Get to Know How Netguru Mobile App Development Team Works
Diversity of experience and knowledge are team's strengths, and how those working for Netguru enable to provide state-of-the-art solutions for clients. Here, you can find out more about our mobile app development team, the essential roles and how to achieve success.
What Is the Structure of a Mobile App Development Team?
Netguru’s mobile application development team is divided into iOS, Android, React Native (RN) and Flutter teams. The department is made up of almost 100 professionals with the biggest teams dedicated to iOS and Android. Flutter is the most recent side of the department and one, alongside RN, which is rapidly expanding.
App development team roles
Mobile app development professionals can pursue a leadership path or focus on expanding their expertise as a senior tech specialist. This includes a variety of different roles such as mobile manager, leaders, developers, and tech leads. Team leaders often offer their mobile app development teams a combination of expertise and leadership skills. This means their teams enjoy:
- Strong working relationships
Developers can enjoy strong and respectful relationships so they feel as if their contributions are valued.
- Support when needed
Team members should feel supported in their career roadmaps and acquisition of new skills and receive constructive feedback when needed.
- Connected with the wider business
Through managers, team members should feel engaged with the overall aims and objectives of the business.
Best team practice
Developers often engage in communication with our clients from the outset of a project. This helps ensure clients are part of the project journey and are aware when milestones or challenges are reached while offering developers greater project ownership. Usually, a team leader will help decide whether a project is suitable for a team member, if it can help them develop or if their skills and expertise can influence the direction of a team’s work.
Much of Netguru’s Mobile App Development team work is within fintech, healthcare, retail and education and aims to increase customer retention, enhance the user experience, reduce costs and optimize performance. We are currently engaged with around 40 projects. Some success stories include:
Artemest
Artemest is an Italian e-commerce site featuring a collection of curated home décor, jewellery, and lifestyle art created by top Italian artists. This virtual marketplace has made many hard to find and vintage items available online.
Shine
Shine is an app designed to enhance a user’s wellbeing by allowing them to practice gratitude, "check-in" for the day to deal with stress and prioritise wellbeing.
Shepper
Shepper is a software solution developed to enable on-demand checks and inspections on the status of any physical assets.
The benefits of working across different projects
Working across a range of different projects offers developers practical experience so they can expand their skills and knowledge. This includes:
- Greater project dynamics in relation to product companies.
- Working to core strengths and enjoying new development opportunities while remaining motivated.
- Faster acquisition of new skills through challenging projects.
- Enjoying experience within a variety of industries, and diversification in terms of clients and project size, from startups to large corporations.
What projects do developers work on?
There are several different types of projects mobile app development teams can be assigned to. They include:
Single developer project
This is the least common and usually only for clients requiring mobile development support. In these scenarios, the client is responsible for the ownership and management of the project so developers will report directly to them.
This might allow a developer to work with a developed product or a team that is already performing well. In most cases, the developer will join the client’s communication channels and collaborate closely with them. Netguru’s central team will offer support if any issues arise during the project.
Whole project team
The most common scenario is providing a team with overall project ownership. This means Netguru will provide mobile developers, QAs, backend developers, machine learning engineers and anyone else needed to meet the client’s requirements.
A Netguru project manager will lead the work with developers reporting directly to them. This type of project provides opportunities to collaborate between different areas of product development as well as developing consulting skills.
Whole product development
Sometimes, clients will hand over the entirety of the product decision making process and these are projects we always look to acquire. This creates a unique opportunity where the whole project can be grown with our team working as product creators as well as developers. Developers have the chance to enhance their business skills alongside any additional responsibilities.
Bench time
When not assigned any project work, then developers can enjoy ‘bench time’ where they can invest in developing new skills and researching topics.
If developers want to explore new frameworks or learn how to develop apps in a new stack like Flutter, then this is their opportunity. Netguru’s Research and Development Team guides others through this process and offers support when needed.
Being on the bench also means developers might be called into action in case of a client emergency. For example, if an app crashes when in the midst of production. This means they need to be flexible and proactive to respond to client needs when necessary.
Research and Development
The Research and Development (R&D) department’s goal is to solve client’s problems through defining and delivering R&D products. These are created from the consultation phase to the last innovation elements. Then, the team moves knowledge and projects to the delivery team for future development as a standard product.
Working on R&D projects enables a huge amount of innovation, the possibility of turning ideas into solutions, and ultimately leads to the creation of new products and procedures, which can be very satisfying.
Many mobile R&D projects and solutions have been created so far, and we are still working on further developments. Some examples include:
Click & Collect
React Native application where you can buy products and pick a place to collect them from.
Colin Sales Agent
Flutter application using chatbot for scoring leads by talking with a bot.
Kunster
Android application to create portals in a camera to change a picture’s style.
Baby Monitor (Android, iOS)
Mobile application to monitor your baby.
Parallax Header
Open source libraries in React Native.
Company initiatives
There are numerous initiatives at Netguru for developers to engage with and utilise to enhance their skill set and knowledge.
Every year, we organise the Burning Minds conference to bring together the Netguru community to share and exchange advice and insight around best practice and expertise.
We offer team and company retreats, internal webinars exploring work and the latest projects, and ‘Netguru After Hours’ sessions where invited guests talk about their experiences and careers.
Colleagues from different stacks manage various learning initiatives to enhance team member skill sets. These tech academies include Flutter Friday and R&D and exist to provide the practical knowledge of how to create basic apps in new mobile stacks.
Mobile Areas working group
These groups are set up to connect developers wanting to contribute to solving daily work problems as well as improve their and our collective knowledge in particular fields. These areas connect developers with six different groups so they can communicate and achieve common objectives. They aim to improve our daily work by sharing knowledge between stacks and ownership over common issues.
These areas are in people development, new technologies, knowledge sharing as well as supporting developers in their own personal research. These groups – in addition to Mobile R&D described above – include:
Mobile DevOps
This group aims to support and maintain the mobile developers’ tool kit. It also enables the external monitoring of projects.
Development Process Area
This group works to enhance the development process as a whole - so reviewing how we plan, the recommended architectures and how they approach the mobile testing of code.
Security
This group works on implementing best practices, tools and knowledge sharing of security across all teams.
Supporters
This team provides oversight to different departments and helps them find the problems before they grow and become too challenging to solve.
Recruitment
This group helps design certain parts of the recruitment process and contributes to technical and team-fit evaluation with a view to recruiting the best candidates for the most appropriate roles.
How careers progress
Netguru teams progress their careers via mentoring, knowledge sharing, education and a unique leadership formula. Each person in Netguru has their own career roadmap - clearly defined, led with the support of a leader at a pace that suits you. Official career paths exist to give developers a framework and reference point for their development such as with iOS and Android. However, Netguru also offers a second, less formalized development path that can be combined with the main path or separated at some stage.
Team members are encouraged to propose their own quarterly development goals themselves. Every quarter, the team receives face-to-face reviews and evaluations sessions with feedback from colleagues based on objectives. To support the team even more, everyone can use a team’s development budget or invest personal budget in online resources and e-books.
There is also a leadership development programme in place for team members looking to progress their careers into managerial roles. This 16-lesson course enables aspiring leaders to engage in training outside of coding and enable them to focus on their people and communication skills.
There are also personal development opportunities when on the bench.
While at Netguru, developers have the scope to take their careers in any direction they wish. For example, there are examples of team members moving from React Native to the Flutter team or from iOS Developer to Discovery Consultant.
The future of mobile app development
There are over 2.7 million apps on the Google Play store and over 2.2 million on the App store meaning there are plenty of opportunities for success within the mobile app development industry. Our team members are encouraged to take ownership for their work and develop their own careers in line with their passions and interests. If you’re interested in the latest tech and innovation and keen to work within an environment where you will be supported as a partner, then get in touch today.
