There’s an App for That
Preparing for a Successful Software Build & Development Partnership
Development partners like SRG can absolutely bring your vision to life. We will pair you with analysts, engineers, AI/ML specialists, and systems architects. When we first sit down to meet, the clearer the picture you can paint of your goals, the smoother and faster the journey becomes.
Your spark of an idea for software might be the beginning of something great! Maybe you’ve been contemplating it for the past several months/years: How would it work? Who is it for? It would solve this problem in this way… Maybe you’ve written a few descriptions or jotted some notes. Are you ready to reach out to a development partner? Before you take that step, here are some suggestions for what you should have in place and what the collaboration might look like once those foundational pieces are set.
There are three main ideas that you should bring to the table:
What problem are you trying to solve?
What is your desired outcome? Outcome clarity helps dev teams plan, estimate, and build effectively.
What is your expected user reaction? User interviews and/or market research help you and your dev partner to meet an audience’s expectations.
The answers to these three foundational questions will define your Minimum Viable Product (MVP): the simplest, leanest version of your product that solves the core problem, delivers value users expect, and allows you to test key assumptions. The MVP can be tested by users – user feedback is essential in moving forward with developing the actual product.
Knowing the answers for an MVP ensures developers know exactly what you want, keeping development focused and setting realistic expectations.
A current SRG project came to our group with a fully designed mobile app, and in defining the designs of their idea, they were able to think through how it works, who it is for, and what their desired outcome is. They had clearly done this hard work (and some), which allowed the team to dig in directly to the next set of work to define the parts of the app we would start developing.
To define MVP features, one must separate essential from optional features. A good rule of thumb to follow is to separate by:
Must-haves: Without these, the product doesn’t work
Should-haves: Important, but can wait
Nice-to-haves: Useful later, but not needed for the MVP
A fourth category that is not always feature-oriented would be your non-negotiables. These might be technical, UX, or market requirements, but they could also be related to legal concerns or regulatory compliance. Make sure these are clearly communicated and defined before you start building your product.
If a project has not yet done this work, and if you don’t know where to start, SRG would organize a design sprint, which is a structured, time-boxed process that helps founders move from a vague idea to a validated concept quickly. Rather than spending weeks debating features or months building the wrong solution, a design sprint lets you test your product direction before writing a single line of code. It can clarify your product vision and align your team and development partner. A design sprint can be as short as a week or as long as it takes to define your product.
The next step would be to translate the MVP into user stories. You can do this yourself or work with a business analyst to review and document the user stories for your product.
User stories have a standardized format:
As a [user type], I want to [action] so that [outcome].
Converting the information gathered in your design process into user stories clarifies the product's goal and guides developers down the specific path to follow. Good user stories and good products focus on specific outcomes.
Choosing the right development partner for your product is vital. Find out more here about the expert services that SRG Software provides.
Contact us today to learn more.
