Maturing Your Mobile Development Team

Part 1: Organizing and Evolving Your Development Efforts

By the start of 2011, mobile had grown within many companies to merit dedicated internal depart-
ments and focused development efforts. Both the value that mobile brings and the complexity inherent
in mobile development has driven this change, elevating internal mobile production teams to a level of
sophistication already comparable to their web counterparts. Further, in comparison to web, this
acceleration in sophistication has occurred over a much shorter time frame.

So what separates successful mobile teams from the rest? We’ve found over and over that the best
mobile teams adapt their strategies and team structures to the prodigious speed and breadth of
mobile. And while companies have been assembling in-house development teams for years, mobile
presents challenges not previously encountered in other forms of development.

The most productive and effective mobile teams are structured to account for:

Regular, frequent product iteration

Organizations have even less lead time to build for new technologies. Despite rapid
growth in all dimensions, the mobile industry is still nascent, and there is often little
precedent for how users will respond to a product. Gearing the team for frequent
iterations prepares companies to embrace the unknown.

Cross-functionality within teams

In mobile, product strategy, design, and development are intricately linked. Depart-
ments within a mobile team cannot operate as islands and must work together
throughout the product life cycle.

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Intro to the Mobile Maturity Model

In January 2011, IDC and Appcelerator released the Mobile Developer Report, a joint venture highlight-
ing important trends in mobile development. Among many other findings, they unearthed the following:

1. Companies go through distinct phases in adopting mobile technologies. The

three main stages can be categorized as Exploration, Acceleration, and Innovation.

2. Maturation is occurring quickly, with most companies entering the Acceleration

phase within roughly a year of commencing a mobile practice. From 2010 to 2011,
the study saw a growth in companies maturing to the Acceleration phase from
27% to 55% of the overall field.

3. Most companies are adopting a multi-platform approach that encompasses

tablets, smartphones, and multiple operating systems. In 2011, the average organi-
zation planned to create apps for four separate devices; in 2010, the figure was
just two.

4. The average number of apps developed by each company per year increased
from 2.3 in 2010 to 6.5 in 2011, an increase of 183%.

5. Many companies are insourcing their core web services development. This is
generally in alignment with the Create Once Publish Everywhere (COPE) strategy
that we advocate.

Where Companies Fall in the Mobile Maturity Model, 2010 vs. 2011

Exploration Acceleration Innovation

60 55%

50
44%

40

30 27%

20%
20 19%

9%
10
%
Getting Source: Appcelerator / IDC 1/2011
Started
2010 2011

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The darker side of these facts is that this expedited growth often brings with it a lot of scrambling to
get projects out the door. The result is a loss of oversight across departments and a lack of develop-
ment bandwidth that can drive projects over budget and out of the dedicated
timeline.

But companies ARE finding ways to absorb these growing pains. In our experience working alongside
CMOs, CIOs, Mobile Product Leads, and product managers across a variety of industries, it is those
with a clear team structure road map that find the most success.

The following three team structures cover each phase of the Maturity Model, laying out a blueprint for
building and expanding mobile teams capable of operating and excelling in mobile.

Exploration Stage Team Structure

Mobile Developer

Team Compostition
• All-around skilled Mobile Developer
• All-around UX and Visual Designer
• Project Manager • Pool of testers

The Exploration structure offers a low-risk entry into mobile development for companies looking to
produce simple apps with a minimal number of in-house team members.

The organizational structure associated with this stage is loose and incorporates only a few dedicated
company resources:

1. A designer and developer who are either a) a talented generalist with a variety of
mobile skills, or b) a specialist on the platform the company plans to start targeting.
2. A product manager who guides the project time lines and is accountable to the
company’s stakeholders.
3. A pool of company employees to carry out testing in lieu of a dedicated Quality
Assurance team.
This structure is inefficient for developing more than one or two apps at any given time, and lack of
experience across platforms limits your mobile initiative’s reach across multiple platforms. However, the
Exploration model is a low-risk way to set off a mobile initiative, and adding more employees or
outsourcing specialty needs can increase capacity.

The Exploration structure lacks the complexity necessary to facilitate a productive mobile environment,
but it serves as a foundation for a company to build upon as it moves through the next phase of
maturation.

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Acceleration Stage Team Structure

Team Compostition
• Design team led by director
• Development team led by director
• Project Managers • QA team led by director

Stage two - Acceleration - expands the number of projects a mobile team can handle and introduces
ways to share team resources across individual projects.

As more projects are introduced to the company’s pipeline, they will invariably exist at a variety of
different stages, and the availability of talent will also ebb and flow with the progress of projects. The
Acceleration model accommodates this by assembling employees into virtual teams with flexibility to
work across multiple projects, in different phases, all at once.

In contrast to the Experimental structure’s fixed teams, the Acceleration structure charges department
heads with managing their employee resources. PMs work with these departmental directors to
assemble a virtual team for each project according to employee availability at the time. If certain
projects appear to be particularly demanding over a long period of time, members can be peeled off
from each department to create a dedicated account team. At this level, enough applications are being
produced that a library of reusable code will begin to accumulate, greatly improving overall efficiency.

The Acceleration structure’s only weakness is its lack of cross-functionality. Because each team
member’s time is fully allocated, they are frequently unavailable to return to products in need of
revision. Few employees stay on for each of an app’s iterations, obstructing the evolution of those
apps and hindering the full practice of agile development.

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Innovation Stage Team Structure

Team Compostition • Development Dept. w/ Lead iOS,

• Design Dept. w/ Lead Visual Designer, Android, Blackberry, Server, etc.
User Research, User Experience, etc.
• QA Dept. w/ Unit Testing, Load Testing,
• Project Management Department Usability Testing, etc.

The Innovation phase is designed for large, oftentimes global, companies seeking to offer complete
shared services for departments requesting mobile products company-wide. This structure accommo-
dates all major platforms, with specialists to address each, and can handle the creation and long-term
management of a nearly-infinite number of projects.

These goals are made attainable by taking the concept of the small, specialized team and multiplying it
hundreds of times over.

Unlike the Acceleration structure’s departmental directors, Innovative organizations are more granular
and possess a director for each particular function. This iOS team, for instance, would consist of a lead
and two medium-grade engineers, with the understanding that these three members could cover all
necessary iOS skills including front and back end development, computation, and integration. This
model is then repeated not just with other mobile platforms, but throughout all of the organization’s
departments, including QA, UX, Visual Design, and others.

The Innovation structure comes with two main benefits not achieved in the previous structures:

1. Running Knowledge of Availability Each small, dedicated team operates with a

complete understanding of its availability. This allows for a considerable degree of
balance between projects, enabling each departmental unit to work on three to
four projects simultaneously while still possessing the flexibility to offer its time for
cross-functional purposes when needed

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 2. Incorporated Help Structure Should any individual team become overwhelmed,
it can easily gain assistance from one of its fellow teams. Because no department
team is over-saturated with projects, any unit can shift efforts to help when neces-
sary and quickly re-prioritize its own tasks. Through this method, problems can
easily be contained and absorbed by the whole.

Dynamic teams also offer the benefit of creating clear paths of advancement for the future. Pairing
junior and senior talent facilitates instant, side-by-side feedback and prepares junior staff members to
eventually lead their own teams.

Conclusion

Only 20% of companies currently operate at the Innovation phase, but if the Mobile Maturity Model
holds true, 2012 may see a much larger pool of companies ready to massively expand their mobile
efforts.

By structuring your mobile road map at the division’s inception and driving toward Innovation, you can
expand to more platforms, produce higher-quality apps, and reach a broader audience, all within a
shorter rollout cycle. A calculated development structure will also enable your organization to mature
beyond a reliance on outsourced expertise, trimming costs and enabling a prolonged and higher
degree of engagement with users. Establish clear intentions for your mobile initiative during its initial
phases and take charge of your company’s capabilities.