Hello all,

It’s with great pleasure that I announce the promotion of Howie Fung to the position of Director of Product Development at the Wikimedia Foundation, effective February 1.

Howie joined us in October 2009 as a consultant for usability projects, and became a permanent staff member in May 2010. Prior to Wikimedia, 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.  He has an MBA from The Anderson School at UCLA and a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University.

I’m really proud of all the work Howie’s done for Wikimedia since he’s joined, calmly and rationally introducing method where there was madness, always challenging us to increase our understanding of our communities and to use our limited resources for the projects that are likely to have the highest impact. In addition to the work he’s done on the Usability Initiative, he’s worked on a variety of projects, including the Editor Trends Study, the Former Contributors Survey, the Article Feedback Tool, Moodbar, and the Feedback Dashboard.  We’re very lucky to have him in this new role.

This announcement also means that we’re formally establishing a Product Development department at Wikimedia, which is part of the larger Engineering department. Product, in our context, means really digging into what we want our projects to look like in a year, in two years, in three years, and working together with software developers and architects, as well as across Wikimedia, to make that vision a reality.  Our work will be organized along the following product areas: Editor Engagement, Mobile, Analytics, and Internationalization/Localization.

The following staff and contractors will be part of the Product group, going forward: Phil Chang, Brandon Harris, Fabrice Florin, Diederik van Liere, Siebrand Mazeland, Dario Taraborelli, Oliver Keyes, and the new Interaction Designer, when hired.

The Mobile team, which works on both mobile apps (such as the Wikipedia Android app) and the mobile web experience, is a good example of how this works in practice. It has Phil as a product owner (reporting to Howie), Tomasz as a scrum master and engineering director, and Patrick, Arthur, Max, and Yuvi as engineers (reporting to Tomasz). The team itself is the most important unit here: it drives the success of any given initiative. The connection into the Product Development group helps to ensure we follow a consistent strategy and coordinate efforts across the board. [1]

This is an important step in our organizational development and will help us parallelize and coordinate product and engineering work more effectively.

Please join me in congratulating Howie, and WMF. :-)

All best,

Erik

[1]  In case you’d like to learn more about agile product development and software engineering, this presentation is a good intro to scrum, a specific methodology we've started to use on a couple of teams: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/presentations/30-an-overview-of-scrum

-- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

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