MOBILE RELEASE OPERATIONS & STRATEGY

Impact

• →Reduced production incidents by implementing disciplined release gates and multi-layer monitoring
• →Shipped 25+ releases with zero critical production failures
• →Established trusted partnerships with external charge point operators through reliable operations

The Challenge

Releasing a mobile app serving real users in the field (literally - charging their vehicles) is fundamentally different from web releases. Users can't easily roll back, they might be offline, and a bad release can impact revenue immediately. We also had multiple stakeholders (Product, Engineering, QA, external Charge Point Operators), different release cycles for iOS and Android, and complex production monitoring across multiple tools. Critical decisions like force-updates had to be made carefully - users in the field relying on the app meant every release carried real operational weight.

The Solution

I built a tiered release process with clear quality gates: RC builds had strict criteria, we coordinated readiness reviews with product and QA, and I owned the final submission and monitoring. On the technical side, our team took full ownership of the React Native shell and Micro Frontends architecture to ensure stability. For production monitoring, we used AWS CloudWatch logs, Firebase Analytics, and Grafana into a unified view so we could spot issues within minutes. When incidents occurred, I debugged across the full stack - coordinating with network teams on charge point availability, working with external CPOs on integration issues, and diving into backend logs when needed. For force-update decisions, I developed a principled framework that weighed user experience against critical fixes.

The Outcome

We shipped 25+ releases with zero critical production failures that impacted user charging. Production incident detection time dropped from days to minutes through proactive monitoring.