Future Audiences/Roles and responsibilities

Future Audiences teams are comprised of the following roles, which are defined by their associated responsibilities.

Product Manager

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

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

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

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

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.