to be a great competitive advantage or another form of product offering for your company.

However, in order to assess the usefulness of these assets, you must look for four key attributes:

Whether these assets can be used to seize new opportunities or subvert possible threats.
Whether these assets are available to your competitors.
Whether these assets are easily replicable.
Whether these assets are non-substitutable.

There was a time when newspapers considered classified ads to be their strategic assets. But Craigslist proved to be a cheap, easy online alternative, thus taking a giant bite of 5 billion dollars out of their revenues between 2000 and 2007.

2) Pin down your transformative aspirations

Simply having a digital vision is not enough. It also needs to be transformative. Your aspirations must help you partake in the disruption leading to digital future.

Here are three ways to start channeling your digital aspirations:

a) Substitute or replace the old technology with the new one. This may not change the efficiency of the existing process. But it might be a great way to experiment before investing in anything bigger.

If smartphones are only used to send emails or any such function that could also be done on desktops, then they are simply being used as substitutes.

b) Improve the efficiency of the existing process. You may not change the process itself.

Sermo, a social media community, is connecting doctors worldwide to share support, wisdom and insights with their peers. This is enabling pharma companies to learn about issues and opportunities in the field of medicine in real-time.

c) Reinvent or redefine the process through the use of technology.

Apple manufacturer Foxconn is aiming to fully automate its factories and has already deployed 40,000 robots at individual workstations. Ultimately the automation should offer a number of benefits to Foxconn executives, including faster production, cheaper labor expenses, and the ability to outbid the competition. A good example of digital transformation.

3) Define your vision clearly

Your digital vision must entail exactly what you want and the changes you need to bring about in order to achieve that. At any level in the organization, the challenge for employees is to try to convert the vision into their day job.

By mentioning specific tasks, actions, and behaviors that bring the vision to life, leaders can help employees convert the concept into practice. The trick is to create a solid vision statement that is easily translatable by everyone in the organization into actions on their day-to-day job.

Invisionapp, a design collaboration platform has a clear vision that drives all its employees to achieve a certain quality standard in their daily work. “Question Assumptions. Think Deeply. Iterate as a Lifestyle. Details, Details. Design is Everywhere. Integrity.”

4) Keep evolving

You must create a vision that is focused enough to anchor the employees of your company in the right direction while giving them ample room to be innovative and grow in their fields.

Proctor and Gamble’s vision is to be recognized as the best consumer products and services company in the world. And in aiming to achieve that, the company is also transforming digitally.

“We’ve all been understandably racing to master the new technologies in this ever-changing machine, but I have a little secret for you: we will never master all these technologies. As long as we try, we will forever be on our heels. I try to simplify by taking the mystery out of the new world and telling our people to look beyond the obsession of technology and turn our attention to what really matters – the consumer experience. And, when necessary, it’s my job to take out the friction in the marketing supply chain,” says Marc Pritchard, P&G’s Global Brand Officer.

Focus on business, not technology

No digital vision can make long-term predictions. For it is very fluid in nature. And it must evolve as new technologies replace old ones or new skills open up better opportunities.

So as you set out to create your digital vision, keep your focus on business, not the technology. For technology keeps changing. It is the customer-experience, operations and business models that you need to transform in order to bring about an effective digital transformation in your organization.

Photos by Mona Singh

How I got 2-3 days of work done in 1 day?

The other day I decided to outsource self-management. In other words I gave the day off to my brain’s frontal lobe, which is known to make choices. In my case usually very questionable ones.

And being absolutely mindful of that, I surrendered to the idea of letting someone else make all the decisions for me for a day. Even the most ridiculously brain dead ones. Like when to eat, when to take a coffee break, when to exercise or when to take a deep breath. Only toilet breaks were left to my discretion.

The whole concept was to de-clutter and free up space in my mind so that I could concentrate purely on the most important tasks of the day: prepare a roadmap for my company’s blog, submit a sales pitch and write two business case studies. I would usually spread these tasks over three days or so depending on my ability to procrastinate or my inability to work for hours at a stretch.

That’s one of the perks of working remotely. There is no one to hold you accountable for your time, space or behaviour. And the only organ (brain) that perhaps has a loose leash over your day is also exceptionally smart at finding ways to succumb to wasteful distractions.

Losing 5.5 hours doing nothing everyday

“According to research, most people achieve only 2.5 hours of actual work and lose about 5.5 hours in low or no-value tasks, distractions, interruptions, meetings, calls etc.,” said Dr. Antoine Larchez, my decision-maker for the day and usually known as productivity/happiness coach.

He welcomed me. And nine others like me. (Basically individuals that find themselves easily distracted and sucked-up into social media trash during work hours.) Into a spacious, white room. Adorned with big green chakras on the facing walls.

We were asked to put our phones on airplane mode and close all our browser tabs and windows on our desktops. Productivity Boost Day! That’s what we had all signed up for. Some of us were there to finish our most dreaded/procrastinated tasks. And some of us were there to break the monotony of our usual ways of working.

I belonged to the latter group. I wanted to test if I functioned any better when left to the devices of another person. But before I could get comfortable about settling in to spend my day in that atypical room, Antoine got us all up on our feet. Asking us to start with jumping jacks.

Signing an emotional contract

After few giggles here and there, some hand-leg coordination exercises and a clapping circle, he asked us to commit to our goals for the day. The tangible outcome of our goals was put up on a white roll out sheet in front of the room as a symbol of accountability. We also committed to paying a monetary fine on account of failing to reach our targets.

Each of us betted anything from €10 (INR 700) to €50 (INR 3,500) bucks depending on the significance of our goals and available cash in our pockets. Likewise, we were allowed to reward ourselves if proven successful in achieving our goals. Some of us rejoiced in the idea of going to a movie afterwards, reading a book or simply taking a day off.

It was like signing an emotional contract. To stay focused and perform during the day. And refrain from social distractions in all forms. Online and offline.

Working in productivity capsules

The whole day was divided into six time-bound productivity capsules of 50 minutes each. The room would fill up with music each time we completed a productivity session.

At one point I felt, it was all about following commands. When Antoine said, “Stop working,” we stopped. When he said, “Show me burpees,” we showed him so. When he said, “Start working,” we started so. And when he said, “relax and go into a happy place in your imagination,” we did exactly so.

For some of us, it was like having a Guru that knew what worked best for its disciples. For others, it was basically mirroring a behavioural pattern that looked pretty productive.

At the end of the day, most of us got into a synchronised work flow. Punctuated by music and dopamine releasing exercises. That prevented us from slacking off every now and then. And anytime we found ourselves branching away from our main task, we took to the ‘Not-now pad’: a piece of paper set aside to dump all our ideas or to-do lists for later.

A hack or structure?

I am not sure if I have nailed a new productivity hack. But it’s definitely worth a try. To set aside a day when you resign from the position of being a self-manager. And just be the agent of execution. Following instructions. And letting someone more experienced design your day. It could be a coach, a scrum master or a team member on roster.

I am sure every CEO would like the idea of having at least one Productivity Day in the week when employees are allowed no distractions or meetings. A pure getting-things-done day to focus and perform!

At Lean Apps, we are planning to turn Wednesdays into the Productivity Boost Day of the week. “And if all goes as planned, we might soon be looking at a four-day working week in our company,” said Narjeet Soni, CEO of Lean Apps.

This article originally appeared on yourstory.com

Behind Every Relationship, There Is An App

Lola is a 20-something, attractive woman whose long-term boyfriend dumped her three years ago. In a text that didn’t even display the courtesy of a spell check. Tinking we shd backup (read breakup). She cried relentlessly (six times a day on an average) for months to follow.

Relationship Status: Complicated

Drowning in her own quicksand of self-pity, she activated the Drunk Mode app to avoid sending emotional texts to her ex after getting wasted.

Two years ago she could have been easily dismissed as a ‘dating disaster’. Starved of happy hormones and bereft of any self-confidence, she resorted to digital therapy of sorts. She downloaded the Rx Breakup app that helped her get over her crazy obsession in exactly 30 days.

But she needed a lot more than a temporary self-esteem boost to get back into the dating game. Incidentally her friends signed her up on Squad. A casual group hangout app that is often used as a discreet back doorway to dating.

For Lola it was a healthy way to graduate to Tinder. One month into it, and she had begun swiping like a pro. On an average she went on three dates every week (mostly starting Thursday). During happy hours to load up on two-for-the-price-of-one drinks.

“It’s cut-throat out there. Everyone’s a slut. I am tired of sharing the same anecdotes with the same enthusiasm every week. Sometimes I am not even interested in a guy, but I just play along because I don’t want to go back to an empty apartment or binge watch on Netflix,” she wrote in an anonymous blog post.

It was disturbing how Lola had created a psychological urgency to find a spouse before she hit 30. There was also a callous indifference in the way she strung along some of her past romantic relationships through Instagram. “My biological clock was ticking. I had to act smart. I had two guys in the backburner. It didn’t cost much to comment on their pictures. And it kind of kept them interested in me,” she wrote in yet another anonymous blog post.

Relationship Status: Committed

After almost 87 dates, 2 one-night stands and one polyamorous relationship, Lola finally changed her Facebook status to ‘Committed’. Puffy the Cat got replaced by a sultry looking bloke called Eduardo.

And her romantic commitment was apparent in every post she published thereafter. Check-ins at restaurants. Check-ins at spas. Check-ins at shopping malls. Feeling loved. Feeling hungry. Feeling sleepy. Feeling pampered. With whom? Eduardo of course.

Congratulations, congrats, felicidades! These trigger words on her wall shot Lola to a temporary fame of three days, as Facebook algorithm bumped her happy posts on her friends’ new feeds. A Snapchat video of how Eduardo proposed to Lola at sunset facing the romantic waters of the Mediterranean got 1,174 views.

Relationship Status: Married

One day before the wedding, Lola cleared her phone of all the Whatsapp chat histories and wicked apps that got her through the ordeal of being single. The idea was to make a clean start. Have no secrets. Share a new intimate bond with her partner. So much so that the duo even exchanged their passwords with their vows.

After all what was there to worry? The Marriage Material app had already confirmed that their compatibility score was above average compared to other happy couples. All their wedding jitters of dress fittings, white tulips, music band and dinner rehearsals were ticked off on WeddingWire. The only thing that remained was streaming this life event on Youtube.

Fast-forward seven months and Lola was sending her first-trimester belly photos to Eduardo through The Bump, an app that tracks week-by-week pregnancy of mothers-to-be.

Relationship Status: None of your business

And just when you thought they had the most clichéd pattern of life, Lola caught Eduardo having an affair with a colleague. His phone was filled with sexed-up messages and semi-naked selfies. His online behavior had changed significantly. He was changing his profile picture way too often. And the incessant sharing of his daily runs, moods and horoscopes showed him in a different light.

At this stage, no digital remedy, be it Fix a fight or Marriage and Counselling app could put the shards of Lola’s broken relationship together.

From anger to angst to absolute indifference, Lola went through various stages of grief until she started living in a silo under the same roof with Eduardo. Yet there was continuous spying and tailing. Digitally though.

It was an irreparable damage. Emotionally and financially. Divorce seemed like a workable solution. But they were too exhausted to go through the charades of legal attorneys and mountains of paper work. So they agreed on one last thing.

At less than a thousand bucks per month in legal bills, they sorted their divorce on their smartphones through a frugal divorce app called Amicable.

Relationship Status: Still Exploring

Rightfully so. In this day and age of digital madness, our phone apps are perhaps a better reflection of our relationships/behavioral statuses than our own instincts.

Now Lola may seem like an exaggerated manifestation of digital-emotional drama. But sadly we meet and experience bits of Lola everyday.

And thanks to Data Analytics, Google is now luring Lola into exploring the likes of Divorce Dating to find love/companionship second time around.

This article originally appeared on Huffington Post

Three ways to create your company’s digital vision

True digital transformation starts at the top of a company. It starts with a focused vision. Often created and led by the senior-most employees. And then carried out by the mid and lower-level employees.

This is not to say that mid-level executives cannot bring about transformation. In fact, there are plenty of such examples where executives have digitally transformed parts of their businesses. But they are almost always confined to the boundaries of their own units or departments. Unable to break through silos that so rampantly exist in companies.

So it turns out that the top management has to be in the driving seat for a global company-wide change to happen.

A digital vision can focus on any of the three approaches:

1. Redefining Customer experience

Many companies choose customer experience as their focal point for digital transformation. But there is no one set way to do it. For customer experience itself can be redefined in many different ways:

a) Delivering an integrated customer experience through digital transformation

When Burberry took the digital road to rebuild itself, its aim was to seamlessly blur the lines between physical and digital – create multi-channel coherence. Today Burberry is known as a fully digitized luxury brand. From interactive mirrors that transform into personalized screens to virtual smooches, the company has transformed itself digitally by focusing on creating an integrated customer experience.

b) Improving service to customers through digital transformation

The low-cost carrier Southwest Airlines has been continually using Big Data to improve and determine which new customer services to implement. The airlines are apparently using speech analytics to extract value-rich data from its customers. This helps them explore customer sentiments and how they feel about their experience with Southwest in comparison to other competitors.

“By observing and looking into customer behaviors and actions online, we are better suited to offer our travelers the best rates and experiences possible. We also use this data to support the evolving relationships with our customers,” said Dan Landson, a company spokesman.

c) Using digital transformtion to understand customers better

LEGO uses its online presence to understand its customers better. One brilliant example is how it allows its members to co-create products that they would like to engage with. For instance, LEGO Ideas is an online community that allows members to create their own design sets and vote on submissions of others. If a proposed set gets 10,000 votes, then LEGO reviews it and picks a winner whose set is created and then sold worldwide. The creator earns a percentage of sales and gets recognition as the creator of all packaging. Thanks to digital transformation, customers are involved from ideation to creation to validation at LEGO.

d) Changing lives through digital transformation

While big pharma companies are still struggling to go fully digital to make an impact on the lives of patients worldwide, there are smaller players that are rapidly changing the health landscape.

Be My Eyes is one such example – a social network that connects blind users with sighted ones. The app provides on-demand help to blind users with simple everyday tasks, such as reading the expiration date on a milk carton or directing to a road sign. It offers a wonderful opportunity for sighted people to help those in need, with a quick swipe on their screens or a few minutes of facetime.

2. Redefining Operations

Companies that lack efficiency in their existing operations usually put their digital focus on redefining operations. For it is in the interest of every executive in a company to have a more transparent supply chain. This allows them to break down silos, form new collaborations and increase the speed of decision-making across the organization.

Boeing has been focusing its digital efforts on achieving operational excellence. And it believes that the future of aviation lies in creating ‘digital airlines’ using advanced analytics and artificial intelligence. Its collaboration with Microsoft is aimed to improve commercial aviation by enhancing factors like predictive aircraft maintenance, fuel optimization, airline systems, and the overall cabin passenger experience.

“There is great potential between the connected traveler, the connected airplane and the connected operation, and their interplay,” said Andrew Gendreau, director of advanced information solutions in Boeing’s Digital Aviation division. “Globally, airlines spend about $700 billion on operating costs, and there’s about $700 billion in revenue. So airlines are a very competitive business with profitable but narrow margins; leveraging data and analytics not only improves performance and experience but will give airlines a chance to sustain profitable growth.”

3. Redefining Business Models

Companies often create new business models by combining ideas around operational processes and customer experience. These newly defined business models can either be an extension of the existing ones or a complete departure from the old ways of working. Such a digital transformation takes one of the three approaches:

a) Defensive: Companies that are under the threat of being rendered obsolete tend to take a defensive approach, often focusing on their long-term survival. The pace of change in their industry is so fast that they must either face death at the hands of new technology or redesign their existing business models.

The extinction of street travel agents is a perfect example of how the Internet has forced the travel industry to adapt and embrace new technology. Even the biggest of travel agencies have had to step up their digital efforts to woo customers. Browsing through travel brochures or reading through Lonely Planet guides are no longer sufficient hooks for booking a holiday.

Travel stores are facing oblivion. But thanks to virtual reality, Thomas Cook is now offering ‘try before you buy’ tours in some of its stores to bring back the lost sheen of its business. By simply donning a headset, customers can now experience a slice of their holiday destinations before actually paying for them.

b) Offensive: Companies that actively seek opportunities to create digitally powered business models tend to adopt an offensive approach. In such a case, a company does not have to brave through a crisis. In fact, executives in such companies enjoy the luxury to experiment with new digital approaches.

H&M, an established fast-fashion clothing brand, is actively looking to make recycling ‘cool’ for creating a sustainable fashion future. The company aims to focus on behavioral change by encouraging consumers to recycle their unwanted clothes. Any piece of clothing or textile that is not needed can be dropped off at any local H&M store and given a new purpose: This campaign is helping them win the hearts of not just fashion-conscious but also environment-conscious consumers, thus helping them break into new customer segments.

c) Disruptive: These are companies that do not wait for challenges or opportunities to redefine their business models. These companies create digital visions to drive the industry-wide shift.

The ecommerce software platform Shopify has simplified the shopping experience to a new level. How? By realizing the retail potential in three of the world’s biggest social hubs: Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Shopify has introduced buy buttons on social media to empower small-time business owners in boosting their mobile and online sales. Now anyone can post products to Sello, the company’s new app, without first having to maintain a full-blown Shopify store. Pinterest’s Buyable Pins is already getting twice the conversion rate of regular Pins on mobile.

And yet there is no one way to conclude or frame a vision for digital transformation. It is an evolving journey that starts at the top and then engages people at every level in the company.

Photos by Mona Singh

Five ways to disrupt your business model

Burberry has become a Digital Master by transforming its customer experience. Codelco has become a Digital Master by transforming its operations.

And Uber has become the epitome of Digital Mastery by transforming its customer experience, its operations and its business model.

The trip history of Uber reads like this (copied verbatim from its site):

On a snowy Paris evening in 2008, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp had trouble hailing a cab. So they came up with a simple idea—tap a button, get a ride.

What started as an app to request premium black cars in a few metropolitan areas is now changing the logistical fabric of cities around the world. Whether it’s a ride, a sandwich, or a package, we use technology to give people what they want, when they want it.

For the women and men who drive with Uber, our app represents a flexible new way to earn money. For cities, we help strengthen local economies, improve access to transportation, and make streets safer. When you make transportation as reliable as running water, everyone benefits. Especially when it’s snowing outside.

Uber has created an inspiring story. It has redefined the archaic business model of the cab industry. Connecting over billion people across 536 cities worldwide with a tap of a button.

And now it’s perhaps redefining the delivery industry with the launch of UberRUSH in New York City, San Francisco and Manhattan. It’s a service that connects people with a delivery partner at the push of a button, ready to pick up items and deliver them wherever they need to go.

There are five classic ways of transforming business models:

1) Transforming industries through platforms

Transforming an industry is a difficult ball game. It’s risky. It’s complicated. And it throws a company out of its comfort zone.

But thanks to digital technologies, companies are now able to connect every element of their business at a level that never existed before. They no longer need huge infrastructure investments to redefine their value chains. They can simply go shopping on different online platforms for whatever it is they need.

Need three project managers for 90 days? Go to a platform such as Upwork.com. Need to crowdsource your R&D? Go to a platform such as innocentive.com. Need to buy particular IT infrastructure? Go to a platform such as azure.microsoft.com. Need to publish content for a wide audience? Go to a platform such as medium.com. This is what we call the rise of the platform economy.

Airbnb started a sharing revolution

Joe and Brian came up with the idea of Airbnb in 2007 when they were struggling to pay their rent. They decided to set up a website, rent out three airbeds on their living-room floor and cook breakfast for their guests. And in less than a week, they had three guests sleeping on their floor paying $80 each a night.

Soon this idea took shape of the world’s biggest sharing economy platform, connecting people looking to list or book accommodations. Today, Airbnb is present in 34,000 cities and 191 countries and does not own a single property.

How does it make money though? Through brokerage: a 3 per cent cut from the renter and 6-12 per cent from the traveller. In return, Airbnb provides customer service, handles payments and covers insurance for its hosts. Its annual revenue is projected to grow to $10 billion by 2020.

This has got many a big dinosaurs in the hotel industry scrounging for new ways to open up revenue streams. Marriott for instance is offering a sharing economy style workspace on demand: Whether you need an office for 3 hours or 3 years, the LiquidSpace network gives you more space, more variety and more flexibility than any other platform. Hands down.

Quite a ‘sharing’ revolution it is. Large hotel chains across the globe are in fact looking for ways to incorporate the sharing economy formula into their business models.

2) Replacing products with substitutes

Sometimes transforming your business model becomes a necessity. Especially if your product or service is being swept away by a new digital wave.

The way Ipods swept away Walkmans or CDs did away cassettes.

If you see your margins shrinking or customers moving away to other substitutes, it’s time to regroup and rethink. And the earlier you do it, the stronger your advantage would be over your competitors.

Fujifilm reacted, regrouped and redefined

When Kodak was beaten to death by the new wave of digital photography and smartphones, Fujifilm survived by diversifying. A calculated move that came after studying the fact that the anti-oxidants used in film were similar to those used in cosmetics.

So the company launched a new line of cosmetics using its stock of anti-oxidants left in film library. And given that it was already an established name in film, it started making optical films for LCD flat screens.

A rather smart way to proactively manage a business transition.

3) Finding new ways to create business

Large firms are often so obsessed with expanding or protecting their existing businesses that they find it hard to open up new streams of revenue with a revised business model.

It’s usually the smaller players or startups that cause disruptions or make way for new digital businesses.

However, there are always exceptions in the industry.

Tesco is like a giant startup

Tesco has traditionally built its business on large retail stores. It has also been equally bold at adapting new technologies. Take for instance Tesco’s innovative move in South Korea. A country where people are adept at using latest technology, working long hours and commuting with public transport.

Tesco created a new way of shopping by setting up virtual displays of grocery aisles at subway stations and bus stops. People waiting for their transport could simply scan items on their smartphone for purchase. And then have them delivered to their doorstep. Since they didn’t have time to visit stores, Tesco brought the stores to them.

That’s what we call innovation.

4) Transforming value chains with technologies

If you are so far away from your customers that you can’t hear their moans or cries, then you need to redefine your value chain.

There are many B2B companies that want to connect with their end-customers but are stuck in a third-party distribution model.

If they approach customers directly, they might hurt their relations with distributors. And if they don’t, they might never find out detailed needs of their customers. It’s a terrible dilemma.

Volvo broke the traditional setup

In an attempt to reach out to its end-customers directly without bypassing the authority of its car dealers, Volvo devised a B2B2C business model. It started by opening up a conversation with its customers on social media to reinforce loyalty and build trust.

Then it launched a Volvo-on-call button in its cars. An emergency and tracking service that enabled its customers to control the car remotely. By using the smartphone app the customer could control the climate in the car or pre-heat engine in parking. Also, the driver could simply push the button and talk to someone directly at the Volvo call center. Whether it was a flat tire, a breakdown, or an accident, Volvo would send assistance anywhere.

This helped Volvo redefine its business model in a way that strengthened both its customers and dealer relations like never before.

5) Rethinking value propositions

Business model transformation can sometimes help you transform your market position. It may not always open doors to new markets. But it can help you re-establish your presence in the existing market.

This can be achieved by using analytics, taking on a new image, revising your pricing etc. Or all of them combined together to redefine your value proposition. In startups, it’s often called pivoting. But for traditional big companies, it’s a tall order to do so.

Dove changed the perception of beauty

Dove started out as a soap brand and dreaded to be rendered as yet another beauty brand. That was the fear grappling a team of sensitive women backing this global brand when they decided to rethink their value proposition.

They clearly did not want to be another voice in the overcrowded space of glossy, photo shopped image of beauty brands. So they redefined their value proposition. Dove made it clear that it saw beauty in imperfections. It discarded all the stereotypes. It made beauty sound very democratic. It recognised the inner beauty of women. Their character, their strength and personality.

They took ordinary women in their advertisements talking about how Dove made them feel. Dove changed the rules of beauty.

Do not fixate on the odds against you but on victory ahead of you — Matshona Dhliwayo.

Photos by Mona Singh

Disrupt your operations

Operations have never been sexy. If anything they have been the opposite of what sexy looks like. At best, they conjure up images of dust, grime and heavy machinery. Take mining for example. Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer, created its competitive advantage by focusing solely on operations. It transformed digitally by choosing to focus on operations. Not on customer experience.

Here’s the lowdown: Mining used to be a dirty business. And from what we heard in news, it used to be dangerous too. Men would go underground and lose their connect with the world above for days. There were terrible issues around productivity, environmental hazards and miner safety.

Codelco figured that it needed a fresh approach. Either it had to move from a physical to digital model or risk being irrelevant in future. To innovate its operational processes, it initiated Codelco Digital, a radical way of automating business processes.

“Our business used to be related to physical labor. Today it is about knowledge and modern technology,” said Codelco CIO Marco Antonio Orellana Silva, the key driver of Codelco Digital. Thanks to his vision, today trucks on Codelco’s mining sites drive autonomously and information is shared in real-time. Miners don’t go to mines anymore. They go to the central automation facility.

And that’s not it. The digital transformation continues. It is changing the fabric of the entire company. Employees are now engaged to look for ways to innovate and speed up execution. They are not leveraged for their physical strength. They are leveraged for their knowledge. They make decisions based on data. Safety is no longer their biggest worry.

Codelco has disrupted the nature of the mining industry.

You can’t just copy-paste!

When you transform your customer experience, your competitors can watch and learn. But when you transform your operations, your competitors can be caught off-guard.

For they can’t see your internal processes, your skills or your information flow behind your successful outcome.

All they can see is your productivity and agility. But it’s hard for them to figure out how you get it. That’s the reason operational advantage is pretty hard to copy. If it were only about adopting a new technology, every other company would be a Digital Master. But it takes much more than simple process improvement to get there.

Digital Masters perceive technology as a springboard to redefine their way of doing business. They abandon their old assumptions stemming from the limits of their older technology and forge ahead with newer ways of digitally optimizing themselves.

Everything comes at a price, even Operational Efficiency

Let’s say you align and automate your processes to such an extent that even a robot can perform all your tasks without sweating or swearing. Result? You gain tremendous financial benefits. But in the process, machines replace your workforce. That is not an ideal situation for any company.

How can you make your workforce more efficient without replacing them?

UPS (United Parcel Service), the world’s largest package delivery company, is an excellent example of operational efficiency and process alignment. It has aligned every step of its logistical web to such an extent that its drivers are even trained how to walk in slick conditions. And guess what? It seems to be working wonders in improving their efficiency and quality.

UPS has built its operations in a way that a) it delivers on time, b) it gives its customers multiple options to meet their needs, and c) it allows the flexibility of changing delivery choices while the shipment is in route. Regardless of the weather, distance or size of the package.

UPS delivers more than 15 million packages each day in more than 220 countries across the world. And given that there is a gazillion ways to run its deliveries, UPS mines this sea of data to optimize routes to save even quarter of a mile. Thanks to data analytics UPS has been able to shave off 85 million miles driven per year.

It may sound absurd but UPS drivers are encouraged to avoid left-hand turns as it involves longer waiting time and hence wastage of fuel. The company specifically maps out routes with right hand loops. In 2012 alone, it resulted in saving around 10 million gallons of gas and a reduction in emissions tantamount to taking 5,300 cars off the road for a year. That’s a lot.

UPS has managed to do all this not merely by hiring analytics talent but by persevering to train its existing engineers and business people in using these key tools to optimize their processes. It’s a company-wide collaboration.

Automating Innovation can be a challenge

Can you expect a robot to come up with new suggestions? Or tell you, “Let’s try it this way dude.” Not really. But it might seem plausible in the wake of artificial intelligence. Let’s face it. Automation has become more intelligent these days. It’s not just about moving heavy stuff or fulfilling an assembly line.

There are sophisticated information systems that are beginning to automate decision-making too.

Credit Suisse is one such organization that has optimized its operations through intelligent automation yet leaving enough room for innovation. The financial giant has automated its report writing with the help of Narrative Science technology that essentially converts data into narratives.

It analyzes millions of data points on thousands of companies and automatically writes research reports that assess company expectations, risk and upside. What would generally be a long, tedious, spreadsheet driven decision-making exercise for analysts and investors is now an automated process.

Result? The quality of the reports is definitely better. They are a lot more consistent in structure and language. The outcome does not depend on the experience of the analyst to pick nuances in the given data to make interpretations. And there is massive scope for scalability.

Credit Suisse has been able to triple its volume of reports without hiring any new analysts. In fact, its analysts are rather engaged in strengthening relations with new clients. Such is the power of intelligent automation.

Digitizing means linking your supply chain closer than ever

Digital technologies are creating tremendous opportunities to manage supply chains better.

Every element of the supply chain, from suppliers to intermediaries to third-party service providers to customers, is now digitally linked closer than ever.

And Zara is leveraging every bit of it to ace supply chain management.

In simple language, Zara is changing the fate of the retail industry. What its rivals take nine months to put on their shelves, Zara does it in two weeks. Its unique fast fashion business model is fueled by buyer-driven supply chain capabilities. Store managers use personal digital assistants (PDAs) to capture real-time consumer data on transactions and preferences that are seamlessly transmitted to designers and manufacturers at the backend.

Optical readers are used to sort and distribute clothing items at an incredible speed of more than 60,000 items an hour. Cut pieces are tracked with the help of bar codes thus allowing minimal human requirement. Result? Zara is able to control its value chain of designing, producing and delivering in 14 days without the need of stocking in warehouses.

That’s the reason when you walk into a Zara store, you are bound to find something new and something worth buying. Unsold items at Zara account for only 10 per cent in comparison to the industry average of 20 per cent.

Act fast and act now

If you want to gain a distinct competitive advantage, you have to move beyond simple adoption of tools. Connect your processes, your people and your technology in a way that you can outshine all your competitors. And if you need a hand in rethinking your way of doing business, give Lean Apps a nudge.

Photos by Mona Singh

Author: Ripu Daman Singh

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