How to De-Risk Your Cross-Platform Strategy

Once you’ve decided to reap the benefits of a cross-platform strategy—such as universally compatible features across web and mobile—how do you outline the roadmap to get there? And, more importantly, how do you ensure success?  There are many compelling reasons to embrace a cross-platform strategy for application development in 2023, as user experience and time to market continue to be at the top of the agenda for business leaders and developers alike.

However, no new business strategy or approach is without its pitfalls, and it’s crucial to lay strong foundations before jumping in at the deep end. The last thing you want is to compromise your web and mobile features or alienate developers and users by introducing a new approach.

Read on to find out how to move to a cross-platform strategy for building applications, while mitigating business risk at every stage.

Improving customer and user engagement is one of the most compelling reasons to move to a cross-platform architecture. This means you’ll want to keep users’ requirements front of mind when rolling out your cross-platform strategy.

Collating honest and accurate feedback, whether positive or negative, is a reliable way to document what’s currently working, what isn’t, and where there are obvious areas for improvement.

With these valuable insights at your organisation’s fingertips, you can start to map out how the customer and user experience should look across web and mobile and use this as a blueprint moving forward.

Taking this important step will help to ensure that when your organisation does move to a cross-platform approach, you retain the best elements from your current applications and platforms, iron out any existing legacy issues, and bring your users on the journey. Discover how cross-platform app development is helping organisations to enhance agility, boost innovation, and more.

When undertaking any kind of digital transformation, bringing key stakeholders on the journey is essential to ensure a mutual understanding about the benefits, key steps, timeline, and nature and level of risk—as well as how to mitigate this.

Being transparent about the ins and outs of moving to a cross-platform approach to application development is crucial to gain key stakeholders’ trust, build confidence across affected teams, and ultimately secure buy-in for your cross-platform strategy.

Armed with the benefits of moving to a cross-platform approach (improved customer and user engagement, greater operational efficiency and reduced costs, and improved talent acquisition and retention), your organisation will be better aligned and motivated to succeed. Related Read: How Cross-Platform App Development Reduces TCO

From achieving key milestones throughout your cross-platform journey, to measuring key user and performance metrics once the new platform is live, setting clear goals will help to keep your organisation productive and accountable.

It’s a good idea to set smaller, team-specific goals in addition to wider organisational ambitions when moving to a cross-platform approach. These goals should take into account each team’s responsibilities, priorities and strengths.

Setting clear goals from the start will help to ensure your cross-platform strategy is watertight and guarantee stability across your architecture, backend, frontend and operations, mitigating risk at every possible stage of the process. Related Read: 5 Reasons to Embrace a Cross-Platform Mobile Architecture

Are developers in your organisation tired of building the same features twice? Perhaps your development teams are tied up managing disparate mobile and web applications, leading to inconsistent user experiences and cost wastage.

Your business may also be experiencing slow features delivery and time to market, causing it to fall behind the competition. These are all signs that moving to a cross-platform approach can help. But how do you create the roadmap to get there?

From planning how to take your existing staff from their current skill set, to becoming productive in your new chosen technologies and language, to benchmarking target response times and more, we can help. Ready to begin? Find out how NearForm can help to kick-start your organisation's cross-platform app development journey today.