Stop Releasing off Your Laptop—Implementing a Mobile App Release Management Process from Scratch in a Startup or Small Company

You arrive at a new job ready to help a small company get mobile apps out the door quickly and with a high bar for quality. iOS builds are being shipped from one engineer's laptop, there's no automated QA to visualize release readiness, and branching for release building is an entirely manual, minimally documented procedure. What do you take on first, and how can you get to a scalable process with automated testing and a faster release cadence?

This describes my first day at Pinterest. In a former life, at Mozilla, with incredibly scaled infrastructure, telemetry, and process we were able to confidently ship high-quality builds across multiple platforms in the blink of an eye (or at least within 24 hours). With mobile apps, while there are external restrictions to how fast you can move on some platforms, there's a whole world of improvements that can be made to get release builds off of individual contributor computers and start building out automated releases, improving communications between Product and Engineering around what's in each version, and helping a company on a growth spurt build a release process that can scale.