Reading/Retrospectives/2014-2015q4

Reading-wide successes

 * Filling in for PM, team stepped up.
 * Experimentation in 10% time and hackathon successfully contributing to quarters work and Q1 planning
 * Engineers taking up PM work has helped keep things moving

Reading-wide misses

 * Reorg uncertainty hurt velocity
 * Loss of 2 PMs hurt velocity

Web Successes

 * Gather
 * Built according to goal (share replaced by public feed)
 * Saw engagement numbers that surpassed our goals:
 * Generic infrastructure around lists re-used in browse prototype, and other types
 * Wikigrok
 * Paused development
 * Identified and pushed 120 claims to Wikidata from WikiGrok using very conservative thresholds.
 * Used Wikigrok to move people to mobile web beta: now we can validate ideas in beta, more quickly and don’t need to move to stable (2k->43k daily adds, trailing back down, but folks don’t opt out)
 * Built the Browse prototype in 2 weeks with a minimal number of bugs.
 * Wikidata descriptors in search results will start rolling out Tuesday, 30th
 * User testing has been very helpful (ad hoc, heuristic + planned live walk-throughs)
 * Anonymous editing went live and seems to be succesful
 * Worked with performance team to identify areas for speed improvement

App Successes

 * Incorporated Design more fully into the Development Process
 * Begin a more collaborative product/design/engineer design process
 * Successfully prototyped link preview feature with design using new process
 * Formally integrated Design into the feature and bug signoff for users

iOS Successes

 * Increased Performance of App
 * Improved load time of articles and general speed of navigating articles
 * Increased perceived performance of the app by improving UX
 * Improved delivery process
 * Implemented and documented a comprehensive release process
 * Improved release cadence and tightened feedback loop (5 versions released during the quarter vs 1 release in the previous quarter)
 * Automated distribution of "nightly" builds
 * Increased unit test coverage by 30%
 * Automated running unit tests for builds before automated distribution
 * Shipped crash reporting, and used to fix 12 high volume crashing bugs that may have gone unresolved otherwise
 * Implemented Regression testing for all deployments to the app store
 * Took over ownership of Regression Testing scripts and have added 50 additional test cases (nearly a 100% increase)
 * Engaged customers via social media to identify and fix bugs
 * Contributed to Open Source community
 * Multiple contributions to open source Continuous Integration/Deployment project (Fastlane)
 * Increased experimentation
 * Built 2 prototypes at Hackathon that are being scheduled for development in Q1
 * Built 2 prototypes at Hackathon that are being scheduled for development in Q1

Android Successes

 * Increased unique installs by more than 1.7 million (almost 15% total increase from the end of Q3). Largely due to PR, but owing to new features.
 * Increased Play Store rating (from 4.36 to 4.39, and climbing)
 * Continued to demonstrate ability of mobile apps to quickly prototype and deliver new features. (e.g. link previews)

Web Misses

 * Did not ship
 * Lead images (beta, but not stable)
 * Browse prototype (not as early as we hoped)
 * Site speed (dashboards)
 * (this impacted Q3 more than Q4) More support for minimizing friction on prototyping--getting extension on gerrit, project on phabricator, required to have documentation
 * Had moderation communication flare ups with community--need to build bridges there.
 * Nobody owns developer happiness--vagrant issues are an example here
 * User feedback loops were slow
 * Uncertainty around re-org and metrics hurt culture and velocity: we paused development on wikigrok and gather
 * Passionate people (even within org) telling you you’re doing a bad job can bum you out
 * Lost engineers to do PM work.

Misses Learning

 * Lead images: We need to engage with the community (and the engineering community) before we start planning. We're more aware now of the cultural and technical problems around lead images (and the infobox).
 * Browse: Regular review of our beta and stable features is required to stop small projects getting lost in noise, which requires more visibility.

iOS Misses

 * Failed to catch significant "data migration" bugs prior to release (which caused issues for many users and bad reviews)
 * Failed to deliver link preview feature to end users
 * Failed to ensure tickets are well defined prior to the beginning of sprints
 * Failed to improve overall rating in app store
 * Failed to significantly improve event logging (add search)
 * Failed to increase developer confidence in making changes to the code base