Transit Lines & TouchPoints: Engineering the Customer Journey
Caitlin Steele
09:30-10:30, Wednesday, 21st May 2025
What if we considered building native apps like urban planners think about transit systems? This talk explores how understanding your app's broader ecosystem transforms mobile development. While modern software teams excel at shipping features in rapid cycles, companies often underinvest in the correct type of planning, leading to mounting tech debt, slowing release cycles, and fragmented user experiences. We'll examine how design should influence our technical decisions and why thinking beyond the bundle creates more sustainable code. Discover how embracing a transit planner's perspective can help engineering teams build more cohesive experiences while maintaining velocity and morale.
Caitlin Steele
A seasoned design leader at GitLab, Caitlin brings over a decade of experience architecting seamless mobile experiences across complex digital ecosystems. As Trello's first dedicated mobile design leader at Atlassian, she shaped the company's cross-platform strategy. Her innovative approach to mobile strategy and designing across the device ecosystem has transformed major brands like lululemon, driving a 233% revenue increase for their mobile app over two years. Her expertise spans from startup innovation at MasterClass to enterprise-scale mobile optimization across iOS and Android platforms for Atlassian.