{"id":20,"date":"2010-12-28T15:41:00","date_gmt":"2010-12-28T13:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.lifshitz.net\/building-a-great-mobile-team-personal-thoughts"},"modified":"2014-11-17T16:09:03","modified_gmt":"2014-11-17T14:09:03","slug":"building-a-great-mobile-team-personal-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lifshitz.net\/?p=20","title":{"rendered":"Building a Great Mobile Team &#8211; Personal Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A while back I read a great blog post by Elad Gil who kick started Google&#8217;s Mobile efforts (see <a href=\"http:\/\/goo.gl\/xB6N4\">link<\/a> for the full post).<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/42591248@N05\/5300146032\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.lifshitz.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/12\/5300146032_8229e9318b_m.jpg\" height=\"240\" width=\"200\" alt=\"not-a-smartphone.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>In the past 1.5 years we built our own mobile group in SHC Israel, and while I can definitely relate to much of what the blog post describes, I will list here a few points where I view things differently.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<ul>  <\/p>\n<li><span style=\"color: #272727; line-height: 19px;\"><span style=\"font-family: 'Lucida Grande';\"><i>Hire great athletes; mobile &#8220;experts&#8221; will be useless in 6 months.<\/i><\/span><\/span><\/li>\n<p><\/ul>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"line-height: 19px;\">This is a very general saying, I&#8217;d even go further and say that if you find a &#8216;great athlete&#8217; &#8211; hire him. However, I believe we are now in a different environment than even 2-3 years ago, mostly because today there ARE mobile experts. As iPhone and Android are no more than 3 years young, obviously that time ago you couldn&#8217;t find any subject experts, and when you looked for &#8216;mobile people&#8217; your applicants usually had a not really relevant WAP experience at best or low-level cellular networks level in other cases. These days, if you can find people with 1-2 years of real iPhone experience or even better &#8211; who actually released something meaningful to the App Store, this could really help you boost your team level.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<ul>  <\/p>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; line-height: 19px;\"><i>Don&#8217;t hire mobile Product Managers.<\/i><\/span><\/li>\n<p><\/ul>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"line-height: 19px;\">Pretty much the same as above, a great Product Manager is hard to find &#8211; if you find an all-around great PM, chances are he&#8217;ll do a great job in the mobile area as well. Here&#8217;s the thing &#8211; I believe PMs need to &#8216;live&#8217; their product. If your PM is not an iPhone experienced user, the chances of him defining a great product are not promising. The relevance of real Product experience become more relevant as the mobile development industry matures, obviously.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<ul>  <\/p>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; line-height: 19px;\"><i>You must build for all platforms from day one.<\/i><\/span><\/li>\n<p><\/ul>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"line-height: 19px;\">I definitely agree that you shouldn&#8217;t spread yourself thin and develop on all platforms, especially if you have limited resources. There are &#8216;magic solutions&#8217; which supposedly let you build once and run on any device &#8211; I&#8217;m yet to see a good solution for that (it may run, but usability will be questionable in most cases. I&#8217;m not saying it&#8217;s not possible, I just didn&#8217;t see any). Choosing eitherAndroid or iPhone is, as the post says, a good bet. Personally, I think iPhone is a better bet as a start, if only because of Android&#8217;s fragmentation, both in the device types and deployed OSes. This may change (the starting point) in the future, though.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A while back I read a great blog post by Elad Gil who kick started Google&#8217;s Mobile efforts (see link for the full post). In the past 1.5 years we built our own mobile group in SHC Israel, and while I can definitely relate to much of what the blog post describes, I will list&hellip;&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11,10,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifshitz.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifshitz.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifshitz.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifshitz.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifshitz.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifshitz.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifshitz.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifshitz.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifshitz.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lifshitz.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}