How does your company think about mobile?

We see mobile as being central to our business, which is about building engaging sport experiences. You’re not going to go out for a run with your laptop, after all. Yet mobile works best in combination with the right mix of platforms for your experience. For example, you might use our app with Facebook Portal for a quick workout in your living room. 

We’ve undergone several phases during our growth, from delivering and maintaining more than 30 apps, to narrowing it down to just four accompanied by a web platform, to focusing on only two apps, adidas Running and adidas Training, following our acquisition by adidas in 2015.

—Christian Orgler, adidas Runtastic

Our native apps enable us to connect our users with interesting events around the globe, as well as deliver a more personalized and seamless experience by leveraging location information, notifications, digital wallets, and more. Mobile is our users’ preferred platform, demonstrated by substantial engagement, conversion, retention, and login rates. 

—Natalia Gatti, Eventbrite

Citymapper is all about helping people navigate cities, so we need to be deeply mobile. Features start mobile-first and are later adapted for the web. While we’re quick to adjust to new technologies, we usually don’t adopt new frameworks if they don’t provide a clear benefit to the user. And since not everyone can afford the latest device, we take pains to support old operating systems and keep our APIs backward compatible so a wider range of people can benefit from our service. Citymapper versions from five or six years ago still work!

—Jorge Cohen, Citymapper

How does mobile engineering fit into your company’s team structure?

Our product engineering teams are set up cross-functionally to include mobile, backend, and QA engineers, along with a product designer and manager. Inspired by the Spotify model, teams clustered together form “tribes” focused on our two apps or on overarching social experiences available in both. Our tribe leadership team, which consists of a principal designer and heads of product, marketing, and engineering, is responsible for the tribe’s success in connection to our company goals. 

This structure helps support team autonomy and creates a sense of belonging within the wider organization, but it can be challenging when dealing with features or requirements that can’t be worked on by one tribe in isolation, like single sign-on. We’re currently focused on reorienting tribe and team goals around experiences rather than a single app so we can benefit from this team structure while also becoming more app-independent and experience-led as an engineering organization.

—Christian Orgler, adidas Runtastic

Our mobile engineers sit on two teams, iOS and Android, which also include a dedicated product manager and product designer. The benefit of this structure is a greater focus on internal knowledge sharing and support, allowing for cross-pollination between the two apps as well as cross-team mentoring. The product team also benefits from this structure because it affords them a holistic view of each app. It does, however, require a high degree of collaboration and coordination with the feature teams that own backend services, which can lead to compromises and trade-offs in terms of coordinating releases and aligning on roadmaps. 

—Natalia Gatti, Eventbrite

All of our mobile engineers sit in one team, with a sub-team for each platform. Any engineer can work on any part of the app, which enables context sharing across different features and products. This also means we can be more flexible with priorities, since any engineer can jump on any task. Sometimes this makes project management harder when there are multiple high-priority project needs. When that happens, we may assign certain engineers to certain tasks or reevaluate our priorities.

In rare cases, we’ll build temporary feature teams to help us focus on a particularly challenging project or to jump-start a new product. We recently did this for our B2B SDKs. These teams are short-lived and are dissolved once we’ve tackled the challenge. We then share knowledge about the new feature across the rest of the team through documentation and internal talks.

—Jorge Cohen, Citymapper

How do you measure the performance of your mobile apps?

On a team level, we measure specific performance metrics tied to our experiences, such as how often our GPS tracking algorithms have to adjust accuracy and speed and remove outliers to compensate for hardware sensors. On an app level, we look at common metrics such as crash and application not responding (ANR) rates and spin them into user-focused metrics such as “annoyed user rate” and “crash-free user rate,” or categorize them based on when they happen for the user, for example during a run or while completing a workout. We also measure time to UI, startup speed, app size, and many more, including some crucial metrics for emerging markets, like cellular data usage and connection speed.

—Christian Orgler, adidas Runtastic

We monitor our crash-free user session rate with Sentry in order to maintain the stability of each app after a release, and we aim to keep that rate above 99.6 percent. For our iOS apps, we use MetricKit to monitor startup time and hang rate. For Android, we measure core vitals like ANR and crash rates in Google Play Console. Our focus is on preventing performance and network issues during traffic peaks.

—Natalia Gatti, Eventbrite

We primarily measure app start time using a custom-built tool. Engineers use the app daily, and we’ve found that getting annoyed at slow screens is the best way to motivate us to fix things. Our app is meant to be used underground, in the subway, with unreliable connectivity, so we optimize for less stable connections from the get-go, caching relevant data to make sure the app can operate offline. Our team also makes sure to keep old versions of the app running reliably, and we almost never deprecate old APIs.

—Jorge Cohen, Citymapper

What’s something unexpected or unique about your mobile development processes or workflows that you’ve found especially effective?

We’ve defined additional roles for engineers on our product development teams that offer opportunities to grow their leadership skills. For example, we have interest groups, called guilds, led by appointed guild leads, in which members exchange knowledge and learnings through weekly meetings and presentations. We also have a rotating set of release managers who collaborate and manage our two-week release cycle across development teams. Having dedicated release managers has made our release processes smoother and improved our ability to meet our target release dates. It’s become a foundational part of how we work.

—Christian Orgler, adidas Runtastic

Apple and Android products appear in different ratios around the world. As a global organization, understanding these variations helps us prioritize features and integrations, and gives us the freedom to develop for each platform and meet our customers where they are. For example, our point of sale and ticket scanning application for event organizers integrates with a number of third-party barcode scanners, card swipers, and ticket printers with varying availability worldwide. When we need to prioritize platform support for these peripherals, we may develop integrations based on the product-market fit of the mobile platform in the region we’re working to support.

—Natalia Gatti, Eventbrite

Many mobile apps have at least one screen with ad content that needs to change frequently, and Citymapper is no exception. To keep content up to date without involving developers, we use a custom Sketch plugin that allows our designers and product managers to build entire functional screens with no programming required. Moving to this system accelerated the rate of experimentation on messaging and design, and freed the mobile team to focus on higher-priority work. Our app currently has over 10 screens built with this tool.

—Jorge Cohen, Citymapper

Editor’s note: Christian Orgler left adidas in July 2021 to found his own company. His answers reflect his role as VP of product engineering at adidas Runtastic.