Hello, Thanks to everyone who sent me their congratulations and best wishes. I'm excited to be taking on this role. Thanks also to Jono for his work over the past two years in bringing us to this point.
So, where do I want to take Launchpad? I have four broad aims: * Win projects and mindshare: Launchpad should be the obvious choice for hosting a free software project and people using Launchpad should be enthused to talk about what a great experience it provides. * Make Launchpad a joy to use: all those usability issues we already know about, they've no place in Launchpad. Similarly, the new features we develop should be relentlessly focused on making life better for the people who use them. * Get social: we should learn from social networks and build on those ideas that can help people get more out of Launchpad. * Get commercial: I mean two things by this. First, we should give the same care and level of polish to Launchpad as if we were producing a software application that we were selling. My second meaning is pretty straightforward: whether it's as part of one of Canonical's partnerships or through our direct commercial subscriptions, we should make it easier and more rewarding to use Launchpad commercially. Why have I chosen to focus on these? I think they'll help us to fulfill the ambitions we have for Launchpad, primarily: * to make it easy and fun for people to work on free software * to accelerate the development of software for Ubuntu * to help Canonical make software. I want to get there by changing the way that we work and by introducing new features to Launchpad. For the things we choose to work on, it means: * We're going to make Launchpad the best place to host, review and find code: our code review was ground-breaking when we launched it. We can lead again. Other sites have in-line code commenting. Great, we can have that but we can also make it so someone reviewing a branch can click a button and fire up that branch in the cloud so they can review it without even running it locally. Before any of that, though, we need to make it trivially easy to get code into Launchpad. * We're going to improve our Git support: whether it's by directly supporting Git hosting alongside our existing Bazaar provision or by providing a seamless interface between Git and Bazaar on LP. Making it easier to use Git with Launchpad will help us to bring more projects to Launchpad and will aid our colleagues in Canonical. * We're going to integrate UbuntuPay and make commercial subscriptions rock: buying and operating a commercial subscription to Launchpad should be hands-off, from the Launchpad team's point of view, and a joy from that of the customer. We'll introduce new payment plans, with monthly payment options. * Glossaries and a re-thought UI for Translations: Launchpad Translations is an amazing success story. However, there is work to do. When Huw returns from leave, we'll work with different translation teams to better understand their workflows and how Launchpad should cater to them. We'll also look at glossaries and submitting translations upstream. * One issue tracker to rule them all: we're going to merge the bug and blueprint trackers, as we had planned, and also ask what should happen to Answers. Should it be another face to our combined issue tracker or do we even need an Answers tracker? * After the re-brand, the re-design: the Product team will be cataloguing all the usability problems in Launchpad. We will then propose fixes to those problems and, once we've moved our focus from critical bugs, Huw and the maintenance squads will work together to implement those fixes. Generally, we'll make it easier to get started with Launchpad and we'll gear Launchpad around the goals that people have. There's a lot of work here and some, such as the new code-hoster story, will require Feature cards. * Derived distros for everyone: anyone should be able to create a derived distribution, using PPAs to host packages peculiar to that new distro. For how we work, it means: * Interaction design happens before implementation begins: in the weeks before a feature squad starts on a new feature, the Product team will work with the squad lead to start work on designing the interaction and UI for that feature. Once implementation begins, the Product team will continue to work with those squad members who enjoy UI work on designing whichever deliverable comes next. * We'll expand our user research: our Stakeholder board will stay pretty much the same but I'm going to introduce a more formal route for non-Stakeholder members to request features and give us other types of feedback. As you can see, what I'm proposing involves a lot of work and I'll work with Francis to make sure we can get these things done as well as fulfilling the various stakeholder requests that come to us. Soon, I'll be recruiting someone who'll take over user research for Launchpad and also look after many of the communications things I did in my previous role. We have an exciting and important role to play, not only in the futures of Ubuntu and Canonical but also free software generally. I look forward to your comments/questions/etc on what I'm proposing! Thanks :) -- Matthew Revell Launchpad Product Manager Canonical https://launchpad.net/~matthew.revell _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev Post to : launchpad-dev@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
