The Mobile Shift in Practice – Scaling Mobile Product Development

Today’s users take “Mobile” (in all its aspects) for granted and expect services to naturally work across touchpoints and wherever they chose to use them. For many larger product organizations who were used to providing primarily web based (desktop) products this is challenging. While being used to distributed web-development, continuous deployment etc. the (native) mobile activities of such organizations are typically centralized in dedicated mobile units. Such mobile units are prone to becoming bottlenecks and limit the likelihood of true cross-touchpoint thinking of products and services.

In this presentation I will share insights about how XING currently addresses this situation and which steps we are taking in order to move mobile thinking out of the silo and turn it into a natural aspect of product development.

We have identified 4 main components necessary to guide this change process: – establishing and growing the necessary staffing and skills in all teams, – guiding collaboration by means of a set of guidelines, tools and processes, – providing the right infrastructure to enable a distributed development of large native apps, – finding ways to make sure that all teams have a common understanding.

My presentation will provide a mix of general models for why and how to address this shift and first-hand experience of managing such a transition process for a large product organization.