Growth/Annual Plan 2024-2025

The Growth team's work is guided by the Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan, and specifically the Product & Technology department's Objectives and Key Results. The Annual Plan relates to the Wikimedia Foundation's fiscal year, which starts on July 1 and ends on June 30 of the following year.

The Growth team expects that about half of our time will be devoted to annual planning priorities in the coming year, while the other half will be spent on technical maintenance and other essential work to support our actively and passively maintained projects.

Essential work

Actively Maintained Projects: We will continue to scale Structured Tasks (Add a link and Add an image), and support the GrowthExperiments extension and the Community Configuration extension. We will support other WMF teams and MediaWiki engineers interested in utilizing Community Configuration.
Passively Maintained Projects: The Growth team is currently the maintainer of many other extensions and features. Bugs and issues in these projects will only receive attention if the issue is urgent, affects a large number of users and needs to be unbroken immediately.
Temporary Accounts: The Growth team supports many extensions and features that may need further updates to accommodate Temporary Accounts.

First annual planning priority

Current full-page editing experiences require too much context, patience, and trial and error for many newcomers to contribute constructively. To support a new generation of volunteers, we will increase the number and availability of smaller, structured, and more task-specific editing workflows (E.g. Edit Check and Structured Tasks).

Key Result	Growth team hypothesis	Project details	Timeline
Wiki Experiences, Key Result 1.2 Constructive Activation: Widespread deployment of interventions shown to cause #% increase in the percentage of newcomers who publish ≥1 constructive edit in the main namespace on a mobile device, as measured by controlled experiments. Baselines to be established in T360829.	If we conduct user tests on two or more design prototypes introducing Structured Tasks to newcomers within/proximate to the Visual Editor, then we can quickly learn which designs will work best for new editors, while also enabling engineers to assess technical feasibility and estimate effort for each approach.	Constructive activation experimentation	Complete by the end of September 2024.

Second annual planning priority

To enable and accelerate data informed decision making about product feature development, product managers need an experimentation platform in which they can define features, select treatment audiences of users, and see measurements of impact. Speeding the time from launch to analysis is critical, as shortening the timeline for learning will accelerate experimentation, and ultimately, innovation.

Key Result	Growth team hypothesis	Project details	Timeline
Signals and Data Services, Key Result 2.1 By the end of Q2, Data Products can support 1 product team to evaluate a feature or product via basic A/B testing that reduces their time to user interaction data by 50%. Baselines to be established in T354779.	If the Growth team learns about the Metrics Platform by instrumenting a Homepage Module on the Metrics Platform, then we will be prepared to outline a measurement plan in Q1 and complete an A/B test on the new Metrics platform by the end of Q2.	Community Updates	Complete by the end of December 2024.

Next annual planning priority

Teams are approaching annual planning more iteratively this year, so rather than committing to larger year-long projects, our first two annual planning priorities should be complete before the end of 2024. This should allow teams to deliver value in smaller increments throughout the year, while also ensuring we have the flexibility to pivot as we learn more or discover other urgent priorities.

The Growth team will likely continue to focus on Wiki Experiences, Key Result 1.2, and pursue surfacing Structured Tasks to newcomers in new ways. It's also possible we will work on developing new types of structured tasks.

Research

The Growth team will work closely with the Editing team and the Research team to investigate new ways of developing Structured Tasks.

Key Result	Research team hypothesis	Project details	Timeline
Wiki Experiences, Key Result 1.2 Constructive Activation	If we train an LLM on detecting peacock behavior, then we can learn if it can detect this policy violation with at least >70% precision and >50% recall and ultimately, decide if said LLM is effective enough to power a new Edit Check and/or Suggested Edit.	🚧 Project page will be linked soon.	Complete by the end of September 2024.

Community discussion

Any project the Growth team pursues will include community consultations with Growth pilot wikis, and other impacted user groups. However, we also plan to share our Annual Plan ideas with communities to get initial feedback on our high-level plan. T361657