Delivery at Mobimeo is related to the work needed to get our products shipped to the market. Our Delivery team works closely with the Product and Engineering teams that own the product vision and are responsible for all product development activities. This results in numerous tasks and responsibilities for the Delivery team: We help teams to be efficient, effective, and healthy. For all B2B customer projects, we foster collaboration and alignment among development teams, facilitate the determination of requirements, and identify and resolve impediments that block the teams’ progress. On a broader scale, we handle milestone planning, stakeholder management, and proactive risk management.
Overall, we are there to encourage a well-balanced approach to software quality and delivery speed. We design and implement processes and help build a healthy culture where we celebrate success, embrace failure, and encourage experimentation and innovation.
Typically, Delivery team members are well known for their close relationships with colleagues from all various disciplines within the company. In a single day, we might coordinate with product owners of different teams about prioritizing a key dependency, persuade a product designer to create some visual assets for one of the frontend engineers, track down a colleague in the marketing team to obtain a decision or approval, and deal with a dozen other similar roadblocks.
Currently, in terms of Mobimeo’s organizational structure, we are embedded in the Engineering department, and I report directly to our Chief Technical Officer (CTO). It allows us to be even more closely connected to the product development process and to drive initiatives that help improve the engineering experience.
To explain the requirements and challenges of Delivery management, I briefly want to focus on how our approach to Delivery differs from traditional project management. Projects are typically defined as temporary endeavours. We at Mobimeo view Delivery rather as a continuous process due to the nature of our digital products and our user-centric approach.
In this context, I would like to outline two major areas that we act on and that define our work and the challenges we solve every day:
On the one hand, together with our colleagues from Business Building, we constantly keep an eye on the market. Being part of the rapidly changing mobility industry, we must monitor the market and the market developments (e.g. new competitors, technologies or product features) closely for our MaaS products to stay up to date. We share the results and insights from our market observation with the respective teams.
On the other hand, we function as an interface to the MaaS ecosystem: MaaS products involve a multitude of players. As outlined by my colleagues in previous interviews of this series, we work closely together with public transport operators, cities, mobility service providers, and the users. For the development and the roll-out of our apps, the Delivery team builds a bridge between all these different players. Being in that interfacing role, we must include and bring together different points of view to deliver properly. And this is also how we to a large extent ensure the optimal conditions for the success of our products: They must be competitive to survive on the market and at the same time serve the demands of all stakeholders involved.
Simply put, without happy app users, our platform cannot succeed. Our product development approach is clearly user-centric and we put a high emphasis on user research and product analytics. Despite our B2B orientation, the platform and the apps need to be developed based on the needs of the users: Only if a lot of people use MaaS products, will their positive effect be noticeable. The users lead to new ideas that our products can address. We, therefore, involve beta tests early on in the process, invite the tester community to try out early versions of our apps and give feedback.
A very practical example of this is our engagement as one of the technology partners for Mobility inside (Mi). Mi is an industry initiative, enabling all public transport operators in Germany to provide their region with a high-performing multimodal app for public transport. We develop and deliver white-label apps for Mi, which in the first step reach 40 percent of the German population. Each app is configured according to regional requirements. However, the core of the apps is the same. The benefits of such a white-label approach are obvious: costs for development and operations are shared while improvements benefit all partners. Thanks to a scalable architecture and an easily adaptable design concept, additional customers can be won over easily. Overall, we enable large user bases to enjoy a tailored mobility experience.
The interviewee
Lisa Portmann has been with Mobimeo since the early days of the company. In her role as Delivery Lead, she shapes the approach and processes of the Delivery team. Together with her team, she makes sure that our MaaS products successfully enter the market.
