Marie C. Cassandra

Last night, I kicked off 2013 for the Software Product Management Meetup group with a roundtable discussion I titled “2013: The Year of Mobile“. I was inspired by Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report and I was curious to hear from other product managers about where mobile is fitting into product roadmaps.

Sadly, the consensus in the group was that most companies are being very reactionary to the growth of mobile interfaces. Mobile strategy is usually an afterthought and not considered a core aspect of company strategy.

Of course, you can’t discuss mobile strategy without the “Responsive vs. Native App” debate. To  decide which route to go, you need to understand the context in which your customers are going to be engaging with your site. We tend to assume that when users are on their smartphones they are on-the-go. However, 60% of smartphone use is done at home! In a way, “mobile” is a becoming a bit of a misnomer.

One of the attendees (shout-out Urs!), said that he felt that smartphones are the first truly “personal computers”. He pointed out that we keep these devices next to us at all times and feel a sense of loss when we are separated from us- in a way, they have become an extension of ourselves.

If you are looking for more information on how people are interacting with devices, I highly recommend flipping through this deck “The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-platform Consumer Behavior” from Google’s research.