Hello all,

I'm pleased to announce that Howie Fung, who has been supporting us as a consultant since October 2009, is joining the Wikimedia Foundation as Senior Product Manager. In the immediate future, Howie will continue to support the deployment of our user experience improvements, as well as the continuing development and deployment of the FlaggedRevs extension for the English Wikipedia. In the longer term, Howie will help us to build Wikimedia's product development roadmap by commissioning and assessing research and analytics, and by engaging in broad consultative processes.

Most recently, Howie was Senior Product Manager at Rhapsody, where he helped grow the music site's traffic five-fold within the the first year on the basis of extensive customer research, including web analytics, focus groups, user testing, and customer surveys. Prior to that, Howie was Product Manager at eBay, prioritizing features based on business objectives, usability studies, and economic impact. Howie has more than 15 years of experience in product management, business analysis and strategy, technology evaluation, and team incubation. He has an MBA from The Anderson School at UCLA and a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University.

As a consultant, Howie completed several key projects, including the survey of former contributors [1], the analysis of feedback from the user experience beta [2], and extensive analysis of the user interface, workflows and terminology used in the FlaggedRevs extension. He has also supported Wikimedia's five-year business planning process. We're very pleased that Howie is joining Wikimedia's permanent staff: please join me in welcoming him!

All best, Erik

[1] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Former_Contributors_Survey_Results [2] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Beta_Feedback_Survey