FYI, for the sake of transparency; WMF engineering is kicking off its department-level goalsetting process and now is a good time to follow along. Some commitments have already been made for the purpose of the Annual Plan 2013-14 through team-level deliberation and are reflected as such, and some commitments are pre-existing (e.g. we'll need to continue to support Wikidata development on the WMF side; we're planning to ramp down the Tampa data-center), but a lot of details are open to being negotiated now, so feel free to add your thoughts on the talk page as well.
And in general, as noted below, we're aiming for a more flexible planning process that reflects a general desire to be able to continuously adapt our objectives to changing circumstances and opportunities. So, very little is set in stone and not open to being revisited through the course of the year. Cheers, Erik ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Erik Moeller <e...@wikimedia.org> Date: Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 3:56 PM Subject: Engineering/Product Goals for 2013-14 To: WMF Engineering/Product Dear all, as those of you who’ve worked on individual goals have seen, we’re only looking for focus areas and individual professional development goals through that part of the process. We’re aiming to separately develop a single goals document for all of engineering/product which breaks down planned team activity. It will live here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2013-14_Goals Important difference from last year: The template is much simpler. The idea is to provide a quarterly breakdown of planned activities plus a summary of the team and any dependencies on the rest of the organization. The reason for the simplicity is that we want to more explicitly iterate on this document through the year, so keeping it lightweight keeps the cost of change low. Your team can do this through quarterly review/planning cycles if you’re already following that model. The only area where iteration is harder are the specific commitments that we put in the Annual Plan. These apply to Mobile, Editor Engagement (E2 & E3) and Visual Editor, and the respective teams are already aware of the Annual Plan commitments, which are reasonably high level. If we do end up needing to change any of them, we’ll need to notify the Board of such changes. This also means that at this point you’re only making your best guess as to what you’re going to work on through the year, and you shouldn’t panic about the level of precision. Obviously some facts are known well ahead of time (e.g. ramping down the Tampa DC) while others are much harder to pin down (e.g. what exciting mobile feature will we be working on in April 2014). It’s the responsibility of product managers (where applicable), technical leads and engineering managers to organize the development of this document through June/July. I’d like to have a complete first version no later than end of July. This should give us plenty of time. I hope the lightweight approach and the built-in assumption of continuous iteration will make this feel minimally burdensome and more like part of your normal day-to-day work. Let me know if you have any questions :) Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
