On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 12:54 PM Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
It has been a pleasure to work with someone from
Product who "gets" the
community and has taken feedback from the community seriously and used that
feedback to improve the experience for editors and readers. This can be a
big challenge, because I wouldn't exactly say the community is unified in
what they consider "improvements".
I think it's worth saying here that Toby did not innately "get" the
community (and I suspect the next hire won't either!) Instead, like truly
great product people, he had to spend a *lot* of time listening, and
questioning, and wondering, and yes... picking and choosing his battles :)
This listening and learning was, more than anything else, what I'll
remember about working with Toby - he was *constantly* trying to learn and
understand, both from practice (lots of time talking to Wikipedians and
parsing the data) and from theory (I lost count of the number of times he
said "I've been reading this book on [relevant topic] and it made me
think..."
Which is both to say: to everyone on this list, remember that those "big
shoes to fill" were not initially seen as big shoes. As with all the new
wave of leadership in the foundation, patience both ways is a virtue :) and
to Toby specifically: kudos to you, friend, for doing one of the hardest
jobs in the software industry and doing it well (and being a delightful
human being in the meantime even if you spend too much time thinking about
birds). You've left WMF and our software a much better place than you found
it.
Luis
Luis