Enterprise Mobile - Dedicated mobile team or web teams with mobile expertise?
I am the mobile product owner (PO) at a firm with a dozen or so scrum teams each managing their own web products. My team builds mobile versions of the above web products. I work with each product owner to bring features of their web apps to our mobile platform picking and choosing features that make the most sense on mobile. We build native iOS and Android apps sharing the same backend API's each products web team created.
My firms long-term goal is to strive for mobile-first products and features that will eventually make their way into each web product. I am tasked with looking across all of the teams to determine if it still makes sense to have a single mobile scrum team in leu of each web team building both mobile and web versions of their products. Brining dedicated iOS and android developers to each web scrum team. That way each team controls their product from mobile to web. Their domain knowledge stays within the team vs the mobile team having to understand and keep up with each teams direction, quirks, priorities etc.
I feel it would be very difficult for each web team to manage the diversity of mobile challenges with consistent results. What are other firms doing? When a team owns a product does that team typically build mobile & web? or leave mobile (as we do) to a dedicated mobile team. Thoughts?
Thanks!
Problem you have is that you have several teams for web platforms and one team for porting those feature sets to mobile iOS and Android.
The question is they port one by one platforme or several at once ? if one by one then it may take long time to come to port platform X. If they do several at once focus and complexity is not on your side.
Are web products each unique or have similarities ?
Do you develop features in API or some kind of backend that is modular ?
Asking a few questions before I come up with an opinion.
- Is mobile really a separate product if all it does is replicate or introduce features that are also or will be part of the web based apps?
- Is the way the user accesses the functionality a product or is the functionality itself a product in the view of the company?
- Are the mobile apps intelligent or are they basically just another UI using APIs to a back end that does all of the processing?
- Would it benefit the organization and stakeholders to have the mobile and web based products combined and potentially deliver the same functionality in both options closer together time-wise?
If you answer these questions and still have concerns, post them here and I (and probably a lot of others) will help to clarify anything you need.
I am tasked with looking across all of the teams to determine if it still makes sense to have a single mobile scrum team in leu of each web team building both mobile and web versions of their products.
Firstly, what do the teams themselves think about this? How would they choose to self-organize for the best delivery of product value, where dependencies and potential impediments are minimized?
Secondly but no less importantly, how would Product Owners wish to release that value into the market? How can it be maximized? Should there be separate products per platform, or a single value stream?