Wikimedia Product/Technical Program Management

Who we are
We are a team in Wikimedia Foundation's Product department dedicated to guiding delivery processes and facilitating healthy teams through good practices.

Values


 * We believe in operational excellence and continuous improvement.
 * We uphold a culture of accountability.
 * We care about the connections between people and teams.
 * We enable others to do their best work.

Team


 * Grace, Manager
 * Lani, Technical Program Manager
 * Aida, Technical Program Manager
 * Chelsea, Technical Program Manager
 * Max, Team Effectiveness Coach
 * Leza, Senior Technical Program Manager

What we do
We help teams work better.

We promote a culture of continuous improvement and process optimization. We coordinate the delivery of projects, identify and mitigate risks, and address blockers. We facilitate Agile ceremonies such as standups, sprint planning, retrospectives, and backlog grooming, as well as other team meetings (and we don't limit ourselves to Agile, if there's a better fit for a team). We facilitate internal communications across teams and departments (and throughout the organization), ensuring a shared understanding of timelines and priorities.

For more specifics, see this overview of day to day work.

How we do it
We improve process, communication, and understanding.

We focus on developing and supporting healthy team dynamics as well as a culture that welcomes diverse perspectives. We guide teams to find effective workflows through ongoing discussion of performance, as well as dedicated coaching. We treat all engagements with a focus on sustainability, showing teams how to be their best on their own so that we can support more teams. Sometimes this means we consult, and sometimes this means we embed on a team for a while before moving on.

Approaches and styles for specific roles

 * Team Effectiveness Coach

Teams we work with
Grace


 * Product Technical Program Management
 * Product Leads
 * Technical Decision Making Process
 * Technology Program Management
 * Communications Program Management

Lani


 * Mobile Apps (Android & iOS teams)
 * Readers Web

Aida


 * Anti-Harassment Tools
 * Community Tech

Chelsea


 * Language
 * Inuka

Max


 * Growth
 * Parsing
 * Structured Data (formerly Multimedia)

Tools, Practices, and Presentations we like

 * Manager readme
 * A prompt for setting expectations between managers and reports. Most people adapt the prompts to their needs.
 * Off-sites
 * A guide to planning off-sites.
 * Workshop planning
 * A guide to planning workshops.
 * Meeting best practices (including remote staff)
 * Best practices for meetings
 * Phlogiston
 * A tool for creating reports from Phabricator, such as burn-up charts.
 * Distributed Agile Development or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Remoties
 * A presentation about Agile and remote work.
 * Agile Coaching Lifecycle
 * A model for understanding coaching Agile.
 * Phabricator
 * How to request silent Phabricator batch edits