Create things people want.
It’s that simple. It’s that complicated. You may need help figuring out who you should focus on and what they want, but getting started with this simple focus—actually making things and getting them in the hands of your users—will push your organization a lot farther down the road and give you plenty of insight to grow a mobile platform that truly transforms your business.
You don’t need to endlessly slice and dice the options either. A solid strategy has some basic components. Understand your business objectives, brand vision, user experience focus and technical implications, then set a hard deadline and get started. And it doesn’t have to be perfect. Perfection is a myth perpetuated by people who charge by the hour, abetted by others who can’t or won’t prioritize.
One more thing…make it a creative experience. It’s not simply requirements gathering, compiling feature/functionality matrices or taking an existing desktop application and porting to mobile. It’s creatively mixing and mingling the assets you have with services and content you can pull in from other sources. And of course, have fun thinking about uses for the increasingly powerful device and platform capabilities—things that will solve your users’ problems or make their life better in the moment—all within an irresistibly tasty user experience.
Having a solid mobile road map is great. But it’s pointless if you don’t occasionally take a road trip.
Now get moving!