On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 11:56 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
It's been awhile since I've noticed a status update from the Growth that team through the EE list or this list. The Meta page implies that the Growth team disbanded on October 3. Is that true, and if so, does WMF still have a single person leading tech-based growth initiatives?
Yes, the Growth team was disbanded, and the engineers working on this team are now supporting Mobile (Rob Moen, Sam Smith) and Flow (Matt Flaschen). We'll be updating wiki pages as we go, but help is welcome.
Terry wrote a piratey blog post about his departure here: http://terrychay.com/article/fair-winds-and-godspeed-me-hearties.shtml
Also, who is PMming Winter?
Winter is a way for the UX team to prototype ideas, not a product. It's a useful way for us to experiment with ideas like the "right rail" concept for moving some structured info out of the main content area, and a fixed header.
We're discussing how we want to explore some of these ideas further. My bias right now is to look at this through a "mobile first" lens as much as possible, i.e. for completely new UI ideas to be validated on mobile before moving them all the way to desktop scale. This helps ensure that we're getting UI/UX patterns right for multiple device categories and capabilities from the start rather than handling mobile as an afterthought.
However, the current focus of the mobile web team is to increase contributions. To keep a high velocity of experiments, we're not currently doing anything major re: the above.
It would be helpful to have a unified high-level overview of the status, relationships, plans, strategic goals, and contacts for projects like:
Our focus has been to shift to and fully adopt the new quarterly prioritization that Lila has pushed for, and getting that piece right before everything else. This has included project leads for each priority, and more systematic resourcing/trade-off conversations to ensure that every project lead has the support they need. This page will continue to get further attention to flesh out metrics & deliverables: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals/Q2
Teams that are not mapped out here are being asked to revise their (remaining) Q2 roadmap on the overall goals page, here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals
The overall process is still running late and there's lots of context to be fleshed out -- since we're changing the cadence and nature of planning in pretty fundamental ways, it's not running like clockwork just yet. In addition, I am working on aligning the goalsetting, prioritization and review/reporting processes. This will likely mean a shift away from monthly status updates to quarterly (while over time, I'd like to have more user-centric updates like the VisualEditor newsletter and more consistent updates to Tech News).
Erik