Megan Dean is the Senior Strategic Growth Manager at Yodel Mobile and has worked with the agency for 4 years. As part of our Meet our Growth Team series, Megan gives us the scoop on the future of app growth and the importance of education to achieve app success, having worked with a huge range of clients of the years.

What is your role at Yodel Mobile and what does it entail?

I’m the Senior strategic growth manager at Yodel Mobile and I work on the consultancy side of the business and on big picture strategy for clients. Whether they’re launching an app or scaling, I look at how they can best achieve their goals by providing both strategy and focus.

Day to day, I do a lot of team management, especially catching up with different members of my team to ensure our projects are on track and communicating with clients regarding deliverables. I also spend a lot of time speaking to developers around technical implementation and troubleshooting.

What principles do you feel are integral to a strategic consultancy role?

A strategic consultancy role requires a good understanding of your clients’ businesses, because you not only need to understand how the app is positioned and where they’re sitting in the marketplace, but also have an insight into the long-term vision to ensure that we are all aligned. It requires a lot of future proofing to make sure that we’re prepared for the challenges that we’re likely to face further down the line. Ultimately, we try to form a solid partnership and do our best to come to a mutual agreement on the direction of the business.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned as a growth strategist?

A big part of my role is education; instead of dictating what needs to happen without exploring the “why”, we ensure to prioritise proof of strategy which is why we have a data-led approach at Yodel Mobile. That means you are able to have a mix between achieving that long-term vision whilst being reactive to the behaviours that we’re seeing within the app. You can also pinpoint where acquisition is working and where it isn’t. That requires joining up a lot of different data points across paid, organic and in-app, to maximise our understanding of their audience.

It is also easy to get distracted by small things, for example, some businesses may come to a complete halt if they notice strange behaviour in their app in order to rectify it. But it’s really about validating the size of the problem and prioritising. Instead of jumping into the “how”, the first question should be “why are we doing it?” or “should we even be doing this in the first place?”

What is the most effective approach to app growth?

I think the “most effective” method to app growth is always changing. As time goes on, more sophisticated technology, tools and capabilities become available, so we make it our imperative to stay reactive to that. That means that we are constantly evolving our services to make the most of these capabilities and achieve maximum impact.

Additionally, improving communication between teams is really important for us to align marketing, product and development departments with the goals that we’ve established. But, we also try to minimize the development work needed so that marketing teams can have a lot more freedom and in the long-term, developers have time to work on the inevitable long backlog for their product. We essentially alleviate dependency between teams, so that each can continue to optimize toward their own goals whilst still communicating to ensure a common vision.

What does the future of app growth look like?

There is a lot of conversation around data privacy right now. In the UK, users are very opposed to data sharing. What’s interesting is that Generation Z are the least worried about this and most open to giving their data. The reason is that they understand the benefits and that no service is truly free. They also understand that sharing their data will work in their favour in terms of personalisation and seeing more relevant advertising, etc. Whilst privacy rules may get stronger, there will also be a greater focus on education for app users on data sharing and its importance.

Finally, app growth as a concept and its expertise are still considered niche and there’s a lot of people that think launching an app is easy and that anyone can do it. In the future, there will be a greater understanding that anchors the reality that launching an app means launching a business. It takes a lot of work and commitment. I think because of that, there will be a lot more competition in the space. 

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