Building the best self-service app commerce features
by Balint Szeplaki
Head of Product
As technologies have evolved, and configurations have elevated from code to dashboards, users are wanting more power and freedom on the platforms they engage. More importantly, users want the capabilities they acquire to include the capacity to make changes quickly and easily. We at Poq want to provide retailers and our clients with the ability to speedily set up, configure, grow, and analyse their apps. This blog will cover our reasons for building self-service features that will provide product owners and non-IT professionals with power over their apps.
One of the greatest benefits of working with a platform is the ability to make changes and customisations without the need for highly skilled developers. While Poq’s professional services team has been successful in building a number of client customisations on the platform, we are always striving to improve 💪. With a new set of features, we will be giving our clients the capacity to make configurations, which previously, were lengthy customisations done by developers.
New self-service features and tools
Over the course of the next few quarters we will be building and launching a new series of tools. They bring the app’s key management jobs of app set up and real-time app configuration into the hands of product owners. App set up is made up of configuration jobs which are done once, or infrequently prior to the app’s launch. Real-time app configuration is made up of day to day configurations which affect the app’s live experience.
Each of these features are app setup configuration tools, with the exception of Feature flags, which is often used to control the release of new features:
- Feed Validator for easy and quick catalogue mapping from product files to the live app
- App styling tool for simple updates to the apps style and consistent branding across the app
- Localisation controls for easy management of localisation and textual content
- Feature flags for quick feature configurations such as turning features on and off or configuring their behaviour
Later down the line, features pertaining to app growth and analysis will be built with the same determination to provide retailers and their teams with configuration capabilities away from developers and services teams.
Check out “Empowering product owners to set-up and configure your app” to learn more about how retailers will benefit from Poq’s upcoming feed validator and app styling tool.
The Poq App Manager
All of these tools and features will be hosted within our new App Manager. The App Manager is a web based tool with roles based access controls. Our Poq Identity Portal will provide access to certain areas of management based on user responsibilities and permissions, creating a secure app management system. The App Manager is the single tool needed to access all aspects for managing the app, from set-up to in-live configurations.
The App Manager will also host the CMS, our powerful content management system that makes creating home screen banners, building app stories, and sending out push notifications really easy. Our App Manager and its features will provide retailers and their product owners with the ability to manage and control their app with web-based admin user interfaces. With app management power in the hands of product owners, retailers will save time 🕒 and money 💰 by turning expensive app modifications into quick and in-house operations.
By providing product owners and non-IT professionals with configuration management power, developers will now be able to transfer their focus. They can turn their skills towards building innovative and disruptive technology. We at Poq also want to empower developers and for that reason are building a series of enablement features. To learn more about our first SDK, check out our blog about creating an enhanced omnichannel marketing strategy with Poq’s new push layer SDK.
