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