Dear Wikimedians,
Today we had a meeting at the Foundation to announce changes in our Product and Engineering team structure. They represent the outcome of many conversations with people from across the Wikimedia community and within the Foundation. These changes will organize our teams around the needs of people they serve, and empower them to focus deeply on their audiences to deliver great outcomes.
We’re bringing together our Product and Engineering departments to form new audience teams, reporting to Damon Sicore, our VP of Engineering. We’re grouping core research, architecture, performance, and security functions together, and will begin the search for a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to lead our engineering future. And we’re integrating support for Community Engineering into the broader Community Engagement team. These changes are effective today.
Earlier this year we set out some goals for our work at the Foundation, described in our Call to Action https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/State_of_the_Wikimedia_Foundation#2015_Call_to_Action for 2015. These goals came out of conversations with you, and with Foundation staff. You’ll see that the first thing we identified was the need to improve our technology and execution. These goals focused on defining commitments, data-driven decision making, support for community engineering requests, and a commitment to engineering leadership.
The new changes reflect these commitments. We have organized our product engineering around six teams each with unique audiences. This includes a Community Tech team dedicated to supporting tools for core contributors, as well as teams for Editing, Reading, Search & Discovery, Infrastructure, and Fundraising Tech.
In particular, I wanted to share more about the plans for the Community Tech team. The creation of this team is a direct response to community requests for more technical support. Their mission is to understand and support the technical needs of core contributors, including improved support for expert-focused curation and moderation tools, bots, and other features. Their mandate is to work closely with you, and the Community Engagement department, to define their roadmap and deliverables. We are hiring for a leader for this team, as well as additional engineers. We will be looking within our communities to help. Until then, it will be incubated under Toby Negrin, with support from Community Engagement.
We’re also committed to our long-term technology future. A new CTO will support teams and functions dedicated to performance, architecture, security, privacy, structured data, user experience, and research. Their mandate is to keep Wikimedia fast, reliable, stable, and secure -- and to support the Engineering team in their development of excellent products and features.
You may notice there is no standalone Product department. We are moving away from a matrix management structure. Instead, product managers, designers, analysts, engineers, and others working together will report to the same manager, who will report through to the VP of Engineering. This is because we believe that everyone is responsible for user experience and each team is ultimately responsible for delivering on the product vision and a roadmap. It also gives teams ability to make decisions that are best for their audiences, based on their user’s feedback. This represents a maturation of our organization and processes, and will give each new teams more focus, dedicated focus, and more support.
I want to thank everyone who has worked so hard to bring this new structure together. Thank you to everyone in the community, for being thoughtful and honest with your needs, criticisms and encouragements. Thank you to our engineers, designers, researchers, and product managers, who have given us extensive feedback about what works best for you. Thank you to our new team managers and leads for stepping up into new roles. And thank you to Erik and Damon, who have worked closely for many months to make this happen.
You can find more information about this new structure, the new teams, their missions, and leadership, as well as other questions in a FAQ on Metawiki https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Engineering_reorganization_FAQ. We will update the Wikimedia Foundation site Staff page soon to reflect these new teams.
~~~~Lila
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