results driven deveopment and mobile – aaron glazer – qcon

This is part of my live blogging from QCon 2015. See my QCon table of contents for other posts.

Building a mobile app is like a Formula One car. Someone else creates the rules. People care about how you perform, not the internals.

Results driven means working with all areas (sales, marketing, tech, etc) to achieve a common goal.

Data on it’s own isn’t useful.Needs focus.

Clarity thrugh simplicity. Simplicity alone is not enough.

A typical analytics graph shows dips/peaks over time. But don’t know what. Was a feature released then? Did new copy change your ranking in google? Did features have a delayed effect? Were externalities driving the result? Did features have any effect?

Instead do A/B testing to focus on causation instead of correlation.

In physical store, 75% of users pull out phone and 25% of those buy online rather than in store standing in.

After 1 day after downloading, 15% of users still use app. After a month,only 2% do. This inludes paid and unpaid apps.

On stubhub, see 400 words on desktop, mobile 30 words, Apple watch 5 words. Target has same scale: 500/50/7. On smaller device, word worth more.

A/B testing more important on mobile because less opportunity to hook user.

A/B Testing Walkthrough
Know goal.
Setup distribution. 50% baseline 50% varation
Segmentation: only show to users meeting target audience

Results Driven Development

  • Everyone must work together – Isolating the mobile team is bad. The engineering team controls app, but not accountable for user retention and other business goals. In results driven, havve a cross functional team. Center team around checkout flow, not platform.
  • Get the right tool for the job
  • Ensure accountability is directed properly
  • Data gives you information, but need goal. Results gives you answers.
  • Choose contextual business metric. Hypothesize/test/improve

Q & A

  • How do A/B testing on mobile? Can build multiple apps within an app and toggle.Can use Taplytics (is company) to change dynamically
  • There were two other questions, but they dried up fast

Impressions: The stats were interesting. I feel like i’ve heard most of the remaining info before.

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