Three Essential Roles Needed On Your App Team
You have an idea for an app or application, but not sure how to pull it off. Even if you are an amazing developer or engineer, the idea of handling the design mockups, the development, anything devops, and devsecops all together may concern you. Nevertheless you’ll need certain roles on your team if you are to be successful.
Your team and in particular the tech stack that your team is familiar with will vary depending on whether you are building a webapp, mobile app, or both. To start your search, start with starthawk.io and angel.co. If you have a promising project you are more likely to find people who are interested in hearing about your idea. These sites also tend to attract individuals who are already familiar with certain terminology like equity, performance bonus, cliff etc.
The Backend
A good backend is hard to find.
At the early stage, you are looking more for a generalist backend (not necessarily full stack). I refer to this as the full backend. Someone who can both build an API, and understands how to manage a Postgres, MariaDB or Mongo DB with and without relying on a managed solution . Depending on how complex of an application you are trying to build, and how quickly you are trying to get to market, two separate backends with complimentary skills may be needed. For example, one backend that focuses exclusively on data security, devsec ops, deployments, while the other backend focuses on building out the backend of the application.
In certain circumstances you may need to bring on a specialist. Let’s say someone who specializes in algorithms. From my experience, specialist are usually great in their area of expertise, but may not fully understand how the other parts of a system, platform, or technology fit together, which can be very detrimental if they are trying to manage multiple parts of your application.
The Product Manager
Great product managers are the ones that often take full responsibility of the success or in many cases the failure of a product. One of their main responsibilities is to provide substantial feedback to leadership through daily updates and status reports, ensuring everything is on time and on budget. Normally they are generalist when it comes to familiarity with different technologies and managing a team. In a pinch, this person could serve as an interim developer, but that role is not a long term fit for this position.
The perfect candidate will be able to manage very well and report on the progress being made on your platform. A product manager is usually essential to your app team and choosing the right candidate will be extremely important to your applications overall success. Good candidates will have managed several products from mockup to launch successfully and can show you example successes of products they have managed.
If your product manager understands backend architecture for example but does not know the first thing about front end design or the needs of a high end designer and how their work fits into the workflow and process specifically, then your application may be headed for trouble. Keep that in mind when you search to fill this role.
The front end designer
The front end designer is a unique and challenging role to hire for. Depending on the complexity of your application, you may need to break this role into a front end developer and a product designer. Some product designers are very comfortable with the mockup process all the way to building out the front end prototype. Others prefer to stick on the product design, focusing entirely on UX and UI.
In either circumstance, I find the best places to recruit designers are Behance or Dribble project. The front end designer will be fully responsible for your UX and UI — note the differences below.
If you decide to hire a separate designer and front end developer role, you may want to consider building your app in Flutter, a cross platform framework based on Dart for mobile, web, and desktop apps. There is also a growing dart, flutter and devops community here https://discord.gg/DASCuNJd.
While it’s not easy to find the perfect mix of talent to build your mobile application, hopefully the above tools and references will help you get a good head start.
Originally published at https://thestartupguy.dev.
