In mid-2014, members of my leadership team began working to grow revenue channels for the PhoneGap team, by working towards adding tools and services to the Adobe enterprise offerings.
Wishing to gauge level of interest and to gather leads for the enterprise sales team, I designed and implemented a microsite (then located at enterprise.phonegap.com) that was marketed through various channels.
Screenshot of microsite that I designed and implemented
After an astounding response, the likelihood of success of an enterprise offering and our team’s ability to execute on this initiative led the entire PhoneGap team reorganized to work on this new product offering. I was tasked with re-skinning a demo application that had been created as a part of the sales cycle.
The concept was loosely based on the existing “PhoneGap Developer” app that my team had built. The goal of the PhoneGap Enterprise app was to give users of an enterprise suite of applications the ability to preview apps that were stored in the cloud. The previews would viewed mostly by non-developers.
After being introduced to the development team implementing the app, I got my hands on the demo and worked to understand the intended offering, how it would work and what the benefit would be to users. The request was for me to simply “re-skin” the demo application, but in order to feel like I was providing value I dug into what the app was supposed to do, how it would work in the larger workflow, and worked with the product team to get these answers.
An early requirement was to use the developing concept for an Adobe design system, so I dug into both brand guidelines and the internal design system wiki before creating mock-ups.
The mock-ups I created showed each screen and component state, and I also put together a userflow diagram as a way of communicating effectively with a new and distributed development team. I also created a prototype, using Pixate, which dictated specifics of interaction and motion design.
As the app was being developed, I requested and want granted access to milestone builds in order to use the app on device and to record issues on the private issue tracker.
The PhoneGap Enterprise app was used as a part of the sales process and contributed to a number of enterprise software deals. This extended the reach of the PhoneGap offering, and was a revenue winner for our team. The desire for non-technical users to preview apps appeared to be desirable, so translating that feature to the PhoneGap Developer app by integrating with PhoneGap Build (our cloud-based compilation service) was the next experiment for the PhoneGap team.