Verizon Ignite

Verizon had thousands of field salespeople with no way to see how they were doing until someone told them. Performance against target, and against the person standing at the next counter, lived in reports that arrived too late to change anything.

The complication was hardware. This had to run on whatever was in the salesperson's hand — any phone, any tablet, across two platforms and a long tail of handsets a retail workforce actually carries.

A Cordova application wrapping a shared HTML5 core, with native iOS and Android shells around it. One codebase, every handset, including the ones nobody would have written a native app for.

The screens are built around comparison rather than reporting: your scorecard against target, and a leaderboard putting you next to your peers by name.

I built several of the application views and the native iOS and Android plug-in components underneath them — the pieces integrating with Verizon's security applications and backend, which is exactly what a shared HTML5 core cannot do for you.

Cross-platform was the right call here and would be the wrong call for a lot of products. It wins when the surface is mostly data display on a fragmented device fleet, and it loses when the product lives or dies on feeling native. This was the first case.

The leaderboard was the part worth arguing about. Ranking people by name against their colleagues is a real decision with real effects on a sales floor, and it is also the reason anyone opened the app twice.

It went out to the whole floor sales organization. Every Verizon floor salesperson used it to track and compare performance.