Create a Blended Team to Build Mobile Apps
Building iOS and Android apps with a single team
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To build expert, mobile apps, you need mobile experts — if you are developing an app for both iOS and Android, you need experts in both iOS and Android. The Rolls-Royce approach is to create a sub-team of iOS specialists and a sub-team of Android specialists, each responsible for their own platforms. But mobile experts are expensive and hard to recruit, so to achieve this, you need a big budget, and power in the recruitment market.
If you don’t have the Rolls-Royce budget and recruiting power, you might turn to a cross-platform technology, such as React Native or Flutter. You still need mobile experts to build expert, mobile apps, but you need fewer of them, and you can create a smaller team around a single codebase. However, whilst cross-platform technologies are sometimes the right choice for a project, they often aren’t — I’ve written about the advantages and disadvantages of cross-platform technologies on the Infinity Works knowledge base.
The good news is that there is another approach that lets you build expert, mobile apps for both iOS and Android, with a smaller team and fewer experts, whilst leveraging the benefits of native mobile development. This approach uses what I call a blended team.
What is a blended team?
A blended team is a single team, made up of a few mobile experts combined with T-shaped team members. All team members are responsible for development across both iOS and Android. It works because, although you need mobile experts to make expert mobile apps, not all tasks on the project need to be done by experts.
What are the benefits of a blended team?
The blended team approach has the following benefits:
- You can build native iOS and Android apps with a small team
- You minimise the number of mobile experts you need to recruit
- Domain knowledge is shared across both platforms
- The team is an effective engine for developing new mobile experts
- It’s popular with team members, who can grow their skills on different platforms whilst…
