Editor’s note: This article breaks down the roles in a mobile app development team, from project visionaries and designers to developers and QA specialists, and what helps such a team work well together. Specializing in software engineering for demanding industries, including healthcare, insurance and investment, ScienceSoft assembles fully mobile teams ready to take a project from concept to launch.
Back in the 2000s, even successful people from higher positions believed that, when you put together a mobile development team, there is absolutely no need to worry about the “mobile” aspect. One of Twitter’s executives Elad Gil mentioned in his article that neither developers nor project managers need to be mobile oriented to fit a great mobile project. Elad went so far as to align the app code with all other software code, which made the reasons for its lack of mobile capabilities much clearer.
Today it is obvious that every mobile app development project have to get specific attention from a skilled mobile app development team. Here we talk about the positions in such a team, the responsibilities and qualities of the perfect candidates, as well as the expectations of the potential employees of the company they would like to work with.
Effective mobile app development team structure
1. Visionary
Project manager, business consultant or strategist – the position has many names, almost as many as the responsibility it involves. Nevertheless, the Visionary combines various tasks under one term, which also captures the main function of the position: leading the entire project towards the vision of an ideal mobile app.
To do this, a person should have deep and diverse knowledge of the business industry targeted by the mobile project, as well as well-versed in management, development methodologies and mobile development. A visionary is also responsible for the consistency of the app and ensures that it meets the client’s requirements described in the specification documents.
Basically, a visionary is a responsible person who should:
- have a solid technical background,
- have a good understanding of the business line,
- Inspire, manage and lead human resources,
- have a high sense of responsibility,
- be good at multitasking.
2. Designer
Design implementation can only sound as a one-step work. In reality, mobile design experts must first work with documentation. After processing the requirements, the team develops the navigation mechanics of the app and creates basic wireframes. Then designers work on the look and feel of the app, replicating identical UI/UX for specific platforms or creating a stand-alone for hybrid apps.
A team of designers should consist of:
- Strategist
- Navigation planner
- Visual designer
- content planner
A design team is flexible in their development process. Often they prefer to work on the delivery of the UI / UX together with the test: they step back, let the users try out their current project, get their feedback and then discuss and make changes at each stage.
3. Developer
The job of the Android or iOS development team is to process the finished UI/UX layouts and implement them all in a real application. Developers should have experience working with a platform of choice in its languages:
- Java/Kotlin for Android
- Objective-C/Swift for iOS
Cross-platform mobile development requires other skills:
- HTML/CSS/JavaScript for PhoneGap and Cordova
- C# for Xamarin
- JavaScript for React Native
In addition to their technical experience, mobile engineers should also have some character traits that help them deliver projects. One of them is agility – the drive to quickly develop a solid foundation for an app and continue to improve it.
4. Quality assurance specialists
QA experts are the first and most critical audience of the final product. As they test a mobile app, they have the right to decide when the project is ready to be presented to the client or delivered to the market. But before they make this decision, they should show all the options for improvement and prove how these improvements are really necessary.
5. Sales and marketing specialists
All the efforts to deliver a product would be almost for nothing if not for the efforts of the sales and marketing team. Communicating with customers, working on a product brand and creating advertising material, sales and marketing experts turn the product into profit and consolidate the success of a great teamwork.
What a proactive mobile development team needs
Competency level compliance
An extremely talented mobile team is constantly looking for challenging tasks and projects. And while all members of the team are committed to doing high-quality work, they expect the same level of competence from their colleagues. For example, designers need a qualified project manager to provide them with a clearly articulated app concept and QA specialists who work closely with developers expect them to be professional and open to collaboration.
The complex structure of the mobile app development team itself implies that there is an established collaboration between its members. But what is more, a strictly regulated and controlled development process should be organized. Each sub-team must be informed about the entire project’s scale, explain what role they play in it and how it is related to the others, as well as be made aware of any important changes. Needless to say, there should be a balanced schedule with both big and small goals for a team to maintain.
Everyone in the team as well as people outside should understand that mobile development involves different steps of work and each of these steps requires specific skills, time and effort. No link of the development chain can mark their own part of the work as more difficult / important / time-consuming and screw up the schedule by taking more time to complete it. The same applies to customers: they should be informed that no step can be “speeded up” just because it sounds easier or less important to them.
On a final note
Involving multiple skills and consisting of multiple stages, mobile app development is certainly a complex process. Neglect of one of its parts means disregard for an entire project, and such an attitude often leads to flops. To make development successful, a mobile team should be highly experienced and diverse. But what is more important, all the experts who constantly lead the process forward are respected for all the effort they make in their part of the work.