You're launching a mobile app with conflicting stakeholder views. How do you determine the target audience?

Start by conducting thorough market research to identify the most promising user segments. Use surveys, interviews, and data analysis to understand potential users' needs and preferences. Engage stakeholders in a discussion to align their views with these insights. Prioritize the target audience that offers the greatest alignment with both market demand and business goals. Create user personas reflecting this target audience and use them to guide decision-making. Balancing stakeholder input with data-driven insights will help focus your app on the most viable and impactful user base.

Determine their goals, such as revenue generation, user acquisition, or brand awareness. Engage in discussions to uncover areas of overlap and divergence in their expectations. Engage in discussions to uncover areas of overlap and divergence in their expectations.

We have two straightforward approaches here: we can either launch a minimum viable product (MVP) with only the essential value delivery and then allow the market to dictate the needs and preferences, or we can conduct field research with personas we believe are experiencing the specific pain points we aim to address. I have worked with both methods, and each has proven effective in its respective application.

Remember, the objective is to harmonize the app’s development strategy with both stakeholder aspirations and market realities. By aligning these elements, you can create a product that not only meets stakeholder objectives but also resonates with a targeted audience, enhancing the app’s overall success and impact.

- Explore Your Current User Base : If you already have a website, customize Google Analytics to analyze your existing user demographics. This can provide insights into your potential app users. - Study Competitors Users: Spy on those who use your direct competitors apps. Understand their demographics, preferences, and behaviors. This helps you identify overlapping audiences. - Create a Preliminary User Profile: Based on the information gathered, draw up a target user profile. Consider demographics (age, gender, income), location, psychographics (interests, desires), and specific needs your app can address. Understanding your audience is crucial for successful app marketing and adoption.

Competitive Analysis: Study similar apps in the market to understand their target audience and market positioning. Identify gaps that your app can fill. Demographic and Psychographic Data: Collect data on potential user segments, including age, gender, location, interests, and behaviors. This will help narrow down the most viable audience.

After understanding stakeholder expectations, conduct market research to analyze competitors, industry trends, and market gaps. Identify demographic and psychographic data to determine who will benefit from your app. Ensure that your target audience is not only in need of the app but also interested in using it. This step aligns stakeholder views with real-world data, refining your target audience profile.

After understanding what stakeholders want, the next step is to do market research. This means looking at what competitors are doing, seeing what's popular in the industry, and finding areas where your app can stand out. You should gather information about who might use your app, including details like their age, interests, and behaviors. This helps you figure out who will most likely need and want to use your app. By doing this, you can match stakeholder expectations with what’s actually happening in the market, helping you decide on a clear target audience.

Once you understand stakeholder expectations, dive into market research by analyzing competitors, studying industry trends, and identifying market gaps your app could fill. Gather demographic and psychographic data to determine who would benefit most from your app. Your target audience should not only need the app but also be interested in and willing to use it. This step is vital in aligning stakeholder views with real-world data, helping to create a more focused target audience profile that meets both market demands and stakeholder objectives.

Market research involves gathering and analyzing information about potential users, competitors, and market trends. This approach helps you identify your target audience using real data, rather than relying on conflicting opinions from stakeholders. It provides clear insights into user preferences and behaviors, shows current market trends, and reduces bias by focusing on actual data. While other methods like understanding needs and analyzing feedback are useful, market research offers a comprehensive view of your target audience, making it essential for making informed decisions.

Create Personas: Develop detailed user personas based on the collected data. These personas should represent different segments of the potential audience, highlighting their goals, challenges, and needs. Stakeholder Alignment: Present these personas to stakeholders to foster a shared understanding of who the app should target.

User personas are fictional characters representing your ideal mobile app users, based on market research. These personas should capture demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals, helping you visualize your potential users. They serve as a valuable reference for stakeholders, aligning their views with the needs of real users and fostering more productive discussions.

After doing your market research, create user personas to represent your ideal users. User personas are fictional characters that are based on your research and reflect the characteristics of people who might use your app. They include details like age, interests, behavior, and what they want from the app. By creating these personas, you can better understand your users' needs and keep everyone on the same page about who the app is for. This helps in making sure that all decisions are aligned with the needs and expectations of the actual users.

Creating user personas is a powerful tool to visualize the ideal users of your mobile app. These personas are fictional characters based on market research that capture the characteristics of your potential users, including demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. They help in understanding the user's perspective and serve as a common reference point for stakeholders. Presenting these personas can facilitate more productive discussions, helping to align stakeholder views with the needs of real users, ensuring the app is designed with its intended audience in mind.

User Personas: Developing user personas involves creating detailed profiles of the potential users of the app. This includes demographic information, technical proficiency, and usage patterns. For a Mobile Engineer, understanding these personas helps in making decisions about the design, usability, and performance optimization tailored to the target audience’s needs.

Once you've created user personas, it's crucial to validate your assumptions through user testing and feedback from a representative sample of your target audience. This step ensures that your app's features, design, and functionality align with user needs. It also allows you to refine your target audience based on real interactions, helping to reconcile any differing stakeholder opinions.

Conduct Surveys and Interviews: Reach out to real potential users who match your personas to validate the assumptions made. Ask them about their needs, preferences, and pain points. Pilot Testing: Launch a beta version of the app with a select group of users to gather feedback and test assumptions in a real-world scenario.

Once you've created user personas, it's important to check if your assumptions about them are correct. You can do this by testing the app with a small group of people who represent your target audience and gathering their feedback. This helps you see if the app's features, design, and functionality are appealing and useful to real users. By doing this, you can make any necessary changes to better meet user needs and ensure that your target audience is accurate. This process also helps align different stakeholder views based on real user experiences.

With user personas in hand, it's crucial to validate your assumptions through user testing and feedback from a sample group that represents your target audience. This step ensures that the app's features, design, and functionality resonate with potential users. It also allows you to refine your target audience profile based on real user interactions, providing valuable insights that can help reconcile differing stakeholder opinions. By testing and iterating, you align the app more closely with user needs and expectations, enhancing its potential for success.

Validate Assumptions: Validating assumptions involves testing the initial ideas and features with real users or through prototypes. From a technical perspective, this might include developing a minimum viable product (MVP) and conducting usability testing to ensure that the app’s functionality aligns with user expectations and technical constraints.

Analyzing feedback from user testing gives you valuable insights into how people interact with your app and what they find useful. This feedback can help you better understand who your app truly appeals to and why. Sometimes, you might discover unexpected user behaviors or preferences that could change your idea of the target audience. Sharing these findings with stakeholders can help show how real user data aligns with or challenges their expectations. This helps build a shared understanding among stakeholders and guides the conversation toward identifying the right audience for your app.

Analyzing feedback from user testing provides valuable insights that help refine your understanding of who values your app and why. This feedback can uncover unexpected user behaviors or preferences that may shift your target audience's focus. Sharing these findings with stakeholders demonstrates how real user data can support or challenge their views. This analysis can bridge conflicting opinions, guiding the conversation toward identifying a target audience genuinely connected with your app. By leveraging user insights, you ensure the app meets actual user needs while aligning with stakeholder goals.

Analyzing feedback from user testing provides valuable insights that refine your understanding of your app's value to users. This feedback can uncover unexpected behaviors or preferences, potentially shifting your target audience. Sharing these findings with stakeholders helps align their views with real user data, bridging gaps in opinions and guiding the focus toward an audience that genuinely connects with your app.

Gather User Feedback: Collect qualitative and quantitative feedback from the pilot test or early adopters. Analyze this data to understand what resonates with users and what doesn't. Refine Personas: Based on feedback, adjust your user personas and target audience to better reflect the actual users' needs and preferences.

Analyze Feedback: Gathering and analyzing feedback from users and stakeholders provides insights into how well the app meets their needs. As a Mobile Engineer, this involves examining app analytics, crash reports, and user feedback to identify areas for improvement and refine the app’s performance and functionality.

Iterate and Adapt: Use an agile approach to continuously refine the app and its target audience. This allows you to respond to user feedback and changing market conditions quickly. Engage Stakeholders: Keep stakeholders involved throughout the process, providing regular updates and seeking input to ensure alignment as the app evolves.

Es importante un proceso interativo donde podamos aplicar los resultados del research en la experiencia y la interfaz. A su vez siempre es importante contar con pruebas de usabilidad con los perfiles previamente definidos en el user persona para encontrar pain points dentro del Journey

Agile Approach: Adopting an agile approach means continuously iterating on the app based on feedback and evolving requirements. This involves working in sprints, integrating user feedback, and making incremental improvements to the app’s codebase and features to better align with the target audience’s needs.