It’s an interesting time to be a product studio. As the major distribution platforms for software have matured and encouraged loads of new market entrants, both competition and established monopolies have increased in what seems like equal measure.

These days, when one has an idea for a new product, the chance of finding at least 3 or 4 funded competitors is incredibly high. This hasn’t seemed to distract seed investors, eager to make gambles and well insulated from their downside thanks to tax credit schema like SEIS (in the UK at least), but the ’Series A Crunch’ is well documented. What does this mean for people who are dedicated to new products?

From our perspective, there are two distinct, viable new product approaches emerging. The first can best be thought of as the Slack/Uber approach: Take something people know and are familiar with, but make the experience much, much better, expanding the total addressable market as you go. The second is the opposite and most simple to understand: build a moat by doing something hard, which will take a lot of specialised effort to emulate. Today I’m going to address the first option.

On face value, this doesn’t really look that new or different, but the conditions of the market for software have observably changed. Received wisdom used to be that you’d be fine once you found a problem to solve (that people were willing to pay for). While this can still be considered broadly true, the test for willing to pay for has become a lot higher.

Due to the flood of entries into the software market, competition is fierce, and, while people are consuming more software than ever, they’re incredibly discerning about what they choose to buy. Finding a problem and knocking out a simple rails app over the weekend might solve the problem, but turning it into a real business is another thing entirely. It’s back to marketing basics; really looking at the market and trying to spot a weakness in your competitors that you can exploit and which they’re unable to react to.

The most obvious example of this is Slack. They looked at the workplace chat market and decided that, despite there being a large amount of incumbents, they all just weren’t getting it. They built a client with an engaging brand and bots at its heart and have been able to become a growing force in a very well established market.

Slack decided to differentiate on brand, design and UX because they perceived that their competitors were vulnerable in those areas. They exploited this vulnerability through smart on-boarding that allows small groups to create free channels and build a beachhead in their organisations (which likely already used one of their competitors), without requiring any organisational buy-in.

This is a textbook example of how to behave in the new reality for startups. You may perceive a problem, but you’re almost certainly not alone in the market like you once may have been, so you need to compete. It’s quite nice actually, it feels like tech is approaching the real world, rather than the fake world of easy seed rounds and no requirements for performance.

Our portfolio company, ScreenCloud, is doing this well. They have found a definable market and gone after it in a new, novel way, with both a good interface and a solid technology offering. Their cost and on-boarding process, like Slack, is much more favourable than that of their competitors, who offer expensive turn-key systems that require a lot of configuration and management. They enable people to take control of their digital signage in a new and novel way that will redefine the category, hoping to turn some of that inspiration from Slack into emulation.

This new reality this plays to our strengths at Codegent. We own Thin Martian, a specialist digital interface agency, and so are following Slack down the path of good, smart design. We think this new environment is exciting, an opportunity to really push ourselves forward to create engaging, loveable products, driven by having great UX and design contribute to strong business fundamentals, rather than by speculation. We’ve adopted to the new normal and are thriving.

It’s been a while since me and Mark posted a video. Not so much out of laziness, but more out of a sense of a realisation that we were going through a big change. In 2008 we started our first foray into product with Tepilo.com – the company we started with Sarah Beeny and her husband, Graham. Tepilo ended up being an online estate agent and magically finds itself in the middle of a super-fast growing sector with one of our competitors currently on AIM with a £300M+ valuation at the time of writing.

We also got into the apps market, creating our own series of phrasebook apps along with our kids’ apps brand, Kizzu. Between them, they have had circa 17million downloads. And last year we sold Kizzu to a private equity company.

Along with a couple of SaaS experiments, we eventually came up with the brilliant ScreenCloud, for which we raised a friends and family round in late 2015. On top of that, Mark ended up being a guest lecturer at UCL on digital transformation which came about as a talk he gave on his 10KSB practical MBA course. People, it seems, were desperate to know the things that we took for granted around making sure that their businesses were using technology to align all of their processes.

Meanwhile, our agency work was growing apace but we were starting to notice a sort of sweet spot in the area of interface design and development and away from super-complex back ends. We’ve seen clients becoming more competent tech-wise, but with a real need to find best-in-class design and user interface consultancy. Building a website is relatively easy, creating one that users love is a lot harder.

We headed into the end of 2015 thinking we needed to make sense of all of this. I mean, we’d achieved what we’d set out to do in the area of product development and we were being bombarded by signals around business digitisation, especially for SMEs. At the same time we were thinking that maybe we should really shout about the fact that we are actually very good indeed at designing and creating user interfaces.

So at the beginning of 2016, we separated all of our agency work and staff into Thin Martian: it makes everything very clean and transparent. It also means that the agency can focus on what it is good at: creating the world’s best user interfaces for its clients.

Codegent continues to be a digital innovation studio, with three core offerings:

1. A creator of great digital products
2. An investor in digital products and businesses
3. A digital transformation consultancy and incubator

What do these mean in practice?

Creator of digital products This has been our heritage for several years now. Beyond the physical manifestation of the product itself, there is a huge amount to consider. If you’re looking for investment, or more investment, making sure your Key Performance Indicators are baked into the thinking and product from the start is really important.

We produce products that we want to spin out ourselves (such as ScreenCloud) and for a few clients. What we do and what we know is hugely valuable so we don’t have a lot of it to go round.

Digital product investor We’ve invested in several products and digital businesses: our own and other people’s. We’re open to anything and everything, but again, we’ve also learnt where we can and can’t add value, so we’re very careful. We’ve been burnt in the past where we didn’t do our homework properly. And we all know what happens once people have been burnt.

Consultancy and incubator This has come about almost by accident but it’s also one of the most exciting things we’re thinking about now. Some people don’t want to pay an agency to develop their product or exchange equity for development. They may have raised investment already or be part of a skunk works within an established business. They may have the resources they need in-house already, or aspire to do that as part of their roadmap. But they still need help. The typical CEO of a start-up or business unit leader of a new initiative will be a solid all-rounder with one or two areas of specialism: it could be sales, marketing, finance in some cases could also be tech. But nobody is a specialist in everything. That’s where we come in.

In two examples we are providing product consultancy and incubation:

Tepilo – where we are providing the product interface and platform development, defining the technology stack and then hiring and managing a tech team who are employed and paid for by Tepilo. The team is currently based in our studio, but will ultimately be based in Tepilo’s own office, completely separate from Codegent. The advantage of this is that the business could get a product up and running with an expert team before they’d hired their own A team. Being based in our studio, working alongside our guys means that they can get hand over without any disruption to the business itself. As they don’t have their own CTO from the start, we managed the recruitment, assessment, training and project management of the tech team.

Big Clever Learning – a new and exciting EdTech company, one of the Codegent team is acting as their part-time Chief Product Officer, whilst we also provide the resources for their new product development. We specified the tech stack for the new platform and have hired them a small team to build it. This team is currently housed in our studio. And we’re in the process of helping them set up their own off-shore development team. All of this means that Big Clever Learning had a plan that they were able to action on Day 1, reducing risk whilst working with a team of experts who can slowly replace themselves with the minimum of disruption to the business.

In our experience, the biggest frustration with any tech start-up, be it a whole new entity or a spin out of another business, is speed. Speed of product development, speed of hiring the right people, speed of getting customers on board. Meanwhile the business is burning its investment month in, month out. Working with us means you can act like an established business with all the component parts, whilst at the same time replacing us with the right people, not just the ones that are available right now.

Today we are launching our free property search app ‘Moovrs’ for iPhone.

Did you know that 1 in 8 people decide to purchase a property before they’ve even viewed it?
(source)

So why does that happen? Put simply, it comes down to the important 3 P’s of Property - Place, Price and Pictures - that most influence buying decisions.

The core idea for Moovrs came from the consumer demand for an app that makes house-hunting faster and enjoyable. It has geo-location ‘near me’ built in as well as town search and map view. Price is prominent and accompanied by simple search filters whilst all photos are easy to access, save and share.

Check out www.moovrs.com to download the app

If you saw our previous post on key mobile trends for 2015, where we looked at some of the insights from the BI Intelligence report, you’ll know that mobile advertising, mobile commerce and mobile apps are all set to grow. Despite the resistance from some of the businesses occupying this space, they are all areas which we’d hope they’d be somewhat familiar with, even if they hadn’t yet thought about how their brand would continue to stand out, as mobile becomes more mainstream. But what about those devices and platforms that may not even be on the market yet? It can be difficult to work out how your business will adjust to a device or area that hasn’t even been developed yet but it’s also essential to think about it early, if you are to be there and present, when the game changes. So in the second part of our future predictions, we wanted to look at what ‘mobile’ will mean next year and how this will affect businesses and brands.

Emerging Devices…

At the moment, when we think of ‘mobile’ we think of smartphones and tablets, or at the most, the ‘phablet’ which has risen in popularity over the last year. But what about car radios, iWatches and Apple TV? Wearable computing and connected devices may still be in their infancy but they’re looking very promising for the future and will increase the amount and the frequency, of when advertisers can access their audiences.

While the long-hailed Google Glass seemed to crash before it even really got going, smartwatches are set to peak, with the Apple watch in the lead. This has led us to consider just how many devices the mobile-friendly user will be adopting in the next few years. The study suggests that 41% of TV audiences use a phone or tablet while watching TV, dubbed ‘second screen viewing’ but this could increase to as many of five devices, as wearables, tablets, smart TVs, smartphones and personal computers become standard devices for every family.

So what does this mean for businesses? Firstly, if you think it’s difficult to get your website to look great on a mobile device, think how much more reworking it will need to be viewed on the smallest screen yet; a watch. Designers will also need to zoom in on the iconography of their designs, as users become more accustomed to recognising features through symbols alone, as screens get smaller and harder to navigate.

The type of device will also change the way search engines produce results - a small watch screen is likely to display only the first search engine result and this is something that Google is already preparing for. When Google Hummingbird was introduced last year, it’s biggest update to the algorithm was that it had semantics at the heart of it. This ‘context-first’ approach will help smaller and more intricate devices to get to the heart of what the user wants much more quickly and is something brands should be aware of, when looking at their marketing and SEO practises going forward.

‘Connected homes’ which we touched on in the past will also increase, with the focus going into smart home energy and security. Outside of the home, will also see a rise in connected technology. The study suggests that tens of million of cars will come with internet connections over the next few years, therefore creating a ‘connected’ experience that incorporates many other aspects of the driver’s life. At the moment, the ‘killer’ car apps are standard commodities such as traffic reports, music and weather, but in-vehicle services which can send information to drivers in realtime will be big business over the next few years. This type of connected device will truly merge the digital and physical world and it’s something that brands need to begin preparing for now.

Mobile payments and banking

The adoption of mobile has also began to disrupt many giant industries, such as banking. Old payment habits such as checks have been dying for a long time but cash is also fading and the ‘mobile wallet’ has become an interesting prospect. Half of online banking customers use mobile and for the younger generation, it’s even higher.

According to the report, 94% of millennials are active users of online banking and 39% of them would consider using a branchless digital bank. While older generations are still fairly attached to depositing checks and making other transactions with banks, millenials report a much less positive experience with their retail bank.

Mobile is beginning to change how we pay for things and NFC is currently the in-store payment method of choice through Apple pay, although if there was a new system to be introduced, the shoppers current bank was voted as the preferred mobile wallet outlet (27%), follow by Paypal (16%) and then Visa (12%).

Key takeaways for businesses from Part 2:

• While wearable technology may not be mass-market just yet, brands should start thinking about how it might affect their business in the future
• ‘Second-screen’ viewing should be a factor taken into consideration when looking at marketing strategy for 2015, to determine where an audience will be and how much attention they’ll really be paying at any given time
• Brands should look at the ‘context’ of their marketing, to make the most of the connection between digital and physical worlds that mobile devices offer
• Businesses will need to be aware of how mobile is disrupting even giant industries such as Banking, in order to predict how it will affect their business and to ensure that the way they manage their financial aspect will not make them obsolete in a mobile-first future

If there’s one thing businesses have been told (or rather, warned) to work on this year, it’s their mobile strategy. Digital agencies have been talking about this shift for a while, reflected in a ‘mobile-first’ approach to design and an uptake of responsive website services. Unfortunately, not everyone has adhered and we’re already seeing the effects of traditional outlets who may have begrudgingly adopted digital, but fell down on mobile, losing customers in an increasingly mobile-first world.

For businesses, mobile opens the market to find new and exciting ways to change the lives of their customers. Digital technology has the power to make us more productive, connected, happier, more efficient and more intelligent. And a shift to mobile means that the benefits are open to more people and communities around the world, not just those who have access to a desktop PC. For consumers, it allows them to access everything on-the-go, with minimal inconvenience.

As a result, we’re all looking to see what’s next and how the changes in mobile will affect the wider landscape. To look at some of the areas in more detail, we've summarised some of the key points from a slideshow put together by BI Intelligence, in order to highlight the markets that are growing due to the trends around an increasingly ‘mobile’ consumer.

The Mobile Apps market is booming

Having developed mobile apps ourselves for many years, it’s clear to see that the market, despite being overcrowded, still holds a great amount of potential. 86% of all time currently spent on iOS and Android connected devices is currently spent using apps. The majority of which (32%) is on gaming, while social media accounts for the next largest sector (17% on Facebook, and 9.5% on other social media network apps), with the rest of the time split between utilities and productivity apps.

Social media and music have already become two primarily apps-based mobile channels and many other categories will undoubtedly follow. According to the study, gaming apps are also becoming less dominant, while the popularity of non-gaming apps are swiftly growing.

The Apple Appstore did 10 billion dollars in app revenue in 2013 and independent developers are seeing revenue increase, primarily from the ‘freemium’ apps model, that we ourselves use for our children’s apps brand, Kizzu. This model allows a user to download the app for free and then ‘upgrade’ or gain access to more content/further features with an in-app purchase. This accounted for 98% of Apple app store and Google Play revenue in November 2013, suggesting that we’ll be seeing more of this model, as opposed to ‘pay to download’, in 2015.

Mobile Commerce is the biggest revenue generator

According to the study, mobile commerce is dominating all other forms of mobile revenue growth, including mobile web ad spend. Mobile commerce still only accounts for less than half of ecommerce sales but is growing much faster than desktop-based commerce when compared year-on-year in the US. The report shows that shoppers spend nearly as much on mobile orders as they do on desktop, which says a lot about how much the quality of mobile user experience has improved over the past few years - it wasn't that long ago that we were struggling to press the right product and squinting to enter payment details on the majority of mobile sites, after all. It also shows the importance for ecommerce brands to invest heavily in the quality and design of their mobile sites - or risk missing out on a large and willing, mobile audience. Even within our own portfolio of products, we can see that our latest joint venture in Etail Naturally Selina Scott, where the audience is typically those in the older age bracket, of 40+, over 54% of visits are via a mobile device.

Both online and traditional retailers are seeing their shoppers go mobile - everyone from eBay, to Ticketmaster, Etsy and Home Depot are realising the potential of the mobile consumer and are investing as a result. As well as looking at app-led commerce sites, many traditional retailers are also investing in faster mobile websites- Gap, Staples, Dell and Urban Outfitters are just a few of the brands, according to the report, who have all increased the response time of their mobile shopping sites so that it is much nearer to the industry average.

It’s not just in the US and UK either - mobile commerce is a global, growing trend and one that any retailer must prepare for if they don’t want to be left behind.

Where the people go, the advertising will follow

Over the past year, mobile is the only type of media increasing its share of consumption, while traditional media channels such as Print, Radio and TV decline. Mobile-driven revenue channels are expanding and not just in apps either, as the mobile market pivots swiftly to generating most of its revenue from software, as opposed to hardware.

As with most media channels, where the people go, the advertising spend will follow. Mobile advertising is growing and social media channels are already citing mobile ad revenue as one of their primary forms of monetisation. What’s more, is that mobile-first media companies are now overtaking traditional media channels in revenue. Facebook and Twitter have been overtaking Comcast and Viacom for some time now and out of all of the digital advertising categories, mobile is top for growth.

For advertisers the pull is clear; last year, the time users spent on smartphones surpassed the time they spent browsing on a computer and the average time they spent browsing on mobile (177 minutes per day) also overtook the time they spent watching TV (168 minutes per day). The study predicts that by 2018 15% of US ad revenue will come from mobile.

At the moment, the majority of mobile ad spend is on Facebook and Google, but where will it go next? Despite Snapchat’s failed attempts to monetise and realign what the consumer and the brand both need from the channel, the report suggests that messaging and chat apps such as Whatsapp, Wechat and Snapchat will be next on the agenda.

Key Takeaways for businesses from Part 1:

• A responsive, fast-loading mobile site is no longer a choice - it’s a necessity
• Brands and businesses need to think about their mobile strategy two-fold: firstly if they need a mobile app and secondly, how good the user experience is on their mobile site
• Mobile commerce is one of the biggest growing areas for revenue and traditional retail brands need to take note of this and invest in their mobile sites if they are to keep up
• Mobile ads may well become one of the lead channels for advertising spend, due to the amount of exposure it can give a brand, to an increasingly mobile audience

In 2013, Digital Marketing Depot created a market insight report to take a look at Enterprise Social Media Management Software (SMMS) platforms and how marketers use them. The idea behind the report being, that as social media evolves into a more established method of marketing, we should probably stop guessing what it’s doing for our businesses and instead, find out.

Since the initial report was released, it has been developed and added to further, in light of the changing social media market and the sheer volume of new tools that have been released over the past year or so.

The report looks to answer some key questions surrounding SMMS platforms, some of which, we’ve summarised below, in order to see what issues are affecting those using the tools and also, those developing them.

To begin with, it’s important to note that the definition of a Social Media Management Software Platform for the purposes of this report, is of a tool that can be used to manage, analyse and track multiple social media accounts. The focus is also on ‘leading’ enterprise SMMS systems that include multiple functionalities, rather than single-function tools that only focus on one aspect of social media management such as monitoring or posting.

Let’s take a look...

Question 1: What trends are driving the adoption of enterprise SMMS platforms?

According to the report, nearly half of all social media strategists surveyed are planning to increase their spend on SMMS systems this year. This is great news for SaaS providers, like ourselves, who can use the demand in order to invest in better infrastructure and a fuller range of tools within our platforms.

This has been due to many trends such as the growth of social media teams within medium-large enterprises and distributed enterprises, particularly in the Retail sector, who have expanded what was once a single social media point, into several localised ones. For example Boots, McDonalds and Aston Martin are all brands who have individual accounts for different countries or Cities - all of which need to be managed from a central point. Also, with so much data now available, social media teams are often struggling to make sense of it all. Therefore, SMMS platforms are trying to hone in on what the data means for the brand and the way in which it targets its audience.

The third trend is based on organisations trying to find a universal answer to what merits ‘return’ on social media activity. As we all know, it can be difficult to define results when the channels are all so different. Does a Pin merit more than a Facebook post, or what about a retweet or favourite on Twitter? All these questions, and more, have led social media marketers to look for a central platform that can help provide the answers.

Question 2: What capabilities do we need SMMS platforms to provide?

The report outlines the key capabilities desired in enterprise-level SMMS platforms to be:

• Content creation, scheduling, publishing and moderation
• Social engagement
• Data analytics and reporting
• Structured collaboration and workflow management tools

Within this list, you may argue that simple SMMS tools offer just as much functionality. For example, with scheduling tool Buffer you can create a tweet, schedule and publish it. You can then come back to view the activity on that tweet, see what the engagement was and different members of your team can log in and manage the account.

However, the report then lists a second set of capabilities that are more advanced and require a more integrated approach:

• Social listening and sentiment analysis
• Vertical-specific compliance tools that allow customers to monitor local or regional social marketing campaigns
• Integration with legacy marketing and analytics platforms
• Marketing campaign automation
• Strategic social media consulting services

For social media strategists, Sentiment is the big one here and seems to be the latest buzzword within social media, allowing those using it to analyse how people feel about their brand and business. However, even the best high-level enterprise tools aren’t foolproof, so it’s important to not get too carried away and bear in mind, that while you can automate most things, sentiment is not always one of them - you only have to look at the recent Samaritan App scandal to realise that.

For developers, it’s important to also consider two other important capabilities the report highlights - the desire for a tool which is mobile responsive and/or has its own app and one that has a flexible API. Many social media strategists have been ‘born digital’ and this is only set to grow as Generation Z arrives into the workforce over the next few decades. As a result, they expect the platforms they use to be available on mobile, with almost the same capability as you would expect from desktop. This is an important fact to note and one which will undoubtedly, define many product’s roadmaps throughout the next few years.

Question 3: How can you tell which SMMS tool you should employ?

As you would expect, many of the big players in the SMMS market were suggested in this report, including Hearsay Social, Hootsuite, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Sprout Social.

However, regardless of which platform a business eventually chooses, the report is quick to highlight that the important factor is choosing one which is right for your needs. Providing a list of questions and considerations you should ask before committing to a SMMS tool, it promotes you to firstly understand your current marketing processes and how you measure success, before you even begin to think about which external tools are needed.

The report then highlights a list of questions you should put to your SMMS vendor which should help you to determine how ‘future-proof’ your investment will be, particularly in light of the shift to mobile and an increasing demand for 'real-time' monitoring.

One area the report does fails to touch on in regards to choosing a SMMS tool, is the shift to ‘social shopping’ which will undoubtedly grow over the next few years. With Twitter experimenting with ‘buy it now’ buttons and apps such as Like2Buy which allow you to purchase almost-straight from Instagram, it won’t be long before shopping and social become a synonymous experience and this is something to also consider when investing in a tool for the next 12-18 months.

In conclusion, this report shows that the demand for robust, useful SMMS tools at enterprise-level is high, as marketers begin to harness the power of social media interactions in order to gain better insights into their customers. For developers, this is undoubtedly a growing area ripe for the picking- providing you get it right and can come up with an integrated and future-proofed approach, the enterprise-level social media management market is only set to grow.

If you've stuck your head into the world of developers during the last year or so, you've probably heard about Docker. Docker is a clever set of components for building and managing linux containers (LXC). It has the same promise as LXC for application portability and platform consistency over the entire cycle of development, testing, staging and production deployments. And it also has a nice API with great container management tools, which make it fun to use.

The parts

The most basic components of the Docker system are:

• Docker host: A service running on a machine responsible for all the dirty work of managing containers on that machine.
• Docker client: An interface to control a docker host.
• Docker registry: A storage service for docker images – think github.

Start playing

With any new tool, you want to hold it in your hand and press buttons or hit something to see what it's all about. Fortunately, in the world of computers, we get to do that without worrying about hurting any sentient beings (if you're worried about hurting your computer, run a throw-away virtual machine). Assuming you've installed Docker you can

Docker run --rm -it fedora:latest bash

and you should be at a bash shell in a dockerized fedora. The first time you run such a command, Docker will need to download the fedora image from the Docker hub registry – which may take a while. But from then on, firing up a new container from that image will be very quick.

Fancy seeing what haskell is like?

Docker run --rm -it haskell:latest ghci

Your favourite search engine will surface loads of great resources to help you get started with Docker.

It's worth understanding right away that Docker runs a process in the context of a container (e.g. bash / ghci in the above examples). We used the -it flags to tell Docker that we wanted to interact with that process through the terminal. When the process stops, the container stops (hence exiting bash stopped the container, which was then deleted due to the --rm flag). So if your Docker run command terminates immediately, that's due to the main process you're running in the container terminating (or being daemonized).

Developing with Docker

We've seen how easy it is to run containers from public images on the Docker hub registry, but you'll soon want to be building your own images to dockerize your apps. To do this, we create a Dockerfile. A Dockerfile specifies how to contruct an image in a step-by-step manner and if you have one for dockerizing your app it's also a great little reference to help new devs quickly see the dependencies required to get your app running. Here's an example I've used to develop a laravel app served via php-fpm + nginx:

FROM ubuntu:14.04
MAINTAINER codegent

# I can't live without this alias
RUN echo "alias 'll=ls -al'" >> /etc/bash.bashrc
RUN apt-get update

# Install supervisor to help us run multiple processes
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y supervisor

# Install nginx
RUN echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/nginx/stable/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nginx-stable.list
RUN apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys C300EE8C
RUN apt-get update
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y nginx

# Install our php dependencies
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y php5-fpm
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y php5-cli
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y php5-mcrypt
RUN php5enmod mcrypt
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y php5-gd
RUN php5enmod gd
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y php5-curl
RUN php5enmod curl
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y php5-mysql
RUN php5enmod mysql
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install -y php5-xdebug
RUN php5enmod xdebug

# Install composer
RUN php -r "readfile('https://getcomposer.org/installer');" | php
RUN mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

# Configure nginx
RUN echo "daemon off;" >> /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
COPY nginx/php.shared /etc/nginx/shared/
COPY nginx/laravel.shared /etc/nginx/shared/
COPY nginx/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

# Configure supervisor
COPY supervisor.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/
RUN touch /etc/nginx/fastcgi_copy_env
COPY copy-env-to-fpm.py /usr/bin/

# Copy our application code
COPY . /code
WORKDIR /code

# Install composer dependencies
RUN composer install

# Expose nginx
EXPOSE 80

# Run supervisor in the foreground
CMD ["/usr/bin/supervisord"]

From this we can build the image and run our app (binding it to port 8000 on our local machine).

docker build -t codegent/app .
docker run --rm -it -p 127.0.0.1:8000:80 codegent/app

That is great for giving us a nicely packaged app, but during development we need to be able to edit files and we don't want to have to rebuild the image every time we do. Instead, we can mount a folder from our local machine in the container.

docker run --rm -it -p 127.0.0.1:8000:80 -v "$PWD:/code" codegent/app

We can also run other processes in the context of our container e.g. if we want a php REPL (give me IPython any day)

docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD:/code" codegent/app php artisan tinker

The commands may seem a bit unwieldy at first, but you get a feel for them eventually.

Deploying with Docker

When our code is ready we can just do a Docker build again, tagging it with our release version, and push it up to the Docker hub registry (or a private registry) ready to be pulled down and run on our testing/staging/production servers. And those lucky servers don't need to know anything about php.

docker build -t codegent/app:1.0.0
docker push codegent/app:1.0.0

Magic. Now we can just use a process manager like supervisor or maybe systemd to keep our containers running in production (or let Docker run them daemonized). Unfortunately, in the real world it's not quite that simple.

Orchestration

Most services we build are composed of various component applications. They also require some, and sometimes many, supporting services – typically a relational DB, redis and a search engine. All these parts need to be able to work together across multiple machines. That's orchestration - and it's not easy.

You need to be able fire up all the individual services that combine to provide your service and allow them to communicate in various ways. And you don't really want to have to worry about the individual machines that are running them. There is a lot of interest in this area at the moment and the major players are getting involved. Google has kubernetes, Apache has mesos, Amazon has recently announced the EC2 Container Service and CoreOS is taking off. Promisingly, the good folks behind Docker are working on libswarm to get some consistency in this area.

Ideally we could specify a service topology at a fairly high level (like a Dockerfile, this would be a great reference doc) and be able to simulate it on our development machines or deploy it to a production cluster without having to worry about the fiddly details of container linking. (At the moment, fig is a great tool for assisting with running and linking multiple containers in development).

So...

There's a bright and shiny future for Docker's use in the software lifecycle. And the present is pretty good too. Thinking about how you might dockerize your service forces you to consider seperation of concerns which is no bad thing. Once you have Dockerfiles around, they're great for getting new developers working quickly and also make a handy reference. And the ecosystem is growing rapidly. There is a learning curve and there are pain points but it feels like the community is keen to see Docker succeed at making everyone's lives easier. I know I am!

With so many different online management tools available on the market at the moment, it can become quite overwhelming to know which ones are going to be most useful.To help you make some decisions on which tools to use for managing your own digital products I have outlined a few that I use on a daily basis that allow me to stay organised.

Communication

Hipchat - https://www.hipchat.com/

A large part of any Product/Project Managers day is spent communicating with their team. Depending on the company or project you may need to talk to people on the other side of the world as well as on the other side of the office. This is where Hipchat comes in. A sleek instant messaging service that integrates with Github, Mailchimp, Heroku, Zendesk and many more.

Why do I love it?

• I can drag and drop images into conversations quickly to share with the wider team
• All photos and links shared in the conversation are saved in their own panels on the right hand side of the conversation so that I can find them quickly again in the future
• I can chase people on tasks in the conversation by adding a @ before their name and Hipchat will do the chasing via email for me :)
• Integration with Github allows me to see when updates are pushed by the team to the product therefore, allowing me to keep on track with releases

Roadmapping

Aha!- https://www.aha.io/

With every product comes a vision, to achieve this vision and reach the ultimate goal you need a roadmap. With Aha! you can create and outline your roadmap into quarterly chunks to share with your team. Within each of these quarterly goals a list of features can be added, assigned to a person and given a deadline.

Within the strategy module of the product you can outline the vision, goals and initiatives for your product to be stored against the roadmap. This can be shared with those involved in the project to ensure everyone understands the final vision.

Why do I love it?

It helps everyone to get to grips with the vision for the final product and stay in the loop in regards to what the future plans and priorities for the product are.

Task board

Trello - https://trello.com/

Trello is an online task board tool that allows you to drag and drop tasks into different phases in the project process so that everyone involved in the project can stay up to date. Setting up a board in Trello is similar to setting up a whiteboard task list in the office; simply name the columns and write out the tasks associated with them. Each task can then be assigned to individuals who have been invited to the board who can then take responsibility for each task and drag and drop it to different phases of the project when updated.

Why do I love it?

• The design of the tool is easy to use and anyone can pick it up
• I can drag and drop images into cards to illustrate examples to the team quickly
• I can assign labels to each of the tasks to highlight their priority so that the team know which ones to work through first

Scheduling

Schedule App - http://www.scheduleapp.com/

This is a product that we built at Codegent and that we use internally every day. Product/Project managers are often managing many different people at the same time and so Schedule App enables you to see how all of the projects map out in one easy calendar view. This allows you to ensure that the projects, design and builds don't conflict with one another. A simple dropdown allows you to schedule your team in halfday segments to select the project that you need that particular person to work on for that morning or afternoon. This can be planned each day or weeks in advance, depending on preference. Gentle weekly and daily reminders ensure that everyone is kept up to date on what they are suppose to be working on for that day or week.

Why do I love it?

As many of you will know, project deadlines and priorities can move around lot, schedule app allows you to reflect this in your planning and is a great tool to assist you while creating timelines as you can see everything that is coming up and when there is a gap available for you to kick off with new work.

Which tools do you find most effective for Product Management?

Social media used to be one of the only marketing channels where, with the right approach, brands could make a decent impact without actually imparting any cash. With posts appearing alongside those from family and friends, brands were given the chance to build authenticity with customers, while generating site traffic and presumably, revenue.

Yet back in October, following a leaked sales deck obtained by Techcrunch, it was clear that what brands had been noticing for a while, was definitely true. Brands used to creating an organic buzz on Facebook, saw that less and less of their friends and fans were seeing their posts. In short, Facebook had turned the volume down on organic reach.

This angered many brands and businesses, who seemed to feel that it was their prerogative to appear within a user’s newsfeed. But as Facebook (badly) explained in this post, competition on Facebook is only growing, as more brands and businesses vie for the attention of users, who may only be spending 5 or 10 minutes on Facebook a day.

In some ways, I can sympathise with feeling cheated, having been among those who spent time and money, building a following for the Facebook page of our children’s apps brand Kizzu. Yet at the same time, if all Facebook showed was posts from brands and businesses, how long would it be before users abandoned the channel anyway?

So what are the options?

Paid Advertising

If you have the budget, you can use a blend of paid and organic advertising to retain a strong social media presence. The important factor with any type of advertising, is to weigh up what the spend is actually achieving for your business. If you just want to increase traffic to your site, then measuring clickthroughs is fine. If however, your key metric is paid conversions then perhaps promoted posts aren’t the way to go. It’s also important to look at what each channel offers to its advertising partners - can you gain a clear overview on what you’re spending? Is it easy to pivot the direction of your ads if something isn't working? Certain channels, particularly Twitter, will provide a strong support network for paid advertisers, regardless of spend. While testing ads for our Twitter monitoring tool Twilert, we even had access to a Twitter Account exec who looked at our ads and suggested ways to optimise the campaign. This can really make a difference to the amount of engagement you get for your money and is definitely worth weighing up, when going down the paid media route.

Improved content

To try and retain some organic reach, brands will need to get much more clever with content. Find out what people want to engage with by trialling a variety of different types - status updates, photos, videos, GIFs and linked blogposts, then monitor the effect of each. Which type of content is creating the biggest reach? Are people clicking through to your site or just clicking on the post? Focus on the quick wins - even with paid promotions, the more fans you can reach through ‘shares’ or ‘likes’, the higher your posts will begin to rank in Facebook’s algorithm.

Alternative channels

Contrary to popular belief, there are other social media channels that brands can turn to, that don’t expect you to ‘pay to play’. For most, it’s probably a bit of a habit to continue trying to engage with Facebook fans, but if the amount spent outweighs the return, it could be time to jump ship. Depending on the industry, LinkedIn and Google Plus have both proved themselves to still have fairly good, organic reach and there’s no harm in measuring the success of content on these platforms. The other channels to consider, which many marketers and brands seem to overlook, is the ones you own. You can’t control what Facebook shows to your audience, but you can control your own blog, emails and website. Get clever at using these channels to sell your brand - does your email footer link to your latest blog post? Are you capturing email leads at different stages throughout your website? Social media has almost eclipsed more ‘traditional’ marketing methods, but in light of these updates, it could be the traditional channels which now prove more effective.

Measuring time vs. money

The most important factor for any social media marketing, is to make sure you’re aware of what your Facebook or Twitter activity is achieving for your business. Perhaps you spend an hour scheduling your Facebook posts at the beginning of the week and have a 5% conversion rate from those who click through to your site. In this case, the time spent probably justifies the cost. But if you have a large team, spending hours working social media content, with a minimal - or non-existent, return in site traffic or conversion - couldn’t the time be better spent elsewhere? We’ve found guestblogging to be a great alternative to social media marketing, particularly if you can get yourself on a well-established site that sees a large amount of traffic.

There are also many tools out there which can help automate social media, to reduce the time spent on updates and monitoring. Some of our favourites are Bufferapp for scheduling, our own Twitter Monitoring tool Twilert, for cutting through ‘the noise’ and finding relevant tweets and a new tool we’ve recently started to use called Meet Edgar, which allows you to recycle your own content in an automated loop. Obviously, you need to be wary of automating your social media presence too much, but employing the right tools can be the difference between a costly exercise and a fairly cheap one.

What Facebook's decline in organic reach has really highlighted, is that social media has monopolised brand marketing strategies for too long. If agencies and marketers are honest with themselves, alongside this decline comes a well-needed wake up call that Facebook likes rarely convert into customers and actual 'engagement' is difficult to measure. There are many ways in which one could be disappointed in Facebook, but its refusal to shove branded content into the face of its users, is probably not one of them.

What is the app?

Frugl - Do more and spend less, the London events app for those on a budget.

In a nutshell, what is it?

A great app which allows you to find free and cheap events and general goings-on in London.

What can it do?

You can use the app to find events in London up to a week in advance and can filter between free events and ones that will charge - the diversity is great as it lists everything from poetry at Keats house, to pub quizzes, comedy clubs and free film screenings. Using the interactive map you can find events on your doorstep and try something new and fun. Can’t find the event? The app will give you directions by syncing with the “Citymapper” app so nothing is stopping you!

What’s your favourite feature?

The dashboard “What’s Hot” - shows you the best pickings of new events - such as comedy events, ping pong parties and live music!

What makes it unique?

The interface is really easy and fun to use, and you can “shortlist” events that interest you. You can even buy the event tickets using the app - everything is in one place!

Does anything let it down?

It is only available to download on iPhone at the moment

Any secret tips for new converts?

By tapping on the date you won’t only find events going on that same day - but the app allows you to check events a week in advance.

Where can I find it and can I afford it?

You can download for free at the Appstore here!

Twilert is a Twitter monitoring tool that helps users to find the tweets and mentions that matter to their business without having to spend hours on Twitter. Users create searches for keywords, brand names or hashtags and receive an email alert when they are mentioned on Twitter.

We first developed the app back in 2008, as a way to help agencies and brands to effectively monitor their online reputation. Since then, we have made changes including relaunching the platform as a subscription service in 2013 and adding various new features such as searchable tweet history and realtime email alerts.

At the beginning of this year, we started to feel again that there was more we could do with Twilert to benefit our users. To see if our assumptions were right, we conducted user testing to discuss the feature and update ideas.

The results were incredibly interesting - some features which we thought were essential were clearly not and some which we had added as an afterthought proved to be invaluable. This, paired with the acquisition of one of our service providers, meant that Twilert needed some pretty big changes to its architecture and design if it was to continue as a market leader in Twitter monitoring and alert services.

Here's what we did:

New Features

Improved Geolocation filters

One of the things that came out of our Twilert user testing sessions was how useful targeted geolocation search would be for agencies and brands managing Twitter accounts. Twilert has always had the ability to filter results using the ‘near:’ and ‘within’ operators, (e.g. ‘near:London within:15km’) but this was not always accurate enough. Twitter Search also offers the ability to search by Country or City but we thought it would be much more useful, if a user could monitor a much smaller area such as an event, venue or street.

This led to the creation of a new Geolocation filter which allows users to circle an area on a map that they would like to view tweets from.

This could be a City, a postcode, or even something as specific as a restaurant or street, as shown in the example below.

User monitors tweets sent around Oxford Street in London

Riffle integration

One of the features we were keen to develop for new Twilert, was in-app reporting that would allow users to analyse Twilerts and other Twitter users.

Due to time and resource constraints, this feature ended up staying in our backlog and is something we will look to implement later this year, but in the meantime we were able to integrate with a powerful chrome extension called Riffle.

For those who may not have heard of it, Riffle is an easy to use tool that allows you to click on any Twitter user and instantly see information on top mentions, hashtags they use, their number of followers and many other important insights.

Riffle results for ‘BBCNews’ after the Riffle icon is selected within the search results

Enterprise plan

Within this version of Twilert we will also be offering an Enterprise plan alongside our usual Basic, Pro and Agency subscriptions. This has been built specifically with larger companies and agencies in mind, who need more than 10 user accounts, more searches or have specific requirements that may not be fulfilled within our other packages.

Search results preview

As well as an improved onboarding flow, we have also developed a ‘Live preview’ panel which allows users to preview the results as they are creating a search. We hope that this will help users to experiment with the search filters and find the most accurate results possible, which will save them from sifting through irrelevant results later on when they receive their alerts.

Live preview on the righthand side shows what a Twilert would look like with the selected search terms

Changes to existing features

Extended free trial

After listening to comments from Twilert customers and user testing groups, we extended the 15 day trial period to 30 days. This is something that our users explained would help them to fully evaluate Twilert and also share it with their colleagues and clients where required.

Changes to the trial process

In order to continue to provide ongoing customer support and to justify the build of new features in the future, we also made the difficult decision to remove our free post-trial account.

As we have experienced before, there is often a sense that if it is online, it should be free. Unfortunately, this is not sustainable when you have high monthly running costs and want to continue to invest in developing and improving a product.

The Techie Part

As part of Twilert's latest round of upgrades, we rebuilt significant chunks of its backend architecture from scratch. As time went on, the previous architecture based around PiCloud and Elasticsearch (which we wrote a bit about here) didn't age well - PiCloud was bought by Dropbox back in November last year, who promptly proceeded to shut down the service. This, coupled with some issues in Elasticsearch's stability and data integrity, meant we decided to re-engineer our tweet processing platform from scratch.

Twilert's architecture now comprises of three tiers - the codegent Social Data Service (a highly scalable aggregation platform which connects to Twitter and can receive and process massive amounts of tweets at any given time, performing real-time analysis and de-duplication in the process), Twilert's backend and the Twilert app itself. We're hoping to open up access to the Social Data Service API in the future so that other developers can take advantage of Twilert's processing capabilities.

Both SDS and Twilert's backend are written in Python, backed up by Postgres. We use Celery for task scheduling (effectively replacing PiCloud) and Flask for our web APIs. We're still using Amazon SES to send email, and host our infrastructure on a mixture of horizontally scaled DigitalOcean and AWS virtual servers, moving away from Heroku.

The Twilert app has also been completely overhauled - we've moved away from a lot of server-side rendering and now do everything on the client using AngularJS.

As a result of all these upgrades, Twilert's user experience is vastly improved and we're able to offer a considerably more reliable service which will scale far beyond the 45 million or so tweets we currently store for our users.

We hope that current and future users will enjoy using the new features we have in store for Twilert over the next 6-12 months and we’ll be posting regularly on our progress and the lessons we've learnt along the way, so subscribe to our newsletter if you'd like to join us on the journey. Or, to give the new Twilert a go, head over and start a 30 day free trial of Twilert here.

What couldn't you live without?

myfitnesspal – a website and free app to help monitor your calorie intake and nutrition.

In a nutshell, what is it?

Myfitnesspal allows you to record and track your calorie intake, set goals for weight loss or gain and see how much fat, sugars, salt etc. you consume. It even has its own forums where you can connect with other members for a little encouragement if needed.

What’s your favourite feature?

Possibly the fact that the free app is so easy to use. You can type in a food and view it quickly in a database. This makes logging the calories incredibly easy!

What makes it unique?

Its simplicity. The app has no advertising (not bad for a freebie!) and you can log in using your Facebook account. It's also good for logging your food and exercise on the move.

Does anything let it down?

It isn’t the prettiest interface and the app can be slightly bugging when syncing – but it’s a free app and super simple to use.

Any secret tips for new converts?

Check out the forums, they are full of great posts including people's before and after pics and great recipe ideas.

Where can I find it and can I afford it?

You can download for free at the App store or on Android or view it on the website.

There is so much written about managing the process of developing products from a commercial point of view. But I think often the human element of product development is overlooked.

Whilst people endlessly debate runways, roadmaps and rapid releases, to my mind there is something just as important and just as potentially disastrous if it goes wrong: and that’s your Product Mojo.

What do I mean by that? Well, you’ve probably been in at the beginning of something new: a start-up business, or perhaps part of a brand-new initiative at work. It’s exciting, right? Everyone is energised. People are full of enthusiasm and new ideas flow freely. The whole team is working towards the first milestone: possibly a prototype, possibly the Minimum Viable Product. Let’s say that milestone is set for the end of next month, but when that time comes, the product’s not quite ready yet. Then what?

Well, in most instances there will be a shrug of shoulders, possibly a firm email from the finance director saying that we need to be better at delivering against what we say we’re going to do. But in reality, we’ve started the investment, just because we’ve had a bit of a hitch, we’re not going to down tools and move to the next thing.

But what is the morale of the team like now? Has it changed from day 1 when everyone on the team was telling their friends and family about this exciting new initiative they were working on? I would imagine if you asked them “how’s work?” they’d mutter something about it being a bit frantic at the moment.

It’s often impossible to predict with absolute accuracy how much your team can achieve in a specific timeframe, especially when it coms to product development. Even more so if that product relies on several 3rd party applications that it has to integrate with. So, maybe another month comes and goes and still, we’re not quite there with the first milestone.

This time the MD wants to know why we are behind. Maybe there’s a bit of a blame-game going on. Fred underestimated how complicated the Acme API was going to be; we had to move Debbie onto another project that she had been booked onto months ago. And so how are people feeling now as they miss their second deadline and head into another extension? Probably starting to resent things a little bit. Maybe they are looking enviously at their colleagues working on other projects. The buzz from the start is now being replaced with a creeping resentment. Instead of something they come in at the weekends to work on because they are so pumped up about, they now find themselves coming in at the weekend to catch up, to avoid getting more grief from their bosses.

Miss another deadline still and the people on the project now hate it. In the eyes of their peers they are either lazy or liars, or both (in reality they’re probably neither and have worked harder than anyone else in the business to get this thing dragged over the line).

And when they do finally get the product to the first milestone, we find that the bosses are annoyed that it’s taken so long and costed so much money: they probably started out telling all their friends and maybe even the press, just how smart their new product was going to be, but now they dread anyone asking them for an update. The team working on the project are sick of looking at its stupid face and just desperate for it to die so they can move onto something else. And the team that didn’t work on the project are probably either feeling annoyed that their initiatives were sidelined for the lame duck that has finally come to life, or are bathing in some kind of Schadenfreude. The truth is, even if the product does go live, unless something amazing and unexpected happens, it is dead before it even started because everyone who matters has had their faith poisoned. In short it has lost its Product Mojo.

How to keep your Product Mojo

When a product is first given life, it is going to be weak and vulnerable. Like a newborn: it needs nurture and care and love to thrive. But if the product has lost its Mojo and there is nobody with the passion to champion it, then it will die. You can apply all the Lean Start-up theory you like, but without someone to love it, it will take a miracle for something good to happen next.

But there are some things that you can do to stand the best chance of maintaining the product’s vitality.

1. Build a team In the example above I assumed there was a team, but in some instances there may only be one person assigned the job of developing the MVP. Having a team means that there is more likelihood of accountability as each person will be depending on the other to do their bit. It also means that each person’s work will be reviewed by their peer. It’s not unheard of for someone to be out of their depth, hoping that some miracle will bail them out. Always better to discover this sooner rather than later.

2. Rapid, regular releases The focus should be on small iterations and regular releases. This maintains the energy of the team and prevents people from getting taken down a rabbit hole. Even if the product isn’t progressing as fast as originally hoped, at least there is visible progress if there are regular releases. It also allows for regular feedback which reduces the risk of going off on a tangent that customers really don’t care about.

3. Working processes Product development is done by people not machines and so we have to organise ourselves in such a way that the product’s mojo isn’t impacted. Nobody can work at full tilt, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year. You want intense bursts of creativity, not months of hard-labour. We’ve found that you normally have a core development team and then other temporary team members who will be brought on at critical times during the project. Using an Agile methodology keeps the deliverables to bite-sized achievable chunks (or “sprint backlogs”), but also intensive 1 week ‘crunches’ just before a critical milestone, where everyone drops everything just to pull everything together as brilliantly as possible, is a really great way to boost energy and excitement at a key moment.

4. Avoid functional silos Things work best when the developers are sat with the designers and the designers are sat with the marketing people. It means that everyone’s thinking about the whole process of creating and launching a product and nobody is absolving themselves of responsibility for any particular part of the process. If the development of your product is the sole responsibility of a developer, chances are they will be biased towards the functional challenges that face and away from user experience, design interface, on-boarding, pricing and marketing. But product development needs all of these things to work together.

5. Share the highs and lows As we create more of our own products, one truth emerges above all others: Results Are Everything. Positive user feedback is nice, discovering a cool way to render something on a screen is nice, getting Tweeted by someone influential is nice, getting featured by Apple is really nice, but none of that matters if your results suck. This comes down to determining your Key Performance Indicators and then tracking them. These are probably to do with money, but will also include, numbers of new customers or subscribers, number of conversions to paid, average spend etc. We’ve always tried to share these numbers with people who work here – but never as consistently and as frequently as we’d like. Recently, we built an interface that is automatically updated and sucks all our KPIs into one place for everyone to see. It sits on a big screen in the studio. How can you fail to feel part of the success and failure of a product if its vital signs are being tracked in realtime and shared with everyone you work with?

6. The learning consolation myth Too often you hear of people reinventing their failures as valuable learning. And to an extent this has some validity, but largely it’s nonsense. Yes, we learn a lot from things that we got wrong and it’s fine if you discover in the space of 2-3 weeks that an assumption or belief you had was incorrect: but that’s not a failure, that’s just research. What’s not OK, though, is to spend loads of money and loads of time finding out the same thing– if you could have discovered by, say, building a prototype and speaking to some potential customers. Because, if the product takes months and months to fail to launch, no amount of consolation about how much we’ve all learnt will ever bring back the product’s mojo.

Each Digital Agency has different management techniques and processes, but due to an increase in Product Development projects at Codegent, we've been adopting the development management style called ‘Agile’.

To give you some background, Agile development was first coined in February 2001 when seventeen software developers created the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. This manifesto outlined the main principles around agile development which were based on iterative and incremental development.

Since we have started to follow this guideline, we have found it really enjoyable and have found the style to have many benefits including:

• Speed to market - design and technology can be done at the same time therefore reducing the amount of time needed on a project

• Visibility - with iterations on the work happening regularly, work can be published earlier to a staging environment, allowing the product owner to view work in progress and feedback earlier

• Regular releases - functionalities are pushed more often meaning that any functionality changes are smoother and quicker to implement

• Risk Management - these regular releases allow any issues to be flagged as early in the project as possible while there’s still time to make a material difference to the outcome

• Flexibility - the product and technology can evolve over time and to best suit the target audience

Below we've given an outline to the three main principles of Agile methology and the different elements that make them up.

1. The Kick off meeting

Before any work is started on the project a kick off meeting should be held with the product owner, project manager and the development team who will work on the project.

During this meeting the following points should be covered:

Product backlog

A product backlog is a list of functionalities, tasks and updates that the client owner or product owner would like to complete during the product’s lifespan. It’s important to make it clear during this meeting that the backlog is for the entire product lifespan so tasks within this list may be completed within the first few weeks of the project, or months later down the line. The backlog can be treated a little like a dream shopping list that you can keep referring back to during the product evolution.

Tip: Add this product backlog to a shared file so that it can be referred to easily in the future.

Roles

Roles prove very important when working on an Agile project and so the following roles need to be delegated during the kick off meeting:

• Product owner: This is the main owner of the product or the client. Their main responsibilities include managing the product backlog, testing work and selling the product to the correct audience.

• Scrum Master: The Scrum Master will run the regular scrums with the development team (explained more later on). The Scrum Master’s main responsibility is to keep everyone in the team on track to meet the agreed sprint objectives.

• Scrum development team: This team is made up of all of the people that will be building the product. During this meeting it is good to identify each person’s skillsets so that the best person is working on the most appropriate task. This also helps separate the tasks when you are in the middle of a sprint.

Goals

In the kick off meeting the product owner should detail what the product vision is to the wider team. Goals for the end product should be outlined so that everyone involved in the project understands the end vision and what they are working towards.

Ideas

The great benefit of using agile development is that as the product evolves and adapts over time, ideas are welcomed and discussed to help improve the product.

Tip: Add all ideas discussed to a shared document so that everyone working on the project can contribute and share their thoughts. You probably won't focus on any of these in the first few sprints but you may want to come back to them further down the line. Jotting ideas and thoughts down in a document helps to park the ideas so that you can keep focus on the work at hand.

2. Sprints

After you have had the initial backlog meeting, the rest of the project is broken up into what are called ‘sprints’. These are the individual phases of a project that help to move the build forward. Each sprint can last between 2 and 4 weeks, so it is important to make a decision in the kick off meeting for how long your sprints will last.

Sprints are created by taking tasks out of the product backlog and consolidating them into a set amount of time (called the sprint).

Sprint zero

This is your first sprint and will be all about planning and organising how the build and future sprints will work.

Basic set up

Every team has their own way of working but is often recommended to complete some of the basic setup tasks during sprint zero. This includes things like getting timesheets and development environments organised in advance, to make sure the team can hit the ground running on day one of the sprint.

Goal for sprints:

A clear goal for what needs to be achieved or completed by the end of the first sprint should be discussed and agreed upon by the whole team.The overall vision for the project, along with the product backlog, has already been defined during the kick off meeting so this should be referred back to when agreeing upon the first sprint objective.

The easiest way for everyone involved to understand this goal is by writing it out as a narrative. This can just be a simple sentence that explains the sprint goal from the user perspective. For example, if the goal of the sprint is to set up the payment section of a website the narrative would be:

“As a user I would like to be able to purchase package X on the website successfully’

Remember, focus on only one sprint at a time. You only need to create the goal for the first sprint for the moment as you will make a goal for the next sprint at the end, in your round up meeting.

Tasks

Now that you have identified the goal for the sprint you should list out the tasks that need to be completed to achieve this goal. These tasks can be technical or non technical but it is best to write all of them down, no matter how small they are so that you ensure you tick everything off.

Tip: Write these tasks on post-it notes, this will help when adding and moving them around your task board.

Task board

This is where your tasks on post-it notes come in handy :) The task board is used to monitor the progress of each task during a sprint. It is a great tool to help everyone visualise what needs to be completed - pretty much like a big to do list.

During sprint zero you should set up your Task Board. Depending on the sprint and the project, this board may look different each time, however I try and keep the columns the same for all of our agile projects to keep things consistent.

All tasks are to be placed under the ‘Backlog’ column during sprint zero, then each task (post it note) will move from one column to the next during the sprint throughout the following columns:

• Sprint backlog (all tasks that need to be completed in the sprint to achieve the sprint goal)

• In progress

• Pushed live (this doesn't mean pushed live to a site just pushed to the internal testing environment for everyone involved in the sprint to view.)

• Tested: Once a task lands in the ‘Tested’ column the team, including the product owner, are to review the task and sign it off. If the task has been completed successfully the task can be moved to the edge of the task board. If more work is needed on this task this should be discussed and the task moved back into the ‘In Progress’ or ‘Backlog’ column to be worked on more.

Tip: Put the task board up on the wall somewhere everyone can see it for quick reference.

3. Sprint Cycle

So once you've completed sprint zero and you're ready to get stuck into your first official sprint, how does the cycle of each individual one work?

Scrums

Sometimes called ‘Stand ups’, scrums are short catch up meetings with all the team working on the sprint, that occur each day and last around 10-15 minutes. We do our scrums here at Codegent standing up in our sofa area of the office around the task board. The key is to get everyone away from their desks where they get distracted and get them focused on the tasks for the day.

All teams run their scrums differently but to keep ours as short and sweet as possible we go round the circle of team members getting them to answer the simple questions:

“What did you do yesterday?” “What are you doing today?”

Individuals are not to go into detail on every single thing they did during the day but give more of a brief outline. Whilst people are outlining what they did and what has been completed, the scrum master will work along the task board and identify if any of the tasks can be moved along the columns of progression.

Sometimes during these scrum sessions new ideas are created but it is crucial that you don’t all start discussing these as it will draw focus from the sprint at hand. Once an idea has been aired it should be added to the shared ideas document or product backlog.

Tip: Plan your scrums for the morning, it helps get everyone motivated and focused on what they need to work on for the day.

Weekly backlog meeting

As well as having scrums every day with the sprint team we also have what we call backlog meetings at the very end of the week, normally around 5:30pm on a Friday before people are getting ready for the weekend. These internal weekly round up meetings are an opportunity for all the team to sit down and discuss what has been accomplished this week, if there are any concerns and what the goals for the following week should be.

Tip: Reiterate the goal and narrative for the overall sprint in this meeting and set individual goals for the following week to help keep people motivated.

Post sprint meeting

After the allocated time has been completed on the sprint and the sprint has ended it is always good to have a post sprint meeting. In this meeting you should cover:

• What was achieved during the sprint
• Any problems or concerns you had about the sprint
• How you can make the next sprint better
• Any tasks which did not get completed in this sprint and need to be carried over into the next one

Once these have been discussed and finalised you can start the cycle again and start planning what should be taken from the product backlog to be worked on in the next sprint and what the sprints goal are.

It may sound like a lot of work but once you are setup to work Agile, you’ll never look back. They key of course, is having the discipline to stick to the tasks in each sprint and not get distracted by the shiny, exciting new features in the backlog which is usually the case in product development. If you can do it, you'll undoubtedly reap the rewards of a high quality product that has a better market fit and needs less iterations later on in the development process.

London is often known as one of the more cold and impersonal cities in the world, so this month we thought we'd tell you about three altruistic startups which tell a different story.

1. Secret Theatre

What is it? Secret Theatre is a London based theatre company that doesn't seek to make a profit and puts on plays in unique locations.

Why do we love it? It’s a fun night out with some great acting and we really like the fact they they showcase emerging artists and...without giving too much away... deliver theatre in a very unique way.

Why will you love it? If you're anything like us, you'll enjoy experiencing something new and being taken out of your comfort zone. The venue is not announced until a few hours before the show starts which just adds to the anticipation.

Does anything let it down? Nope, but the latest performance is definitely not for the faint hearted! With a fair bit of swearing and scenes of drug taking - perhaps don’t take a first date or your mum!

2. Ziferblat

What is it? Ziferblat is a cafe in Shoreditch that operates a ‘pay as you go’ policy. There's no cost for food and drink, you simply pay for the amount of time you spend there and enjoy as much tea and coffee (and snacks) as you wish.

Why do we love it? We love that this place offers a real sense of community and the relaxed vibe. Ziferblat see the people who spend time in the cafe as ‘micro-tenants’ who can make food in the open kitchen and generally make a space to work, play and drink copious amounts of coffee in.

Why will you love it? Why wouldnt you? At 5p a minute you get to hang out in a lovely cafe and be part of the great Shoreditch community.

Does anything let it down? Not in our opinion...

3. Oxjam Festival

What is it? Oxjam is made up of hundreds of events happening all around the UK, all organised by volunteers. Oxjam Festival takes place every October and we will be checking out this year's festival taking place in Islington.

Why do we love it? OK, so its not technically a recent start up, but it felt worthy of a mention as it combined lots of our favourite things; great music, local community and most importantly - giving back. Proceeds go to Oxfam and the festivals are staffed by volunteers so not only it is a killer festival but it helps an amazing cause.

Why will you love it? If last year’s line up is anything to go by, this promises to be a goodie!

Does anything let it down? Just the risk of terrible October weather but then, doesn't that just make it feel even more like a true British festival?!

When you’ve poured your heart, soul and budget into a new digital product, you don’t expect it to fail - it’s difficult to even contemplate the idea.

Unfortunately many products do. Sometimes the launch just never takes off, or often you have a product which initially looks successful, but is really just a product of what Lean Startup guru Eric Ries calls ‘Vanity metrics’; stats which look good to the naked eye but don’t actually show that the product can, or will, make money.

Having worked on several digital products from the initial stages, right through to launch and customer retention, we know firsthand that a product rarely ends up the exact output of what was initially envisioned. To survive, products pivot or change and occasionally they die a necessary death. So when a product isn’t selling, how do you know when it’s time to change direction, carry on or scrap an idea altogether?

We’ve put together 7 questions to ask to help you ensure that you’re giving a product its best chance at success:

1. What is the product value?

The sad truth is, most products fail. Why? Because they neglect to communicate their product value properly. Customers care little about what you do, and more about what you can do for them, yet most websites focus on selling the product rather than its value. To successfully convert customers, you should always aim to sell a solution rather than a product. To take Twilert, our Twitter monitoring tool as an example, it’s very easy to tell visitors about Twilert's functionality, rather than explain what function it could provide for them. Take these two bios as an example:

1. ‘Twilert is a twitter monitoring tool which sends email alerts when keywords are mentioned on Twitter’

2. ‘Twilert allows you to receive realtime alerts when someone mentions your brand on Twitter’

The first is a good dictionary definition but fails to answer the question; why will our customers care? The latter effectively says the same thing, but focuses on the customer and the product value for their business. Rewriting your website copy is an essential step in communicating product value and showing customers why the product is worth investing in.

2. Where is your traffic coming from?

In an ideal world, you’d launch a product, get picked up by The Next Web and suddenly have 100K customers. Unfortunately in the real world, getting a product out there and acquiring customers, is a much slower process. To help this along, it’s important to define a strategy specifically for acquiring more traffic. This doesn’t necessarily mean spending a huge amount on advertising; relatively low cost or even free, inbound marketing methods can often work just as well. Popular social media scheduling tool Buffer, claims to have acquired its first 100,000 users through guestblogging, whereas Spotify and Nike+ both gained traction through Facebook integration. Plan and test various methods until you find the ones which generate traffic for your brand.

3. How are you converting that traffic into customers?

One of the biggest product marketing fails is to generate traffic and then not do anything with it. Banners, header images and call to action buttons should be optimised throughout your website and tested until they are successful at transferring customers to the next step in your sales funnel.

Some good examples of sites that have optimised the signup process include:

Buffer

Simple, call to action headers which show the benefit to the user and give a specific instruction: ‘Sign up. It’s free.’

Google Chrome

Strong call to action download button, optimised against white space.

Pie This

Simple, signup form and secondary Google Apps option.

4. How easy is the onboarding process?

If a sign up process is long or complicated, users will weight the amount of effort it takes to fill in against the amount of value they expect to receive from the product. Often, if the process is complicated or longwinded, they will leave before completion. A good onboarding process should be so seamless, that the user doesn’t even realise they are being taught something. Customers learn by doing and this is reflected in the signup process of some of the most successful products in the world such as Dropbox, Pinterest and LinkedIn. What these products all have in common is a smart onboarding process which leads the user through the experience, teaching them as they go. Also checkout Useronboard which gives a great overview of different onboarding methods used by various web apps.

5. How seamless is the full experience?

We are all becoming increasingly ‘connected’ and as a result, customers expect the products they invest in to integrate with other related systems. A good example is the integration between instant messaging service Hipchat and customer service tools Groove and Helpscout. Both companies recognised that small businesses are relying less on emails and more on instant messaging. This integration means that customer support requests can be dropped straight into team chatrooms and flagged immediately. Similarly, social media products Followerwonk and Buffer have built the perfect partnership so that users can schedule their social media posts (Buffer) for the times when their followers are most online (Followerwonk). The more seamless the experience, the more likely the user is to buy.

6. Do you really know your user?

One thing we’ve learnt from developing digital products is that user testing is an essential part of the product development cycle if you want to really learn about your customer. Speaking to Twilert users has taught us that a 30 day trial is more beneficial than the current 15 days, due to the reporting cycle agencies use. We also learnt, that the stickiest feature was not one of the six we were looking to implement - but actually Geolocation search, something we’d had for years but had never really optimised in the UI. Often you can skip many wasted efforts building new features just by talking to your customers and testing assumptions.

7. Do you have a customer service and social listening plan?

Creating a strategy to manage the ‘always on’ expectations of the modern day customer can be difficult but is essential to securing trust. Outage is sometimes inevitable but this doesn’t have to be a cause for concern if handled in the right manner. The key to good customer service is to respond quickly, honestly and humanely. There is nothing more frustrating for a user than an autorespond tweet or a 3 day wait for an email response. Customers need to feel confident that your team can solve their problems quickly and also protect them from the same mistake occurring twice. Unfortunately, this will extend to times outside of working hours and this is why a good social media listening plan is essential to success. Customers should also be entered into a feedback loop as they hit certain milestones throughout your product, to ensure that you stay in touch with their needs. Retaining customers is critical to growth and it’s much easier to retain an existing customer than it is to gain a new one.

Developing, selling and evolving a digital product is difficult. You only have to look at Microsoft’s Zune against Apple’s iPod, to see that even with large budgets and experienced teams, it’s all too easy for a digital product to fail.The only way to improve your chance of success is to continually assume, test and monitor at each stage of the product cycle and then when you’ve finished, start the process over again. Marketing a digital product is never going to be easy, but when you’re creating something that could potentially solve a problem or make someone’s life better, it’s worth the struggle.

1. New employees need to have similar goals and ideals to the rest of the team

At Codegent we are a very close team, who work collectively to ensure that client work is completed on time and to a high standard, and that our internal projects are also given love and care. This works because we all genuinely like each other! How many workplaces can you honestly say you have gotten along with everyone? And it’s not just that – we work to tight deadlines and people get stressed, so working with people you have fun with and respect really can make all the difference! We all understand each other and work to make sure nobody is left feeling like they are on a sinking ship (or not alone, at least!). There is nothing worse than someone coming in who has a separate agenda and won’t pull together with the rest of the team.

2. Employees Know the Values and Mission of Codegent

There’s a question we always ask in interviews at Codegent: Why do you want to work for us? This is a great gauge to actually see how much the interviewee knows about the company and whether they genuinely love what we do or have just seen a vacancy sign in the window. If an interviewee has done their research we always see this as a really positive sign, as they can then provide a specific reason for why they might be a good fit for the company.

The problem with an interview is the formality – it's tricky to see a personality through a stiff suit in a meeting room, so we also like to call our interviewees back for a second chat – just to mingle with the team and see how well they will fit in. This has proved an excellent way of foreseeing how the new employee will fit into the group.

3. Beer Friday

If there is one thing we love in our office it’s beer Friday! It’s lovely to be able to have an hour of more peaceful time on a Friday afternoon, after the stresses and work of the week. We have a delivery of different London beers arrive every Friday – so it’s always a bit of fun to get people round for a taste. Sometimes Beer Friday progresses to the nearest pub after work. It’s the small things that make us feel valued, and a free beer is always a good way to go about it!

Being such a social company means we all have genuine friendships outside of the workplace. We stress and work together so why not relax together too! Being social means we can call upon each other when deadlines are leering and we need a helping hand. Everyone is hands on and we all muck in and help each other – which gives us the best possible outcome for the work we produce, every time.

4. Freedom for employees

There is nothing worse than having to use a day of holiday because you have the dentist on a work day. Especially as we all hate the dentist’s chair - it’s hardly the sunlounger by the pool we would much rather take time off for! We all enjoy and utilise the flexibility of being able to work from home at Codegent, in times when you need your sofa delivered, or have an appointment. It’s this trust and freedom that motivates staff to work hard and giving employees flexibility and trust that they aren't just going to “WFH” with their feet up in front of Jeremy Kyle means that we all want to return the effort.

Knowing that we won’t be sacked for coming in ten minutes late is also refreshing from the sarky “good afternoon” you receive in some offices when you get in one minute past the clock. This also helps to ensure that no one resents staying late or working extra days when the company needs it.

5. Codegent is a Team and Not Just a Bunch of Individuals

We all work together to achieve the same goals, for ourselves, our clients and the company.

Overall, it’s safe to say that Codegent is a pretty decent place to work!

10 years ago, Codegent was established. Me, Mark and Luke had all worked together at another agency and had never discussed starting Codegent whilst we were all there, but somehow the stars aligned and we all ended up being broadly in the same place doing complimentary things. And so Codegent was born.

When we first started, like most new companies, we just wanted to survive our first year. In fact, thanks to some lucky breaks, we were able to more than survive and spent those first 12 months juggling way more work than we could reasonably handle. Put it down to youthful exuberance, or just terror of waking up one morning with nothing to do, but somehow we worked hard and found a way through.

Things have come a long way since our first borrowed room at the top of Mark’s parents’ office. We opened an office in Bangkok with Luke relocating there permanently with his wife, Khum and building up an awesome team. We then moved our London studio to a converted brewery with high vaulted ceilings in Clapham and then in 2012, as part of the acquisition of Thin Martian, into our current home, a converted Victorian warehouse in Old Street.

Our clients have ranged from one-person startups to some of the biggest companies in the world. Some have been great, some have been less so. We’ve become more cynical along the way as people tried to take advantage of us, but also learnt from our experience of creating our own products, that sitting in an agency getting paid a fee regardless, is a lot more of a sure thing than trying to build a digital business from scratch.

Attitudes to the craft of what we do have changed as web design and build has become more commoditized and ubiquitous. Put simply, anyone can build a website these days. We’ve felt that our future really lies in doing what we do best: which is creating and prototyping ideas, designing them beautifully and then applying the best technical solutions to realising them. From our first foray into product development where Luke was the lead developer on Red5 (which powers Facebook’s self-record video feature), we knew that we could out-think and out-execute our run-of-the-mill competitors. And so today, our focus is no longer in the design and build of websites, but rather in the creation of digital products and businesses: especially ones where we have a genuine long-term interest and involvement in the success of that business.

So what do the next 10 years hold for us? We see Codegent as a vehicle for creating great products and businesses that make a difference to people’s lives using digital innovation. It could be that they educate the world’s preschoolers through fun games, or provide travellers with everything they need to make themselves understood in a foreign country. It could be that they are a partnership with a well-known brand who wants to use knowledge and data in a new way. It could be all about creating new tools for marketeers to reach and understand their audiences. It could be a combination of these things and a whole lot more ideas that are waiting to be discovered.

Whatever happens next, we couldn’t be stood here talking about it if it weren’t for the great clients, staff and friends we’ve made along the way.

So a big thank you to: Attic Media, KLaw, AIA, BBC, Ionscope, Bank of England, Barclays Bank, Novartis, Gap, Marsh, RCM Graduates, AuDeo, Royal Mail, Meet the Author, Carphone Warehouse, ABN Amro, CSP, Benchmark Sport, SOAS, Read International, Redwood, Oxygen Finance, AGR, Welsh Development Agency, Wild Onion, Childrens Society, Sconul, Screwfix, Bigtime TV, Exchangeaway, Air Edel, Colart, DeWynters, Haygarth, Flutr, Government Office London, SAB Miller, Toucan, Jerwood, Jetstream, Juliet Poyser, Just Radio, Winsor & Newton, Ford, CBS, Searcys, ITV, Channel 4, B-Live, Sing-up, Magic Breakfast, McVities, Intellekt, 4Music, MPO, Moonfruit, ITV, Endemol, Nikelodeon, Hamleys, O2, Oakley, D-Gate, Independent Talent, British Library, Groovy Gecko, RT Insurance, 90Ten, London Review of Books, Poetry Book Society, St Michael’s Hospice, Sticky Content, Sigaria, WDRP, Pearson Education, Turner Broadcasting, ICM, Illuminations, South Bank Centre, Global Personals, Trade Finance Partners, Ten Alps, Kinapse, TheRankTank, Tiger Beer, Sophus3, Transcontinental, TSL London, UKTI, Michelle Dewberry, Sarah Beeny, Tepilo, Square Mile Sport, Primesight, Pixl8, cmypitch.com, Pownum, Phronesis, TeachersTV, PWC, UR7s, Spread the Word, The V&A Museum, PIU, ESC, CBeebies, Tweetminster, Old St Labs, Swarowski, Time Out, Tanfield, Skechers, Nestlé, Momentum London, Mortgage Brain, Radioplayer, Radio 1, The Sandpit, British Airways and Microsoft.

And another big thank you to some of the many people we consider to be friends: Nicola Philips, Frances Conn, Tom McManners, Paul Taylor, Justin Cooke, Mike Benns, Catriona Campbell, Phil Scotcher, Remeny Armitage, Matt Harvey, Peter and Moira McDermott, Tom Whitehouse, Sarah Beeny, Graham Swift, Phil Nuttall, Michael Twist, Mark Perera, Toby Morton, Matt McNeil, Spencer Gallagher, Amy McCulloch, Kate Ross, Brad Martin and James Clarke.

And a REALLY big thank you to the Codegent team past and present:

LONDON Samantha Redhead, Kate Twiss, Sarah Evison, Steve McKeogh, Josh van der Broek, Al Mills, Anna Haigh, Joseph Green, Lucy Bannatyne , Lauren Philips, Gloria Lindh, Nick Woodbine, Barry Frost, Alfonso Encisco, Stephen Adams, Aidan Kane, Matt Jukes, Lauren McNab, Jenny Carpenter, Julie-Laure Coassin, Bruna Magor, Nicolas Du Mortier, Phil Yates, Agnieszka Oslak, Michael Kane, Michael Wells, Rachel Wilde, Karine Tonson La Tour, Mel Thompson, Lisa-Marie Leitner, David Harrison, Bjorn Jansen, Nicola Copsey, Kev Danaher, Nick Peasant, Geoff Noel, Kelvin Leung, Umut Ahmet, Massimo Martinetti, Merv Booth, Erwin Bayani, Antony Whenman, Enrica Ciarniello, Hannah Flores, Yannick Chenot, Siebe van Dijck, Tristan Pretty, Joe Savage , Bridget O’Connor-Read, Jane Hart, Seth Armstong-Twigg, Mac Fraj, Beth Gladstone, Josh MacMillan, Sarah Wright and Lauren Smith.

BANGKOK Khum Hubbard, Jirasak Saebang,Tanisorn Karnchanahattakij, Akapong Soontorngitwarakul, Nattapong Kongmun, Chaiwut Witoogit, Tongnueng Sermsutcharitgul, Nattpapat Pinyopusarerk, Manaspon Siripak, Jirapat Tangnoi, Watcharakorn Kotawan, Surasit Liangpornrattana, Panu Aussawaserelert, Nakorn Suttigultorn, Warachet Samtalee, Sillapanon Hattachanchai, Watchara Nilsonti, Prem Sitchanugrit, Watchara Thongkam, Jiraporn Uttaruk, Anurak Eiampoklarb, Max Boulin, Muriel Bowie, Manapan Pattanathong, Kiattikun Chaimoon and Xingmin

We’re very lucky to have found you. Thanks again,

David, Mark and Luke

Another Third Thursday and this month we have tech hacks, focus groups, new projects and a trip to San Francisco.

Other links referenced:

• Twilert
• Kizzu
• F8 Developer Conference

We've been making mobile apps since the start of 2011 and in that time have had 13 million downloads of our products.

Most of our titles have an average app store rating of 4 stars and above which significantly helps in our quest to acquire new users. Anecdotally I've always felt that there was a high correlation of certain keywords users write when penning a good review. So, to try and prove my point I got one of our devs to crunch out the frequency of words used in our reviews.

Feeling the love

The results were interesting. Once you take out the most common words like I, to, app, the, it the most frequent words are praise – great, good and love. As designers it is important to remember people do develop emotional bonds to software they frequently use, especially if it helps them fulfil an important function in their lives. We should remember to give our software personality and do what we can to make it loveable as well as functional.

I believe that the place to inject this is in the small details – a crafted interaction or maybe a slightly unexpected message hidden in the app. It should tell the user that there were people behind this app, and they cared. Childrens' TV and Film makers have been doing this for years with subtle knowing nods to the significant adult portion of their audience.

The appreciation of simple

The next group of words that stood out in high frequency were learn, easy, helpful, useful, simple. Learn may be a slight red herring as our apps are mostly educational however I think the message is clear. Users crave easy to use apps that provide a useful function. By no means is that an earth shattering realisation but bringing simple into software design is not always, well... simple.

Simple should be a design consideration you are prepared to battle for and are willing to spend a longer time trying to achieve. The problem with simple is that whilst we all pay lip service to it in the early stages of a project it becomes increasingly hard to stick to as feature requests surface and different use cases come to light. Simple means understanding the main reason your app should exist and who it is serving so that they will find it useful and helpful. Simple means saying no. You should do so knowing it will be appreciated later.

If you want to check out the frequency of words used around your app's reviews there's a handy tool here.

And if you fancy reading more about simple being effective this is a great post by Alex Cican.