I take over mobile products that have stopped moving.
For a year and a half I was one of five engineers building Shazam — the app that let you point a phone at a speaker and find out what was playing. The recognition engine was a black box to me. My work was everything around it: making something probabilistic and invisible feel instant and trustworthy to people who had never heard the word fingerprint.
That turns out to be good preparation for now, when a lot of companies have a model and no real idea how to put a product around it.
Two shapes of engagement
I am your mobile function
For companies with a real product and no senior mobile person, or two or three mobile engineers and nobody above them. Two or three days a week, owning the whole thing.
- Architecture and technical direction
- Release process and App Store relationship
- Hiring, mentoring and code review
- Roadmap you can actually ship
Something urgent and specific
An app that has stopped shipping, or was built by someone who is no longer around. I have done this repeatedly, including taking a full stack back from an offshore agency.
- Releases that keep failing App Store review
- Codebases nobody on the team understands
- Crash rates and performance regressions
- Extracting a product from an outside vendor
Twenty years of shipping, mostly solo or in small teams
Let’s start with a two-week look at what you have
Nobody should commit to six months of anything with someone they have not worked with. A fixed-price Mobile Health Check gets you a written assessment — architecture, release process, crash rate, App Store exposure, and what I would do about it, whether or not we carry on afterwards.