• Financial Services
  • Flutter
  • Dart

We spent nine months inside Nav’s mobile team, modernizing its Flutter apps and bringing them level with the web. App registrations and monthly active users doubled, and average logins per user rose 200%.

user growth
2x
engagement increase
200%

Small business owners open Nav, in the mobile browser or in the Nav app. At first two of every three use the browser, and the app is half-working. A Ship button ships one two-week release at a time over nine months: dependencies upgraded, Dart null safety, state management, technical debt cleared, then the app comes level with the web and every new feature launches mobile first. More owners open the app, and at the end app users have doubled and logins per user are up 200%.

Every two weeks, for nine months

Month 0 of 9

01The ask

Make the app the place small businesses start.

Nav is a financial health platform for small businesses with 1.7 million users. It has helped more than 380,000 small businesses find financial products, and it connects owners to accounting, payroll, and tax services.

Nav wanted to become a mobile-first company with frequent deployments and a personal experience for every owner. Its iOS and Android apps already shared one Flutter code base, but by 2022 the foundations needed work.

In their words

  • “You will hear this word over again: Trust. There was a genuine trust between our team and the VGV team. I speak for everybody; we did not think there was a VGV and a Nav team. There was one team.”

    Head of Product, Nav Zain Kahn

02The fix

Pay down the debt, then catch up with the web.

We upgraded the Flutter dependencies, migrated the code base to Dart null safety, moved state management to a pattern that scales, and cleared the technical debt so the apps got more stable.

Then we brought mobile level with the web app, feature for feature, and set the expectation that every new feature launches on mobile first.

Before, five older Nav app screens in blue on a grey background, a Bank of America business credit card offer, a card list, offer details, a Business Boost plan at $39.99, and a business profile form
After, the same five Nav screens in purple, Top Options with MatchFactor scores and Money In and Out, a card list, option details, a Business Boost plan billed quarterly, and the Jim’s Bakery business profile
Before and after, the same five screens.

03The team

One team, in the same channels.

VGV engineers and a designer joined Nav’s own workflows, with daily pair programming and shared project management. The new practices moved into Nav’s team through that pairing, day by day.

Ammon Lockwood, Nav’s Director of Software Engineering, called VGV the most tightly integrated of Nav’s consultants, in its channels and in on the banter.

04The rhythm

A release every two weeks, and proof of what it did.

We set a two-week deployment cadence, backed by stronger tests, higher code coverage, and analytics that measure what each feature does once it ships.

05What changed

The app became the front door.

  • 2x

    App users doubled.

    App registrations and monthly active users both doubled.

  • 200%

    Owners came back more.

    Average logins per user per month rose 200%.

  • Every two weeks

    Releases on a schedule.

    A steady cadence with tests, coverage, and analytics behind every release.

  • In house

    The know-how stayed at Nav.

    Nine months of daily pairing moved the practices into Nav’s own engineering team.

06If you’re next

What we’d tell a team in Nav’s seat.

  1. 01

    Look at where your users actually are. If most of them reach you through a mobile browser, the app is the thing to fix.

  2. 02

    Update dependencies and state management before the feature push. New features ship faster on a current code base.

  3. 03

    Write mobile first down as a rule. Every new feature launches in the app before anywhere else.

  4. 04

    Embed, then pair. Know-how moves fastest when your engineers write the code alongside ours.

Roll credits.

Who did what, and with which tools.

Client
Nav
Our part
Mobile-first strategyFlutter engineeringProduct designTeam training
Platforms
iOS and Android
Built with
FlutterDart
Timeline
Nine months

Built by Very Good Ventures

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