Product development

In the MediaWiki community, product development is the process of:
 * researching and prioritizing the users' needs
 * deciding and specifying what to build
 * working with designers and developers to implement or change features in the software
 * and analyzing if the solution is efficient and effective at solving the problems originally identified.

The most visible product development work is currently being done by the Wikimedia Product Development group of the Wikimedia Foundation's Engineering department. The team is responsible for product management for Wikimedia, and includes product managers, 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 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.

Active tasks
For now, we're focusing on the following activities, because they're where Product management resources are the most needed currently.
 * Media storage
 * Shell requests (prioritizing)
 * Non-shell Operations requests
 * Data dumps (ariel, maria)
 * Wikimedia Labs (Sumana)
 * Beta cluster (Chris McM.)
 * Admin tools development (Chris Steipp, James F.)
 * Search (prioritizing bug list)
 * Lua scripting
 * FlaggedRevs/maintenance