From Technical Migration to Product Leverage
I led the redesign of a legacy hybrid mobile app as it transitioned to native iOS and Android, aligning Product, Engineering, user needs, business goals, and technical feasibility into a more focused product direction.
The product sat within a broader ESM suite as the mobile self-service counterpart to an existing web application, which meant mobile needed to deliver the right self-service value rather than simply replicate desktop.
Replatforming the app from hybrid to native created a strategic opportunity to do more than modernise the technology, allowing me to use customer insight, support signals, and delivery realities to shape a more valuable and sustainable mobile product.
The existing mobile app had become increasingly difficult to support, evolve, and scale.
Built using a hybrid framework, it had initially enabled faster development, but over time introduced limitations in performance, platform alignment, and maintainability. At the same time, the product itself had not evolved meaningfully to reflect how users actually needed to use mobile self-service.
The result was an application that was both technically constrained and product-wise outdated.
This created a dual problem:
- A technology foundation that could not support future growth
- A mobile experience that did not fully meet user needs or business expectations
Use the rebuild not just to modernise the technology, but to:
- Define a clear and valuable role for mobile self-service
- Improve task efficiency and usability in mobile contexts
- Align user needs, business goals, and technical feasibility
- Establish guardrails for consistent decision-making
- Introduce measurement to support ongoing product improvement
Challenges & Constraints
The project operated within several key constraints:
Technical
- Backend dependencies limited workflow changes
- Platform-specific requirements across iOS and Android
- Need to stay aligned with system logic and integrations
Product
- Desktop expectations shaped the baseline
- Mobile still needed meaningful product value
- Complexity had to be translated selectively
Business
- Adoption and engagement needed to improve
- The rebuild still had to show value
- Product visibility remained limited
Delivery
- Timelines and scope were fixed
- Capacity and budget shaped priorities
- Ambition had to stay feasible
Discovery
Main Risk: Redesigning based on internal assumptions
To address this, I worked in close partnership with a Product Manager and a Development Lead, and treated discovery as a shared,cross-functional activity.
We joined customer conversations to build a direct, shared understanding of user reality, rather than interpreting insights separately later.
I also reviewed support tickets and available store-level product signals. This added another layer of evidence, hinting at where users were encountering friction, what issues were repeatedly surfacing, and where the app may not have been delivering enough value.
We focused on understanding:
- How mobile fits into real day-to-day workflows
- Critical tasks, when users are away from desktop
- Useful vs Unnecessary on mobile
- Points of friction in the current experience
- Opportunities for distinct value on mobile
This ensured alignment across Design, Product, and Engineering from the source, not just at decision points.
Key Insights
- Mobile is not a smaller Desktop
Mobile as a platform, supports short, context-driven interactions. This requires stronger visual prioritisation, optimised flows, and a clear, scannable structure.
- Availability did not automatically translate into business value
Although the app existed, relatively modest store performance and limited engagement signals suggested that presence alone was not enough. The product needed to be shaped not only around real user needs, but the business outcomes it was expected to support as well.
- Support demand exposed friction
Support tickets indicated users were still encountering enough friction to require help outside the product. The support ticket review, helped surface areas where the experience was unoptimised, inefficient, or not supporing the right user goals.
- Customer needs were more situational and industry dependent, than broad
Customer conversations suggested that mobile value was not about full desktop parity, but about supporting the right tasks, at the right time. Users pointed out fast access, progress visibility and quick decisions as their main goals on mobile, rather than deep multi-step flows.
- Prioritisation needed to lie at the intersection of user needs, business priorities and delivery realities
Customer input, support demand, and relatively modest store signals made itclear that the opportunity was not to broaden the appindiscriminately, but to focus on the workflows most likely toimprove user value, support business outcomes, and earn their placewithin the realities of scope, budget, timeline, and technicaleffort.
Strategy & Business Alignment
We translated the insights gathered through discovery into a shared decision and prioritisation framework, used to filter features before they reached implementation.
To move forward, each feature needed to demonstrate a strong enough case across:
- user value
- impact (business, user, and technical)
- business relevance
- technical effort and feasibility
- scope fit
This gave us a clearer way to decide what was worth investing in, what needed reshaping, and what should be deferred.
Some of the features that moved forward were:
- FAQs and Knowledge Discovery
- Ticket Logging and Support
- Decisions and Authorisations, including a flow optimisation redesign
A deeper support form redesign into a multi-step flow was also explored, but ultimately deferred due to technical constraints in the underlying infrastructure.
The Result
A native mobile experience, built in Swift and Kotlin, designed specifically for mobile use.
The solution delivered:
- Focused workflows for key self-service tasks
- Clearer hierarchy and reduced cognitive load
- Platform-appropriate patterns for iOS and Android
- Optimised goal-completion
- A scalable foundation for future product evolution, based on an established decision framework, based on shared goals across departments
Measuring Success
I defined a baseline measurement framework so the product could be tracked continuously over time, giving the team clearer visibility into satisfaction, adoption, engagement, retention, churn risk, and overall product health.
Outcome
The app evolved from a dated extension of a desktop system into a more intentional, mobile-first product with:
- A clear role within the product ecosystem
- Strong alignment across Product, Design, and Engineering
- A scalable and maintainable technical foundation
- A measurable path for future improvement
Impact
Users
- Faster access to key self-service tasks
- Better support for mobile approvals
- Clearer progress visibility
Business
- Baseline for adoption and retention tracking
- Better visibility into product health
- Stronger focus on measurable value
Product
- Native iOS and Android foundation
- Clearer role for mobile in the ESM suite
- Shared decision framework for prioritisation
Reflection
Technical rebuilds are often treated as delivery work.
In reality, they are moments of leverage.
By aligning closely across Design, Product, and Engineering, grounding decisions in real context, and working within clear business and technical constraints, we were able to turn a necessary migration into a meaningful product shift.
The biggest value did not come from rebuilding the app.
It came from rethinking what the app should be.
