User:Keegan (WMF)/PDP/CL MX notes

The origins of this page are from a community liaison off-site in Mexico City, Mexico pre-Wikimania 2015. The purpose of the exercise was to identify the questions we ask of ourselves, product managers, communities, and/or other stakeholders in the WMF product development process.

PDP stages

Understand/Concept/Plan

What problem(s) is this intended to solve?
- For whom?
- Based on what evidence?
- When/timeline? (When do you want to start, and how long will you dedicate if this is successful?
- Did anyone request this?
Will this replace an existing tool?
Will this break anyone's workflow? To a significant extent?
What are the boundaries of tech support for edge-cases? (blind users of screenreaders, old browser compatibility, text-only feature-phones, etc)
What can be measured?
Has this been tried before, internally (staff or community)?
Are there industry standards around this?
Does this already exist in the outside world?
Will it scale? (both to small wikis, and to large wikis)
Will it add to editors' workload if it's a success?
What are the allocated resources? For how long?
Where are you documenting this?
Where are you discussing this with the communities?
Product name - Is it international? Is it unambiguous? Is it permanent? Has it been reviewed by comms? Is it the same in the code and in the docs? (c. naming things)
Is it local or global?
- Are you affecting people who are not your target? (e.g. French wiki research email, stewards and SWTF, etc)
  - If yes, can precautions be taken to not do so?
Have all appropriate WMF teams been consulted?
Define the product's individual definition of alpha/beta/release

Develop/Release/Maintain

Questions for Alpha/MVP stage

What is the minimal feature set for MVP?
Once deployed, What are the repercussions if it breaks for hours / days / weeks?
What is your criteria for moving to 'Beta'?
Have you gathered enough outside feedback? Where are you doing outreach/notifications?
Did you incorporate the feedback from the public ideation announcement?
Does it meet Risker's checklist? (cf. phab:126952)

Questions for the Beta stage

Alpha has told us this is the design and feature set we're going for, what are the Beta questions…?

What kinds of feedback are you looking for at this time?
Timing, evaluation, scenarios
Do you have a backup plan(s)? (will you roll it back?) - danger of some editors saying "it is never ready"
Are there any (predetermined, and potential) pivot options?
Are you going to do any A/B testing of beta iterations?
What is your criteria for moving to full-rollout, default for everyone?
Have you started your rollout plan?
What else is happening during your proposed deployment? (avoid Fridays, April 1, EU/US holidays, other major planned changes/breakages/deployments, etc)
Is your documentation internationalised/translated?

Stable release questions

How long do you plan to keep supporting this product? [How long will we CLs support it?]
Do the results from Research or A/B testing show that it does no harm, and support the product's release?
Do you have a backup plan?
Are all your major bugs ironed out?
Have the edge cases that need to be resolved, been agreed upon? (pick our battles)
Have you incorporated the feedback from beta?

Buckets or categories that might apply

Perhaps we need to break it into buckets?

longterm/shortterm
disruptive/not
one-time or continual
experimental
Really big disruptive products, like VE, Flow
One-time configuration change
community requested
design change
replacement of an existing product (feature parity issues)

Discussion and messaging tools

Tools like:

surveys
site notice (+ central/site/geo/watchlist notices)
blog
newsletters
village pumps
social media
notifications
tech/news (gets posted to many Villagepumps, but is very over-simplified)
phabricator (pub/pri)
talkpages (pub/pri)
email (pub/pri)
irc (pub/pri)
documentation (pub/pri)
meetings (pub/pri)