Working with the mobile platform
The Mobile Platform and Feature teams work together to deliver high-quality, cohesive mobile experiences for Veterans in the VA Health and Benefits app. While the Mobile Platform team provides the core infrastructure, standards, and guardrails that ensure consistency and reliability, Feature teams bring deep expertise in their product areas and own the functionality they deliver. The table below outlines how these teams collaborate across the product development lifecycle and clarifies ownership and responsibilities at each stage.
| Area | Mobile Platform Team Responsibilities | Feature Team Responsibilities |
|---|---|---|
| Vision & Role | Provide foundation, guidance, and tools for cohesive native app experiences; ensure accessibility, performance, compliance, and design consistency; maintain core infrastructure, components, analytics, and developer tooling. | Serve as experts of their product domain and the features they own. |
| Product, Research & Design | Provide mobile-specific design support, component library, standards, and IA guidance. Offer structured design feedback through design intent, design reviews, critiques, and final sign-off. Coordinate with Platform Governance for consistent feedback. | Own feature research and design, or collaborate with the responsible product team. |
| Engineering | Review and QA all PRs and release candidate branches. Collaborate early on backend logic and architecture. Handle only critical (sev-1) hotfixes. | Engage early with Mobile team. Identify error states, use cases, and test data. Submit PRs in functional chunks. Resolve bugs related to their features. |
| Analytics | Provide documentation on built-in analytics and data access. | Review standard analytics and request additional tracking. Own post-release tracking and adjustments for feature-specific analytics. |
| Monitoring | Provide documentation on standard monitoring and dashboards. Maintain core monitoring for the app. | Identify critical incidents affecting Veterans. Share API dependencies, schema changes, maintenance windows, and outages. Request feature-specific monitoring and own post-release monitoring beyond core platform monitors. |
| Release | Set release timelines. Own all release processes and QA of PRs and release candidates. Provide access to TestFlight/App Tester. | Participate in testing. Provide screenshots, descriptions, what's-new updates, release notes, and content for product guides. |
| Support | Offer routine office hours and communicate major global incidents in #va-mobile-app. | Engage Mobile team as needed for support. |