Meeting Notes/2016-01-22 Strategy planning

Agenda

Introducing the approach we'll use for overall Product strategy planning
1. Description of Playing to Win
2. Specific Sequence of Deliverables
3. In context of Schedule
Questions and discussion about approach
1. Forum for notes - Mediawiki, etherpad, etc?
2. How aggressively are we timeboxing strategy?
  1. What is the minimim quality of acceptable strategy? (that, if we don't reach in time, we would rather take longer and delay things than proceed without)
    1. What are we using this for? What decisions will be made, by whom, when, based on the Strategy document?
How we can track our progress?
Starting to identify the strategic problem:
1. https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/2016_Product_Team_Strategy

Notes

Present: Joel A., Dan G., Toby, Tomasz, Wes, Katie, Trevor, Anne, James F.

Use etherpad during meeting; public notes to be posted on MediaWiki.org after review.
Scope
- Wes: This is meant to be an 18 month strategy, done alongside the WMF-wide one that's on-going right now, and feeding into the annual planning process.
- Plan to iterate and re-use in the future.

What are we going to use this for?

Dan: To help decide which quarterly goals my teams should and shouldn't work on; if it doesn't help, it's useless.
Tomasz: + budget planning, strategic narratives
Toby: Inspire internally and communicate generally
Katie: I don't know. Fundraising tech isn't so much about serving users as enabling the rest of you to continue. I don't see those methods changing substantially.
Anne: For FR we follow traffic more than other things, so it would be useful to know if the traffic approach is going to change substantially.
Trevor: Guide for what we want to be doing a bit further out than one quarter. Longer-term planning is what I want. "what we want to be doing" -> know where we're going
James: to not have too much/heavy of a strategy, as small an amount that is helpful but not so much that we are forced to make the quarterly decisions we don't want to make. Have seen strategies in the past where we are tied to the mast. Shouldn't be ship dates of software, should be direction of focus that is falsifiable.
- Dan: five lines might be enough
Wes: As a Group, we have a rallying point, a way of articulating what we are doing in a simple way to the rest of the organisation, and beyond the organisation, to everyone anywhere.
Toby: Should provide a lens towards picking goals, but if it's so specific to do that then it's too detailed.
Tomasz: Guidance not definition.

What is the minimum quality of acceptable strategy?

Tomasz: Given the 18 month timeline we'll be talking over budget times, so we need to speak to it.
Joel: "Informs quarterly goal choices and helps prioritise budget"?
Toby: Quality on one dimension may be enough; may not have enough time to do the research that we need, strategy may not be fine-grained enough. May not have the time to verify our assumptions. Likely outcome is that the strategy leads us to do more work on a strategy.
Joel: Testable? Tested? Tested and passed?
Anne: Takes a lot of time to do testing. There won't be time with time-boxing given the needed timeline.

Process preview

Joel talked the team briefly though the "Play To Win" strategy process. (See Playing to Win Process Milestones and Playing to Win Cascade Template.)

Status quo cascade

Completed https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Fa95niB5KtaezR9HC8ICDeGx3uf-qQ-YaPl_SCHQdjE/edit
What was the (implicit?) question our status-quo strategy was answering?
- Lack of focus on users
- Inability to co-ordinate between functions
- (Other answers)
- [Toby] - Reduced impact due to stagnation of our existing editor and reader communities
- [Trevor] We don't have a long-term objective we are working toward.
- [Trevor] Decreasing relevancy due to the way our content is captured, navigated and presented (antiquated formats and interfaces)
- [Tomasz] - Our users no longer feel compelled to visit our projects even though they trust our content and brand
- [Toby] We lack an internal framework and culture of collaborative decision-making
- [Toby] The Internet is changing and we are not able to change ourselves (values, presentation, users)
- [Anne] Decrease in (desktop) traffic reduces our ability to engage contributors (both donors and editors). This hurts sustainability of the Foundation and projects.

Brainstorm strategic problem

What is the most pressing problem for WMF's Product Group?

clarifications: Not for WMF. not for WMF's products. Not for Wikipedia. For the Product Group and the people in it (organisational challenges).

Pre-meeting answers:

[Katie] - Missing overall organisational strategy, for a stable context to operate within. We can all come up with our own strategy before that exists / is agreed upon, and agree with each other to the fullest possible extent. But, necessary though this may be, that will definitely cause problems when the overall strategy lands (mostly in the form of wasted time, and wasted team effort increasing with the duration of the mismatch). I know this answer probably makes it look like I didn't read the clarifications, but this overall WMF issue seems like it's going to become a very personal problem for everyone when all the teams try to do this backwards. If this is not a suitable answer for your purposes, let's go with "morale".
[James] - Reconciling the desire for consistency of approach and openness with the adherence to the low-overhead, team-centred agile methodologies we've successfully used as teams for a decade.

Group discussion

[This section includes both the original notes from the meeting and ongoing updates from participants in the days following the meeting. We divided the possible answers into three areas of focus to uncover more possibilities, although the final strategic problem selected must be focused on the Product Group.]

[User-focussed] What is the most pressing problem for Wikipedia/our products/our users?

not reaching the whole world?
ACTION: Tomasz, James, Toby to be primarily responsible for extending this section
How can Wikipedia (i.e.…the editors and WMF in supporting them)…
- [editor mix]
  - … continue to retain its existing content contributors in ways compatible with its ethos and aspirations?
  - … improve the quality of content by attracting and retaining additional content contributors such as to have a proportionately diverse contributor base with the audience?
  - … improve the quality of content by attracting and retaining additional content contributors who are subject matter experts, especially in non-technical fields?
  - … improve the quality of content by attracting and retaining many more content contributors in ways that extend its culture to be more welcoming and embracing?
  - … improve the engagement of editors, empowering content contributors to engage with third party civil society organisations like NGOs, GLAMs or news organisations to join the movement?
- [discovery & re-mix type]
  - … improve the experience for readers by making the provenance and reliability of claims within articles easy to see, track and validate?
  - … maintain and increase the experience for readers in the relevance and value of the content to their daily lives?
  - … provide its content in forms, formats and pieces that are the desired ‘shape’ for readers to consume and distributors to cascade?
  - … improve the value for readers by driving up the quality of content coverage and its visibility?
  - … surface the high quality content and drive readership to its sibling projects?
  - … diversify its knowledge representation beyond text-based knowledge through charts, maps, and other rich media?
- [reader delight]
  - … expand its reader base to reach the whole world?
  - … support and encourage the wider sharing and socialisation of its content through its readers and distributors?
  - … evolve the site, aligned with existing expectations, to avoid reader alienation from being too fusty, old-fashioned, out-of-date or irrelevant as wider trends on the Web alter expectations?
  - … convince its users to click through on a Google/Bing/… search result, and not just read Knowledge Box?

[Foundation-scale] What is the most pressing problem for WMF?

ACTION: Trevor, Anne, Wes meet 1/27/16
Larger organizational issues that are out of our (the member's of this group) hands
- Fewer users coming to desktop and mobile == impact on sustainability of WMF via fundraising, editing, & brand/comms/etc.
  - Organization is very expensive (staff is large), so we have to follow wealth in product development
  - Existing revenue model is constricting
- Environment is unpredictable, so individuals are protective of their process and work to defend against changes
- Role definition of WMF and communities is very unclear.
  - WMF blocks community from doing what they need to do by holding that space
  - Community is not empowered to solve their own problems
  - Expectations of what WMF will do basically don't exist

Organizational Management that we can effect
- Time spent together is harder and harder to come by because of budgetary restrictions and growth of organization
  - Team (feature) Off-sites
  - Org (product) bi-annual meetings
  - Hackathons or Wikimania - movement opportunities
- Because of lack of organizational support and processes, teams have to choose between doing their actual jobs or focusing on improving the way they work - we have organizational debt
- Teams are not well balanced, so we make decisions based on what we have rather than what we need to accomplish goals - short on product managers, QA, analytics and researchers for instance
- Communication issues/hostile environment (as identified in the Engagement Survey)
  - Also contribute to a lack of diversity
- Internal staff development is basically non-existent, which leads to high overhead and hard learning curve
  - We don't train people for their jobs
  - We don't give people institutional knowledge
- Communication overhead is too high - people feel obligated to go to every meeting, too many cooks in the kitchen
- Distrust is very high, individuals are not empowered to make decisions and must get buy-in widely

[Product Group-scale] What is the most pressing problem for the WMF Product Group?

ACTION: Katie, Dan, Wes
- Dan will schedule a hangout for this group to meet and brainstorm. We did this, and the notes from Dan and Katie brainstorming are below.

How do we leverage people that are not employees to collaborate with us and work on our problems with us?
How do we involve more voices in our discussions and decisions?
How do we more readily trust contributions from unknown parties?

No structure for QA on community-contributed code: it relies on people who know people directly, pinging each other for reviews. How do we scale this up? i.e. how do we leverage the abilities and knowledge of those outside our organisation?

Problem 1: we are too reliant on our employees for most things/everything. Knowing that it is real possibility that our the size of our organisation will not be growing next year, how do we continue to scale and/or cut projects and products that are less important than others?
- How do we organise our work so that we can rely on people that are, by definition, less available than a full-time employee?
- We don't purposely make it hard to contribute to our code/projects... but we don't make it easy either. We may need to change this. If we are relying on people who are, by definition, less reliable, then our mindset about how the speed at which projects move will need to change.

Problem 2: User pushback on features and experiments. This continues to be an issue; Gather is a beta-level feature which users are pushing back heavily against for many legitimate reasons. This slows down our progress. How do we improve this situation?

Problem 3: Legal concerns with community-incepted features. How can we more closely involve the legal team with community projects?...also ourselves. This is closely related to problem 1; the relationship is not collaborative, it's push/pull.
- Subproblem: build a more meaningful relationship between groups in the movement. Not just "rebuild trust"... how about "be more trustworthy"? :-)

Problem 4: We (the Wikimedia movement, not just the Wikimedia Foundation) need to use more data to make our decisions. We still make too many decisions based on gut instincts; then when someone comes along and says "I don't like it", the only response you have is "Well, I do."
- Subproblem: Katie believes that A/B testing will, under certain circumstances, lead you to the most obnoxious thing you are organizationally willing to do. Need to start with our core values. Set your constraints first, e.g. "the maximum level of obnoxiousness that you're willing to deal with"

Next Steps

Everybody brainstorms in the etherpad in all areas, with focus on area they've signed up for
By next Friday (earlier if everybody is done brainstorming sooner), Joel organises a vote/test to find out:
1. Can we weed a bunch?
2. Does it seem like the kernel of the right answer is present?

References

WMF Annual Planning Timetable
Playing to Win Process Milestones
Playing to Win Cascade Template
Example of completed Playing to Win Cascade