Streamlining App Development with SaaS Project Management Tools
As of today, 2025, there are more than 4 million apps in the leading app stores. But as seems usual, launching updating apps continues to be complex, involving coordination across teams spread far and wide — designers, developers, product managers … and so on. But you can, and should, use the software as a service (SaaS) project management tools to make app dev as easy as possible with a bit of help from easier collaboration, task management, progress tracking, etc.
This article will explore key ways SaaS project management tools can accelerate and optimize mobile and web app development. Core focus areas include:
- Enabling collaboration across distributed teams
- Managing workflows from idea to launch
- Tracking development progress and milestones
- Integrating with other software dev tools
- Providing analytics and visibility into bottlenecks
- Streamlining deployment and post-launch updates
SaaS project management is the key to fastening the time to market, reducing costs and complexity and enhancing the quality of the app.
SaaS project management platforms offer a great benefit as they make it easy to collaborate when the people involved in an app dev team or SaaS consulting services are located in different geographies and different time zones. Leading solutions include:
- Asana. Flexible project management with customizable workflows and dashboards to coordinate across teams. Integrates with 1000+ apps.
- Jira. Powerful, customizable project tracking focused on agile dev. Great for managing complex projects with dependencies.
- Wrike. Feature-rich work management platform with Gantt charts, workflows and more. Helps plan and track progress.
These tools provide shared workspaces for discussions, file sharing, interactive task lists, notifications and more. This keeps all stakeholders aligned, minimizing miscommunications that can delay projects. Some key collaboration benefits include:
- Central place to store project info and files rather than scattered emails/drives
- Visibility into who is responsible for each task
- Discussions attached directly to tasks and projects rather than long email threads
- Automated notifications when changes occur
- Mobile access to stay connected from anywhere
Multi-disciplinary app development requires collaboration tools. Interactive task lists generate features that help streamline the handoffs between teams, and shared dashboards provide end-to-end visibility to get your product completed on time by coordinating tens of contributors.
Managing Workflows From Idea to Launch
SaaS project management tools also provide powerful workflow management to streamline major app dev phases, including:
- Ideation and planning
- UI/UX design
- Development and testing
- Launch and monitoring
- Ongoing updates
By creating templates for these stages, including standardized sets of tasks and subtasks, project managers can systematize app execution within and across projects. For example, a “UI/UX design” template might include:
- Create wireframes
- Develop visual mockups
- Conduct user research
- Finalize interaction design
With templates, new app dev projects can kick off faster by reusing workflows instead of starting from scratch. Tools like Asana, Jira and Wrike make it easy to set up templates, clone projects, create dependencies between tasks, assign owners, set durations and more.
Some other key benefits of workflow management include:
- Standardization: Consistent workflows improve process efficiency
- Clarity: Task dependencies visualized via Gantt charts, timelines and calendars
- Flexibility: Workflows can be adjusted and improved over time
- Acceleration: Automate repetitive tasks for faster execution
- Coordination: Workflows provide clarity across many contributors
As app dev complexity continues to increase, it becomes essential to use structured workflows that are aligned with each phase of the project to manage projects successfully.
Tracking Development Progress and Milestones
So many things are happening as far as app development momentum is concerned, but staying on top of it can be tricky by itself, especially with a number of other things moving across teams. SaaS project management solutions excel in this area as well.
It has interactive dashboards, progress bars, burndown charts and reports, which makes it easy to see what has been done and what is still left to be done. Most tools provide this visibility at multiple levels:
- Overall project status
- Status by app dev phase
- Status by contributor/team
- Status by task
This helps managers quickly identify bottlenecks before they delay projects. If a certain dev phase or contributor falls behind, more resources can be allocated. Some examples of helpful views include:
- One burndown chart showing the total time of the app dev schedule compared to the actual progress
- A view of a timeline with filtering by a specific team’s tasks and due dates
- A table with which project tasks are pending, in progress and complete
- Interactive dashboards with key milestone completion rates
Having data to support project status conversations allows for fact-based decisions of what changes are required to keep app development on track. In addition, it reports to the stakeholders and captures the insights to improve future projects.
Integrating With Software Development Tools
SaaS project management makes the process of workflow much easier, but teams still use other tools for building the app:
- Code repositories (GitHub, BitBucket)
- Code editing (Visual Studio Code)
- Prototyping (InVision, Figma)
- Chat (Slack, Teams)
- Documents (Google Drive, Dropbox)
Thankfully, most project management solutions integrate with these other systems via APIs and out-of-the-box connectors. This enables automatic task, update and file syncing across tools so developers don’t have to switch contexts constantly. Some examples include:
- Associating GitHub commits and pull requests to dev tasks
- Syncing Figma design file updates to project dashboards
- Importing G Suite documents attached to projects
- Creating tasks within project management tools from Slack
This bidirectional integration provides a central hub for managing and tracking work on all of the technologies used to build apps. Without repetitive manual updates across multiple systems, project status is always up to date automatically.
Providing Analytics and Visibility Into Bottlenecks
The more complex app projects become, the more difficult it is for a project manager to know where to direct their attention and resources. SaaS project management analytics supply knowledge-driven results to these bottlenecks.
Common views include:
- Task velocity. Monitor how fast tasks are completed over the past few days or weeks. Declining velocity indicates capacity issues.
- Cycle time is the period of time it takes for tasks to start and finish. An increasing cycle time indicates inefficiencies.
- Throughput. What is the number of tasks or story points that are being “done” each week or sprint? This metric is a measure of all team output.
- Bottleneck percentage. Tells % of project tasks that are delayed or stuck. It is a signal of blocking issues that need to be resolved with high percentages.
- Net promoter score (NPS). It helps gauge user sentiment on the internal tool itself and improves adoption.
Analytics make the inscrutable feeling of app dev momentum something that exists on paper. Managers know that if velocity drops, they should resolve resourcing strains. The long cycle time makes handoffs between teams inefficient. Investigation into what’s slowing down output is needed to prevent falling throughput.
Having data leads to smarter decisions on how to optimize app projects for speed and quality.
Streamlining Deployment and Post-Launch Updates
The work doesn’t end once apps launch – there are ongoing improvements and new features to build. SaaS project management empowers organizations to streamline these post-launch activities using similar principles of templates, workflows and visibility.
Some ways these tools assist with deployments and updates include:
- Deployment checklists: Ensure all required pre-launch steps are completed with defined owners
- Post-mortems: Document what went well (and poorly) during launches to improve
- Incident tracking: Log any post-deployment issues impeding users for rapid response
- Enhancement planning: Prioritize desired new features based on user feedback
- Release planning: Map out tasks, timelines and owners to develop future app updates
Apps need to go through versions continuously until they provide users with an experience that continually improves over time. App owners can consistently plan, build and release new functionality that their customers value most through structured processes.
Key Benefits of SaaS Project Management for App Dev Teams
To sum it up, SaaS project management has many benefits for the smooth running of app development:
- Accelerates app dev velocity through templates and workflows
- Enables real-time collaboration across distributed teams
- Provides visibility into progress and bottlenecks via reporting
- Integrates with existing software dev tools to minimize task-switching
- Leverages analytics to pinpoint and optimize constraints
- Facilitates structured post-launch deployment processes
Leading solutions, such as Asana, Jira, and Wrike, offer customizable tools tuned for software teams. SaaS delivered by the cloud enables organizations to quickly scale the capacity of app development.
Solutions for project management of SaaS speed up release cycles, reduce costs and provide better quality. Streamlined development via these platforms systematizes end-to-end app projects. It delivers compelling competitive advantages for drastically reducing development costs by coordinating contributors to both mobile and web apps, which are becoming critical for engagement and revenue. Optimization can be kickstarted for both customer-facing and internal business apps by evaluating options like Asana, Jira or Wrike.
Conclusion
Developing an app is a highly complex process that involves coordinating many interdependent activities among teams with different skill sets. If projects have no structure and no visibility, they easily fly over schedule and budgets.
SaaS project management tools like Asana, Jira and Wrike can help you implement the process of methodology and efficiency to build and launch an app faster. They have a set of Core capabilities, such as how you can create and customize templates, start and manage interactive workflows, share and store files in one place, track progress in real-time, take advantage of analytics to get insights and integrate with other dev tools.
SaaS project management helps organizations overcome late app deliverables and cost overruns. Mobile and web apps are the most important elements of businesses that are gaining popularity these days, and they greatly contribute to the differentiation in the competition for years. The option to evaluate apps such as Asana, Jira or Wrike is to start streamlining the app development.
