Future Audiences/Roles and responsibilities
Future Audiences teams are comprised of the following roles, which are defined by their associated responsibilities.
Product Manager
[edit]The product owner, in a nutshell, is ultimately responsible for the product or service to be delivered. The product owner is responsible for:
- Providing vision for the product or service being developed
- Being the single point of escalation for contending priorities among stakeholders
- Managing the product road map
- Making final decisions about trade-offs when desired functionality, or scope, exceeds the capacity of the team
- Defining the target constituent for iterations, releases, and the overall product
- Making final decision about whether or not work done on stories is complete ('acceptance').
- Doing the work of determining what features the team should work on in order to achieve our user, community, and Foundation goals. This is done in collaboration with the team
- Making sure that our products have a coherent, compelling user experience
Because the product owner has the final say over prioritization, there should be only one person acting as product owner.
Designer
[edit]The UX Designer defines how users will interact with the product. Responsibilities include:
- Gathering data to assess needs/requirements of users
- Proposing designs to define how users will interact with the functionality of the product (including designs of UX in general, and the product's interface in particular)
- Providing design expertise and guidance to engineers during code writing and testing
- Ensuring that the product is not only useful, but usable as well
- Assisting in narrative and user story development, particularly in the delivery of development-ready design assets and/or prototypes
- Leading usability testing and logging associated findings
Engineer
[edit]Engineers on Future Audiences write the code that makes our software work, but they also engage in a wide variety of code-adjacent work and conversations, including:
- Discussing and deciding software architecture
- Working with the Product Manager to define features
- Working with the UX Designer to discuss, refine, and implement designs
- Working with other engineers at the Foundation to make the best engineering decisions
- Working with the Data Analyst to instrument and obtain information
Data Analyst
[edit]The Data Analyst provides quantitatively-based user insights to inform decision-making. Responsibilities include:
- Helping set up instrumentation to collect useful data without harming user privacy
- Ensuring that data collected is high quality
- Extracting insights from the Foundation's data repositories
- Building dashboards and reports for tracking success and health metrics
- Assisting with design of experiments (A/B tests) and analyzing experiment results
Engineering Manager
[edit]Engineering Managers are ultimately the accountable parties for engineering decisions on a team. In addition, they support:
- Delivery: Helping to ship quality products to production.
- Engineering Strategy: Thinking long-term. Identifying future risks & opportunities.
- Product Partnership: Bridging product guidance and execution.
- Team Health: Building effective P+T teams. Ensuring effective team rituals.
- Technical Expertise: Specific domain expertise / technical skills.