Reading/Retrospectives/2014-2015q4

Reading-wide successes

• Filling in for PM, team stepped up.
• Experimentation in 10% time and hackathon successfully contributing to quarters work and Q1 planning
• Engineers taking up PM work has helped keep things moving

Reading-wide misses

• Reorg uncertainty hurt velocity
• Loss of 2 PMs hurt velocity

Web Successes

• Gather
  • Built according to goal (share replaced by public feed)
  • Saw engagement numbers that surpassed our goals:
  • Generic infrastructure around lists re-used in browse prototype, and other types
• Wikigrok
  • Paused development
  • Identified and pushed 120 claims to Wikidata from WikiGrok using very conservative thresholds.
  • Used Wikigrok to move people to mobile web beta: now we can validate ideas in beta, more quickly and don’t need to move to stable (2k->43k daily adds, trailing back down, but folks don’t opt out)
• Built the Browse prototype in 2 weeks with a minimal number of bugs.
• Wikidata descriptors in search results will start rolling out Tuesday, 30th
• User testing has been very helpful (ad hoc, heuristic + planned live walk-throughs)
• Anonymous editing went live and seems to be succesful
• Worked with performance team to identify areas for speed improvement

App Successes

• Incorporated Design more fully into the Development Process
  • Begin a more collaborative product/design/engineer design process
  • Successfully prototyped link preview feature with design using new process
  • Formally integrated Design into the feature and bug signoff for users

iOS Successes

• Increased Performance of App
  • Improved load time of articles and general speed of navigating articles
  • Increased perceived performance of the app by improving UX
• Improved delivery process
  • Implemented and documented a comprehensive release process
  • Improved release cadence and tightened feedback loop (5 versions released during the quarter vs 1 release in the previous quarter)
  • Automated distribution of "nightly" builds
• • Increased unit test coverage by 30%
  • Automated running unit tests for builds before automated distribution
  • Shipped crash reporting, and used to fix 12 high volume crashing bugs that may have gone unresolved otherwise
  • Implemented Regression testing for all deployments to the app store
  • Took over ownership of Regression Testing scripts and have added 50 additional test cases (nearly a 100% increase)
  • Engaged customers via social media to identify and fix bugs
• Contributed to Open Source community
  • Multiple contributions to open source Continuous Integration/Deployment project (Fastlane)
  • Increased experimentation
  • Built 2 prototypes at Hackathon that are being scheduled for development in Q1

Android Successes

• Increased unique installs by more than 1.7 million (almost 15% total increase from the end of Q3). Largely due to PR, but owing to new features.
• Increased Play Store rating (from 4.36 to 4.39, and climbing)
• Continued to demonstrate ability of mobile apps to quickly prototype and deliver new features. (e.g. link previews)

Web Misses

• Did not ship
  • Lead images (beta, but not stable)
  • Browse prototype (not as early as we hoped)
  • Site speed (dashboards)
• (this impacted Q3 more than Q4) More support for minimizing friction on prototyping--getting extension on gerrit, project on phabricator, required to have documentation
• Had moderation communication flare ups with community--need to build bridges there.
• Nobody owns developer happiness--vagrant issues are an example here
• User feedback loops were slow
• Uncertainty around re-org and metrics hurt culture and velocity: we paused development on wikigrok and gather
• Passionate people (even within org) telling you you’re doing a bad job can bum you out
• Lost engineers to do PM work.

Misses Learning

• Lead images: We need to engage with the community (and the engineering community) before we start planning. We're more aware now of the cultural and technical problems around lead images (and the infobox).
• Browse: Regular review of our beta and stable features is required to stop small projects getting lost in noise, which requires more visibility.

App Misses

iOS Misses

• Failed to catch significant "data migration" bugs prior to release (which caused issues for many users and bad reviews)
• Failed to deliver link preview feature to end users
• Failed to ensure tickets are well defined prior to the beginning of sprints
• Failed to improve overall rating in app store
• Failed to significantly improve event logging (add search)
• Failed to increase developer confidence in making changes to the code base