The 5 Myths Of Building A Great Mobile Team
December 11, 2010 at 12:19 PM EST
Editor's note : As the Web goes mobile, every Web company needs to build mobile products. Author Elad Gil , director of Geo at Twitter, has a lot of experience in that area. Way before selling his company Mixer Labs to Twitter last year , he kickstarted Google's mobile efforts back in 2004, when Google's mobile team "consisted of 1/4 of an engineer dedicated to maintaining an old WAP search server on the brink of collapse." Gil pulled Google's first mobile team together, recruited the first engineers, started discussions with carriers, and was involved in Google's early mobile acquisitions which set the stage for Google Mobile Maps and Android. In this guest post, he shares what he learned. In the early days of Google's mobile team, we needed to navigate a series of misunderstandings most people have about consumer mobile app development, and how to build a great consumer mobile team and product. Given the ridiculous growth of mobile today, many companies I know are trying to start their mobile divisions and they are making the same mistakes over and over. Similarly, many mobile consumer startups are making a series of common mistakes. This post draws on my experience building Google's early mobile team to point out how to overcome the myths people still believe about making super successful mobile applications.