Product development

In the MediaWiki community, product development is the process of the following:


 *  researching and prioritizing the users' needs 
 *  This includes: reaching out to users for user research, discussing with them to gather feedback, triaging and prioritizing feature requests, etc. 


 * deciding and specifying what to build


 * working with 1>Special:MyLanguage/Design|designers and 2>Special:MyLanguage/Developer hub|developers to implement or change features in the software


 * and analyzing if the solution is efficient and effective enough for solving the problems originally identified
 *  This includes: managing incoming and prioritizing bug reports. Wikimedia Product Retreat Photos July 2013 62.jpg

The most visible product development work is done by the rt>Readers|Reading and ct>Contributors|Contributors teams in Wikimedia Foundation's wmt>Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia Technology|Technology and wma>Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia Audiences|Audiences departments. Each has product managers responsible for product management along with analysts, designers, and a community liaison.

But there are also many volunteers doing similar work, often without formally calling it "product development": they're the volunteers who participate in software discussions, request and describe new features, report and triage bugs, and even complain on mailing lists.

Some of this work overlaps with what meta>m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/Ambassadors|tech ambassadors do, and some is more about specifications and prioritization. In any case, your help is needed to ensure developers build features that are desired and useful to users.

Get involved
If you are looking for projects to tackle on your own or with other volunteers, please consider doing user research and defining specifications about these phab>Phab:project/view/1042/|possible tech projects.