Contributors/FY2016 Retrospectives/Multimedia

Ground Rules

• Conversation this hour is confidential within the group
• Written notes to be published to Editing and to general public after a review pass
• Purpose of Retrospective
• Format
  • What did we accomplish last year?
  • What was great about the way we worked, or the org, or anything else job-related?
  • What was not great about the way we worked, or the org, or anything else job-related?
• Incorporation of Team Retro outputs
• Review key events and results over the time period
• Add a +1 to any “important” items by including your initials
• Heavily upvoted items will be percolated up for larger department discussion; notes contained here will stay as-is and confidential to team

Identify things that went well and should be preserved

• Team
  • Kept the team together through a time of tremendous organizational strife
  • Acquired a new manager (yay)
    • Acquired a new team member (not this FY)
  • [JF][PS] Held a team offsite
  • [MH][PS] Team stand-up process enacted/improved
• [MH][JF][BD][LA] Ability to quickly respond to critical issues (production and community)
  • We were able to get urgent/important things done, alongside the goals (see below)
• Achieved most of our quarterly goals
  • Q1: In-VE/WT uploading inc. drag-and-drop
  • Q2: UploadWizard bug fixes, modernisation and OOUI conversion; and prototyped image editing (but not yet deployed)
  • [MH] Q3: Gathered some key top-line metrics for the first time(!) like how many unique uploaders per month
  • Q4: New gallery type
• [MH][BD] Able to cope without Community Liaison support as most of our product work is with just one community (Commons)

Identify things that should be changed

• [LA][PS] Limited Resources + Constant Fires = :-(
  • We can’t really accomplish set goals for a three-person dev team which is mostly busy responding to on-coming issues
  • Matthias’ presence as 4th developer will likely help, but won't solve
  • Firefighting can be exhausting, but also risk of burnout and unhappiness when not as much concrete production results despite a lot of effort
• [MH][PS][LA] Lack of user testing, design research before we deployed cross-wiki uploads
  • Even though we did a soft launch by not advertising the feature much, the launch was not soft enough to not cause problems at Commons
  • The feature was "too" successful, and we didn’t have “required secondary features” like proper AbuseFilter support for uploads lined up to take the strain
• Lack of community support and resources (compared to history and also rest of org at present)
  • Very few community developers around working on our area
• [MH][BD] We still have almost no way to notice things going wrong automatically, before they’re reported by users (BD has some SQL queries and an Excel sheet…)
• [JF] Sometimes confusing to have "goals" that are about changing/new things, and not the "most important" things like keeping production up/running
  • Also++ the goals are thrown together and may or may not be in line with grander organisational strategy, which makes for a confusing dichotomy
• [MH][JF][LA] Lack of broader organisational/movement strategy makes it hard to work out what the direction for MM should be
  • "Mobile" – OK, so what bit of it? Videos? Voice memos? Text-to-speech? Playback or upload? Editing or capture? All?
  • "Interactive" – For whom? Don't we care about low bandwidth/non-JS/etc. users too?
• [MH][BD][LA] Available Product Manager support is low
  • ~10% of James's time; might not be enough, though we seem to cope-ish(?)
• [JF][PS][BD] Team has very little knowledge about upload backend (we’re mostly frontend, maybe except for Mark) (whoa, don’t put that on me  —Mark)
• Was working on ImageTweaks even a good idea, with Thumbor still not being deployed. Lack of foresight?
  • Mark: while it won’t be deployed yet, it is ready except for the one blocker, so the same amount of time would have been spent either way
    • Prateek: Makes sense, we can get rid of this
      • James: Eh, leave it. :-)
        • Mark: Definitely leave in the five sub-items of meta-discussion for sure
• [JF] The two daily stand-ups, though good, …
  • are at wide apart hours (which means Mark has to work ~10 hours a day), and
  • … the afternoon one conflicts with the SWAT in which urgent things normally get deployed (new hours will 'soon' be 06:00/11:00/16:00 SF)
  • Maybe move to 08:00 & 15:00 SF for saner hours and less clashing?
    • Does that work for people?

Discuss top items, including Actions

Yays:

• Ability to quickly respond to critical issues (production and community); we were able to get urgent/important things done, alongside the goals (see below)

Nays:

• Lack of broader organisational/movement strategy makes it hard to work out what the direction for MM should be
• Available Product Manager support is low
• Team has very little knowledge about upload backend (we’re mostly frontend)

Next Steps

• Action items for team
  • Consider moving stand-ups (to 08:00 and 15:00 SF)? Or keep them the same. Or don't.
  • Consider adopting a weekly "triage" meeting where James decides to accept or back-burner tasks against a pre-agreed priority list, and people petition us to change our minds. Or don't.
• Action items for department
• Read other retros
• Followup