Contributors/FY2016 Retrospectives/Multimedia

= FY2015-16 (July 2015–June 2016) Multimedia Team Retrospective =

= Ground Rules =
 * Conversation this hour is confidential within the group
 * Written notes to be published to Editing and to general public after a review pass
 * Purpose of Retrospective
 * Format
 * What did we accomplish last year?
 * What was great about the way we worked, or the org, or anything else job-related?
 * What was not great about the way we worked, or the org, or anything else job-related?
 * Incorporation of Team Retro outputs
 * Review key events and results over the time period
 * Add a +1 to any “important” items by including your initials
 * Heavily upvoted items will be percolated up for larger department discussion; notes contained here will stay as-is and confidential to team

Identify things that went well and should be preserved

 * Team
 * Kept the team together through a time of tremendous organizational strife
 * Acquired a new manager (yay)
 * Acquired a new team member (not this FY)
 * [JF][PS] Held a team offsite
 * [MH][PS] Team stand-up process enacted/improved
 * [MH][JF][BD][LA] Ability to quickly respond to critical issues (production and community)
 * We were able to get urgent/important things done, alongside the goals (see below)
 * Achieved most of our quarterly goals
 * Q1: In-VE/WT uploading inc. drag-and-drop
 * Q2: UploadWizard bug fixes, modernisation and OOUI conversion; and prototyped image editing (but not yet deployed)
 * [MH] Q3: Gathered some key top-line metrics for the first time(!) like how many unique uploaders per month
 * Q4: New gallery type
 * [MH][BD] Able to cope without Community Liaison support as most of our product work is with just one community (Commons)

Identify things that should be changed

 * [LA][PS] Limited Resources + Constant Fires = :-(
 * We can’t really accomplish set goals for a three-person dev team which is mostly busy responding to on-coming issues
 * Matthias’ presence as 4th developer will likely help, but won't solve
 * Firefighting can be exhausting, but also risk of burnout and unhappiness when not as much concrete production results despite a lot of effort
 * [MH][PS][LA] Lack of user testing, design research before we deployed cross-wiki uploads
 * Even though we did a soft launch by not advertising the feature much, the launch was not soft enough to not cause problems at Commons
 * The feature was "too" successful, and we didn’t have “required secondary features” like proper AbuseFilter support for uploads lined up to take the strain
 * Lack of community support and resources (compared to history and also rest of org at present)
 * Very few community developers around working on our area
 * [MH][BD] We still have almost no way to notice things going wrong automatically, before they’re reported by users (BD has some SQL queries and an Excel sheet…)
 * [JF] Sometimes confusing to have "goals" that are about changing/new things, and not the "most important" things like keeping production up/running
 * Also++ the goals are thrown together and may or may not be in line with grander organisational strategy, which makes for a confusing dichotomy
 * [MH][JF][LA] Lack of broader organisational/movement strategy makes it hard to work out what the direction for MM should be
 * "Mobile" – OK, so what bit of it? Videos? Voice memos? Text-to-speech? Playback or upload? Editing or capture? All?
 * "Interactive" – For whom? Don't we care about low bandwidth/non-JS/etc. users too?
 * [MH][BD][LA] Available Product Manager support is low
 * ~10% of James's time; might not be enough, though we seem to cope-ish(?)
 * [JF][PS][BD] Team has very little knowledge about upload backend (we’re mostly frontend, maybe except for Mark) (whoa, don’t put that on me  —Mark)
 * Was working on ImageTweaks even a good idea, with Thumbor still not being deployed. Lack of foresight?
 * Mark: while it won’t be deployed yet, it is ready except for the one blocker, so the same amount of time would have been spent either way
 * Prateek: Makes sense, we can get rid of this
 * James: Eh, leave it. :-)
 * Mark: Definitely leave in the five sub-items of meta-discussion for sure
 * [JF] The two daily stand-ups, though good, …
 * are at wide apart hours (which means Mark has to work ~10 hours a day), and
 * … the afternoon one conflicts with the SWAT in which urgent things normally get deployed (new hours will 'soon' be 06:00/11:00/16:00 SF)
 * Maybe move to 08:00 & 15:00 SF for saner hours and less clashing?
 * Does that work for people?

Discuss top items, including Actions
Yays: Nays:
 * Ability to quickly respond to critical issues (production and community); we were able to get urgent/important things done, alongside the goals (see below)
 * Lack of broader organisational/movement strategy makes it hard to work out what the direction for MM should be
 * Available Product Manager support is low
 * Team has very little knowledge about upload backend (we’re mostly frontend)

Next Steps

 * Action items for team
 * Consider moving stand-ups (to 08:00 and 15:00 SF)? Or keep them the same. Or don't.
 * Consider adopting a weekly "triage" meeting where James decides to accept or back-burner tasks against a pre-agreed priority list, and people petition us to change our minds. Or don't.
 * Action items for department
 * Read other retros
 * Followup