Marketing and engineering need to collaborate for mobile app growth (event)

The Mobile Data Strategy roadshow is coming to San Francisco! How can you excel at data-driven marketing in a mobile-first world? Register for the event now. 

Marketing wants a product that does everything.

Engineering wants to deliver it on time and on budget.

Marketing still wants a product that does everything.

Sound familiar?

Do you see the disconnect? According to Adobe’s annual mobile maturity study, more than 89 percent of IT respondents claimed that mobile is IT’s responsibility — whereas nearly 50 percent of marketers said mobile belongs to them. Mobile growth is increasingly becoming a top priority for businesses in nearly every vertical. That means it’s also creating demand for faster, continuous development cycles that challenge traditional IT infrastructure and development methodologies.

Which is from Mars and which is from Venus?

Engineering is typically focused on the early stages of the app: “How will we develop and deliver a great app experience in a cost-effective way?”

Marketing still wants it to do everything.

VentureBeat’s research arm VB Insight has been thinking about, talking about, and deeply researching the enablement tools that power the mobile app economy’s unparalleled growth. We’re actively tracking how user engagement/retention, segmentation, targeted messaging, and audience development, acquisition, and engagement, as well as app monetization, have evolved over the past few years. It’s been a decidedly split conversation between marketers, developers, and a hybrid of the two.

Mobile isn’t dead, but your window of opportunity is shrinking

Some pundits tell a grim tale of the mobile app economy’s slowing opportunity. Consider the following: By some estimates, around 90 percent of a mobile user’s time spent on a device is in email, a preferred social network, and a messaging client. That’s potentially scary news for app developers and great news for mobile “enablers” — the engagement tools that help you grow your apps. But the forgotten stat in that equation is that time spent overall on mobile continues to climb. Mobile isn’t just replacing desktop. It’s the remote control for our lives. It helps us get crap done. That doesn’t make the opportunity any smaller — in fact, we’ve only just begun.

Mobile is rapidly maturing, and the window of opportunity for connecting with users at the critical moment of impact is shrinking.

It’s no longer about “which A/B test should I run” or “which segment should I optimize” — it’s how many tests can you run concurrently, and which tools will get me there without killing my app experience?

Whether marketing is from Mars and engineering is from Venus is beside the point. Sustained success in mobile growth happens when the two are orbiting one another.

I Sing the Body Electric … especially when my funnel is busted

If you’ve rapidly iterated on dozens of cohorts, A/B tested funnels, or sent triggered emails — then you’ve merged marketing and engineering in a very concrete way.

Have you tried testing new analytics solutions, or on-boarded millions of new users instantaneously? Have you thought about app personalization or actual UX/UI A/B testing and optimization? Mobile developers and marketers alike feel the pain of owning multiple platforms across multiple devices — all while trying to improve the app experience and improve user retention.

At the VentureBeat Mobile Data Strategy Roadshow, we’ll be exploring the right way to bridge the marketing and engineering gap through a mobile data strategy.