Wikimedia Product/Technical Program Management

See also: How are Technical Program Management and Program Management different, and how are they the same?

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
 * Aida, Senior Technical Program Manager
 * Lani, Senior Technical Program Manager
 * Lauren, Senior Technical Program Manager
 * Max, Lead Team Effectiveness Coach

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 meetings such as standups, sprint planning, retrospectives, and backlog refinement, 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.

How are Technical Program Management and Program Management different, and how are they the same?
These teams with near-identical names and titles are, essentially, one big team with 2 managers, and we all do similar work. In instances where 2 people with program management approaches co-exist on a single team, each such instance will have its own unique delineation of responsibilities depending on needs and capacity.

Approaches and styles for specific roles

 * Team Effectiveness Coach

Teams we work with
Grace

Aida
 * Product Technical Program Management
 * Product Leads
 * Technology Program Management
 * Anti-Harassment Tools
 * Trust & Safety Tools
 * The Wikipedia Library

Lani

Lauren
 * Mobile Apps
 * Android
 * iOS
 * Readers Web

Max Pending Engagements
 * Campaigns
 * Community Tech
 * Product Analytics
 * Parsing
 * Growth
 * Abstract Wikipedia
 * Varied


 * Editing
 * Design Systems

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
 * Technical Program Management good practices
 * Running log of shared good practices for facilitation, sprint meetings, etc.
 * 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

Meetings

 * We use our weekly team meetings to focus mostly on work. We take turns organically to host the meeting. We use emoticons to queue up to speak.
 * For deep dive discussions, we use Gramanada meetings making sure to add the topic to the agenda at least 1 business day ahead of time and indicating that attendance is optional.
 * For 1:1s, we notify the person before scheduling over or canceling.

Communications

 * We use @here judiciously in slack channels and @channel virtually never.
 * We thread conversations in slack channels to manage noise.


 * We use brackets to make it easy to identify the most important emails e.g. Subject: [Urgent] Please respond today….
 * For emails from Toby or Grace, we respond within 24 hours if there is a call to action.

Team Phabricator Board

 * The team board is for tickets that have actions items for everyone with the ticket steward added as assignee. We use checklists in the ticket for multiple inputs with @mentions.
 * We can create tickets at any time but they must be refined or resolved together in the team meeting.

Time-Off

 * Mark full-day out of office on our own calendars including any personal time off and any US-specific holidays.

Team ice breaker questions
Here are some ice breaker questions which intentionally avoid cultural and regional references so you can use these to connect with teammates across the globe! Please add more.

How to use these ice breaker questions

 * 1) Randomly pick a question to start the game. We used a randomizer found online.
 * 2) Starting with the last person who joined the meeting, each person takes a turn to answer the question in 2 minutes.
 * 3) When everyone has a turn, use the randomizer to pick another question, and pick a different person to start with.

Ice breaker questions

 * Who is someone that you looked up to as a child?
 * What is something you would like to learn more about?
 * What is a recent accomplishment that you are proud of?
 * What’s your ideal day?
 * What is your hidden talent or skill?
 * What’s an event or person that’s shaped your life in a big way?
 * What do you hope other people feel when they spend time with you?
 * What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
 * If you could live anywhere in the world for a year, where would it be?
 * If you could choose any person from history to be your friend, who would it be and why?
 * What do you like to do when you have some free time?
 * What is a book that has impacted your life?

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