My first startup, AppCentral, stumbled upon an issue that no one had solved at the time. Companies wanted to use mobile apps to improve their businesses but they didn’t know how to: distribute, secure, and administer their applications. In short, they didn’t know how to manage their applications. business headache

We had been building products to help people with these different problems, one at a time. Eventually we realized that these problems weren’t isolated problems, and it wasn’t going to be just one or two companies that had them. We started to call the suite of tools that we had built Mobile Application Management, and realized we had a business worth pursuing.

Discovering a new space like this meant we had to explain both the problems and the solutions all the time - to potential customers, to journalists, to investors, and to ourselves. Why to ourselves? If the company doesn’t grok what it’s building, what it’s not building, and why; it will produce bad products. This is the heart of product management.

This often meant creating metaphors or maps for people, making connections to markets we already understood, and inventing new language. How did this play out with AppCentral?

Maps and Metaphors

One of the main maps and metaphors we used to describe what we did was application lifecycle management. What we realized was that distribution, administration, and security of applications mattered at different points in the life of an application. Like anything that was alive you needed to treat it differently at the beginning of its life vs. the end of its life. This was a good way of explaining to people why they needed multiple tools. It also helped us think about what else we might need to build. We started with tools for distributing applications, securing applications, and tracking applications. We realized that soon people would want help with updating applications, changing permissions, and more.

Taken from a whitepaper I wrote:

mobile app lifecycle

Making Connections

One of the easiest ways to describe what we were doing (in terms that even the average person off the street could understand) was that we created App Stores for the employees of specific companies, Enterprise App Stores. Everyone knew what an App Store was, everyone knew how transformative the technology was. It was easy for people to imagine that if a company wanted to get applications just to their employees that an App Store would be useful. It was an easy jump from there to get people to imagine that there were all sorts of other issues that a company would have with their applications that the average Joe wouldn’t need to worry about with their applications, things like security.

Inventing New Language

This is the toughest and most expensive thing to do to when you’re defining a new space. Why is it expensive? To do it you often need to spend time with journalists or advisory companies or consulting companies to get them to use the same terms as you. Oftentimes time with these people costs money directly or indirectly. Sometimes it can’t be helped. But sometimes it can also represent a significant calling card for your company. One of the terms that we invented was a term called App Wrapping. It was the way we explained how we were going to secure your company’s applications. Our product, AppGuard, would wrap around your company’s application, providing control over it if a phone got lost or someone left the company. When our company got purchased, almost every announcement had some mention of our App Wrapping technology.