Part 5 of our 7 part series where we look at most common myths about mobile app development. Be clear.

Myth #5: If we outsource it, we don’t need to do much work

REALITY: For the best mobile app development, you will need to be heavily involved with the development team.

Most clients want to simply hand over the development to us and prefer that we make the decisions on their behalf. But it simply doesn’t work that way. For a large, complex app, we need to get information and decisions as fast as possible and require clients’ involvement at various aspects of the mobile app development phase.

We can try to meet what we think the client wants but we still need to be sure that what we are thinking is what the client actually wants. We are an engineering team and cannot think on the same bandwidth the clients have regarding their business. This is why regular interaction with the clients is very important throughout the process of mobile app development.

In several cases, we want the client to sit with us during discussions, white boarding and walk throughs on hangout rather than email chains. The turnaround is so much quicker and so very productive.

And make no mistake, no matter what you have planned, you will need to spend a good amount of time at least for the initial version with the development company. And we think its well worth it.

To understand this better try this: Take a big paperboard and starting drawing a picture. However you need to take 3 colleagues and explain them once and then see if all four of you can draw a combined picture. We are willing to bet you will soon see a disaster. Why is that?

Humans do not think alike. So while you think you have explained and the others think they have understood, they really haven’t. And this is not about outsourced vs in-house. Its humans in general. In fact outsourced teams are much better in understanding and documenting users requirements because they are really the professionals in this and they do it all the time. Argue that!