[Foundation-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Announcing Howie Fung as Director of Product Development

[Patricia Pena]

Congrats, Howie!

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 10:07 AM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> 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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>
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-- 
Pats Pena | Global Fundraising Operations Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
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