App leadership is everything involved in leading an app's development except actually writing the code. The strategy, the research, the planning, the scoping, the decisions about what gets built and in what order, and finding and working with the people who build it.

It is not an industry term. I made it up, because the words the industry already had for this work put off the people who are doing it.

Why I made up a term

Software leadership is terrifying to someone who does not work in tech. App leadership is not. Everyone has heard of apps, and everyone knows what leadership means.

I teach from traditional software development, from places like Intel and Mastercard, and that can be scary for people. So I have been careful about the words I use. The process I teach is the same process a big team uses. The word in front of it is the part I changed.

It also makes people ask the right question. App leadership makes them go, oh wait, so this is about apps? It is not about people?

It is not people management

The course is not about people leadership. I do not teach people leadership at all.

It is about leading an app, and of course that involves people. But the primary person it involves is you.

What it actually covers

It is the process of leading the entire thing. You are working with people, you are working with code, you are working with everything.

In practice that means going from an idea to a built app in the App Store, minus the engineering:

• Working out what the real problem is, and whose it is
• The research, online first and then talking to actual people
• Looking at what already exists and where it falls short
• Deciding on the solution, and what the first version of it is
• Writing it down so somebody else can build it
• Finding a developer, finding a designer, and knowing what to ask them for
• Planning the launch, and knowing what to look at afterwards

Who does it

Anyone leading an app, technical or not. It could be the marketer who has her own app but hires people to do the rest of the tasks.

You could be a real tech company with a team of ten developers, or you could be a solopreneur building it yourself. The process and the things you should do are the same. It is the depth you get into them that changes, and the adjustments you make to the processes.

Why the word matters to you, not just to me

If you are building an app and you are not the one writing the code, there was no name for your job. You were "the idea person", or "the founder", or "non-technical", which is a word that describes you by what you are not.

App leadership is a description of work you are already doing. Naming it makes it learnable, and it makes it something you can get better at on purpose instead of by accident.

Keep reading

App Idea vs. App Strategy: What's the Difference and Why It Matters

What Do I Need to Know Before Hiring a Developer?

Do I Need a Technical Co-Founder to Build an App?

Learn this with me

App leadership is what From Passion to Product teaches, over six weeks, live, for free. Each week is one part of leading an app without writing the code: finding the real problem, talking to users, sizing up the competition, shaping the solution, scoping the build, and launching it.

You practise all six on your own app idea rather than on a case study.

Join the waitlist to hear when the next free cohort opens, or get the App Strategy Workbook and start.