Mobile engineering leaders share hard-won insights on career progression and proving value in tech

The mobile development landscape has matured dramatically, yet mobile engineers still face unique challenges when stepping into broader technology leadership roles. La Fosse recently brought together experienced mobile engineering leaders to discuss how they’ve navigated this transition and what advice they’d give to others looking to expand their influence beyond the mobile domain. 

Escaping the “mobile person” label

The conversation opened with a challenge familiar to many mobile engineers: being pigeonholed as “the mobile person” when aspiring to broader leadership roles. 

Neil Sheppard, Head of Mobile Engineering at Zopa, shared his approach: “One of the things that happened at Moonpig was I’d been a mobile guy for a few years, and my boss said, ‘you’re head of mobile, you’ve got two direct reports. It’s quite a small scope.’ So I said, ‘Okay, well, I need to increase my scope.'” 

His solution was proactive: volunteering to lead the company’s migration from data centre to AWS, despite having limited cloud experience. “It was never really about doing anything technical. When you get to that level of role, it’s more about orchestrating and making sure that people are unblocked,” Neil explained. 

This approach worked, leading to additional platform migration projects and eventually breaking free from the mobile-only perception. 

The mindset shift: from end of chain to orchestrator

Mobile engineers typically work at the end of the development chain, consuming APIs and rendering interfaces for end users. The transition to leadership requires a fundamental mindset shift. 

“With mobile, you tend to be at the end of the chain,” Neil explained. “But when you start to branch out from being mobile, you find that you’re no longer end of the chain.” 

The key insight emerged around expanding impact beyond the immediate mobile domain: “It might be a technical problem, might be a marketing problem, or it might be a process problem, whatever it might be, but really try to branch out to much wider impacts. The wider the impact, the more visible the work, the more valuable it is,” added Vesselin Iliev, Head of Engineering at N Brown Group. 

Building trust across teams

A crucial skill for mobile engineers transitioning to leadership is learning to trust and build relationships with other engineering teams. As Vesselin noted: “You don’t have to learn everything. What you have to learn as you grow is how you can trust and build economy, build ownership with other teams and other people.” 

This represents a shift from the mobile engineer’s tendency to want to understand every technical detail to focusing on enabling others and removing blockers across the entire technology stack. 

Advocating for mobile’s unique value

The discussion also addressed how to champion mobile development in organisations that might undervalue it. The advice was pragmatic and data-driven. 

“For me, it goes back to understanding what the business wants,” shared Greg Pugh, Head of Engineering at Bourne Leisure. “We can say we’re engineering-led teams, but we are business-led. Part of our roles as leaders is to understand what the business wants, what they drive towards, and then build the right products to support that.” 

The importance of data emerged as a key theme from Vesselin: “Show me the data. Is that an assumption that someone has, or is that real data?” He discovered that despite assumptions about their customer base being older and less mobile-oriented, “55% of traffic actually came through mobile devices,” with better return on investment than web. 

The mobile advantage: demonstrating what web can’t do

Mobile offers unique capabilities that web simply cannot match. As Greg put it: “Web development is so homogenised, so basic. It’s not woven into people’s lives in the way that mobile is woven into people’s lives.” 

The end-to-end experience mobile enables creates opportunities to demonstrate value: “That journey that was an email that dropped into their inbox, or was a push notification that took them to just the right place to do the thing and then triggered another journey, that is our unique mobile superpower,” he explained. 

Even simple features like haptics can make a powerful impression on leadership teams unfamiliar with mobile’s capabilities. 

Leadership lessons beyond mobile

The conversation revealed that many challenges faced by mobile engineers transitioning to leadership are universal leadership challenges, not mobile-specific ones. 

Key insights included: 

  • Intent matters: Understanding whether you actually want to move into leadership, or whether it’s happening by default, is crucial for success. 
  • Leverage existing experience: Most mobile engineers have broader technical backgrounds they can draw upon when demonstrating capability beyond mobile development. 
  • Look for growth opportunities: Actively seeking projects outside your immediate domain demonstrates ambition and capability to stakeholders. 
  • Focus on business impact: Understanding and aligning with business objectives is essential for any technical leadership role. 

 

The multiplier effect of good leadership

One of the most compelling points made was about the often invisible value that good technical leadership provides: “Somebody who’s caring about those individuals is multiplying the effectiveness of those individuals. Decisions are being made before they get to engineers, and some of those decisions are really, really stupid. If you can stop those happening, that’s the value you’re providing,” observed one of the panellists. 

This insight resonates beyond mobile engineering, highlighting how effective technical leaders shield their teams from poor decisions and enable them to focus on meaningful work. 

 

Moving forward

The mobile engineering community continues to mature, and with it, the career paths available to mobile engineers are expanding. The key is recognising that the skills developed in mobile engineering, combined with intentional efforts to broaden scope and demonstrate business impact, create strong foundations for technology leadership. 

As these leaders demonstrated, success comes not from abandoning mobile expertise, but from leveraging it as a springboard to broader influence and impact. 

La Fosse continues to bring together technology leaders across specialisms to share insights and support career progression. These conversations provide valuable peer learning opportunities for engineers at all stages of their leadership journey.