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

[Howie Fung]

Great question :).  I think the best way to answer is by example.

In addition to our mobile projects (which Erik referred to in his original
email), the Article Feedback Tool 5 project on the English Wikipedia
provides a good example of how the product group works [1].  The goal of
this project is to develop the next version of the feedback tool that is
currently on the bottom of articles on the English Wikipedia.  The basic
approach is to test a number of new feedback forms in order to see which
one is the best at engaging our reader community to help build the
encyclopedia [2].

In this project, Fabrice Florin is the Product Manager, responsible for
setting the overall direction for the project, as well as determining which
features to prioritize into which releases.  He does this in partnership
with a bunch of other folks, both at WMF and in our communities.  Oliver
Keyes, our Community Liaison, is responsible for reaching out to the
editing community and getting their input on key product decisions.  Oliver
has been holding weekly office hours  where we review the progress on the
project and get input from the community.  In this project, input from the
community consists not only of input on the designs, but also an evaluation
of the quality of feedback/comments left by readers.  To get a feel for
what is discussed during these office hours, please see the most recent one
at [3].  Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, provides design direction for the
project.  This includes helping the team understand user needs and how they
are met from a UX standpoint.  Dario Taraborelli, Senior Research Analyst,
provides the much needed analytical support for developing the feature (see
[4] for the dashboards he developed for the project).  The area where this
project differs from the ones WMF typically undertakes is that the actual
software development is done by an external vendor (OmniTi), vs. WMF staff
or volunteer developers.

In short, I would look for this type of general model when it comes to
product development -- a heavy emphasis on collaborating with the community
as well as analysis on how these features are performing.  One more thing
I'll also say is that, as Erik mentioned, we are using agile methodologies
for software development -- rapid iterations with quick feedback.  In many
of our features, we've been doing weekly to bi-weekly sprints.  We intend
to keep rapid cycle of deploy-measure-improve.

Howie

[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5
[2]
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/20/a-new-way-to-contribute-to-wikipedia/
[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2012-01-27
[4] http://toolserver.org/~dartar/

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 1:48 PM, Bod Notbod <bodnotbod at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 20:03, Howie Fung <hfung at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > If anyone has any questions about the product group (e.g., what to
> expect,
> > how it's organized, how we work with the community and other groups),
> > please drop me a line.
>
> I'm going to do the unforgivable... OK, what can we expect? :O)
>
> Bodnotbod
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>