Talk:Wikimedia Discovery/Portal Team/Roles and responsibilities

Re: Product Owner
The bullet about being the escaation point for competing prioritization seems redundant with the simpler "Determine priority of tasks". If the longer one remains, I would make it a clarifying sub-bullet of the simpler one.

"Determine priority of tasks" might benefit from clarification that these are "phabricator tasks". I come from the Extreme Programming world, where the PO would define the priority of User Stories, but the devs would figure out the priority of low-level Technical Tasks. Obviously phab tasks span both of those (and more).

"Make final decisions about trade-offs when desired functionality, or scope, exceeds the capacity of the team". I would argue that desired functionality and scope *always* exceed the capacity of the team. How is this different from "Determine priority of tasks"?

I would add: Keep the backlog groomed and prioritized. Should there be something about communicating out to the rest of the foundation and communities? I might add something about the product vision, possible lumping it in with the existing roadmap bullet. --KSmith (WMF) (talk) 23:48, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

I would also like to add that an additional PO role is to be mindful and coordinate the overall tone, frequency and transparency of communications to other teams and community about goals and completed features. --DTankersley (WMF) (talk) 13:31, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

"Make final decision if development work on stories has been completed: acceptance" - Traditionally this is the PM's role but I wonder if on a small team we have the UX engineers own this Tfinc (talk) 09:11, 9 March 2016 (UTC) Tfinc (talk) 09:12, 9 March 2016 (UTC)

Re: UX Lead
I would aim higher than the best-designed product within the WMF. :P

The term "design patterns" happens to have a specific meaning in programming circles. Not sure if it's worth rewording or not.

This bullet "Devs can bring specific questions about tasks to the PO" seems out of place here. --KSmith (WMF) (talk) 23:48, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Re: UX Engineer vs Engineer?
Is there a difference between a regular engineer and ux engineer? I think the primary difference is about focus and collaboration. The ux engineer role is meant to emphasis greater integration between the   design and dev. departments. As ux engineers we attend design meetings and contribute to design efforts such as UI standardization. We try to bring a developer perspective to these efforts to prevent ux and implementation issues from arising during the development stage. The language picker on the new search-box is case in point where we didn't consider the mobile and non-javascript use-case early enough, which lead to a lot of stuff having to be reworked down the line. I think Kevin's "Non-role specific" comment below echoes the need for designer/developer collaboration, and the 'ux' in 'engineer' is there just to make that collaboration official. --JDrewniak (WMF) 11:17, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Non-role specific, but important
I'm not sure where to put it, but...

When designing a mock-up, the designer should consult with the tech lead about ease of implementation. When implementing a feature, a dev should consult with the PO to fully understand the MVP. And a dev should consult with the designer in cases where a slightly different design would be far easier to implement, or more robust, or more portable, etc. Every user story should be a conversation, not just throwing some text over the wall where the next worker toils on it in isolation.--KSmith (WMF) (talk) 23:48, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Data analyst
Data analyst is missing here. It's also missing from Wikimedia Discovery/Roles and responsibilities. This is probably my responsibility, as the line manager of the analysts. --Dan Garry, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 02:43, 5 March 2016 (UTC)