FYI

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org Date: Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 6:24 PM Subject: First _draft_ goals for WMF engineering/product To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org, Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

Hi all,

We've got the first DRAFT (sorry for shouting, but can't hurt to emphasize :)) of the annual goals for the engineering/product department up on mediawiki.org. We're now mid-point in the process, and will finalize through June.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals

Note that at this point in the process, teams have flagged inter-dependencies, but they've not necessarily been taken into account across the board, i.e. team A may say "We depend on X from team B" and team B may not have sufficiently accounted for X in its goals. :P Identifying common themes, shared dependencies, and counteracting silo tendencies is the main focus of the coming weeks. We may also add whole new sections for cross-functional efforts not currently reflected (e.g. UX standardization). Site performance will likely get its own section as well.

My own focus will be on fleshing out the overall narrative, aligning around organization-wide objectives, and helping to manage scope.

As far as quantitative targets are concerned, we will aim to set them where we have solid baselines and some prior experience to work with (a good example is Wikipedia Zero, where we now have lots of data to build targets from). Otherwise, though, our goal should be to _obtain_ metrics that we want to track and build targets from. This, in itself, is a goal that needs to be reflected, including expectations e.g. from Analytics.

Like last year, these goals won't be set in stone. At least on a quarterly basis, we'll update them to reflect what we're learning. Some areas (e.g. scary new features like Flow) are more likely to be significantly revised than others.

With this in mind: Please leave any comments/questions on the talk page (not here). Collectively we're smarter than on our own, so we do appreciate honest feedback:

- What are our blind spots? Obvious, really high priority things we're not paying sufficient attention to?

- Where are we taking on too much? Which projects/goals make no sense to you and require a stronger rationale, if they're to be undertaken at all?

- Which projects are a Big Deal from a community perspective, or from an architecture perspective, and need to be carefully coordinated?

These are all conversations we'll have in coming weeks, but public feedback is very helpful and may trigger conversations that otherwise wouldn't happen.

Please also help to carry this conversation into the wikis in coming weeks. Again, this won't be the only opportunity to influence, and I'll be thinking more about how the quarterly review process can also account for community feedback.

Warmly,

Erik

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