Wikimedia Product/Inclusive Product Development

Background
The Product Development Diversity and Inclusion Working Group is a multifunctional, multi-department group formed in an effort to align Wikimedia Foundation's (WMF) strategic vision with tactical day-to-day practice. It was formed with the high-level objective of crafting a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive product development practice.

Founding members of the working group include Ana Chang, Manager of Design Strategy; Angie Muigai, Lead Product Manager; Carol Dunn, VP of Product; Erika Bjune, VP of Engineering Technology; Jazmin Tanner, Senior Product Manager; Morten Warncke-Wang, Staff Data Scientist; and Margeigh Novotny, VP of Product Design & Strategy.

Methodology
Following best-practices, in August 2021 the Product Development Diversity and Inclusion Working Group conducted cross-functional, collaborative interviews with 15 teams across the Product and Technology departments to establish a baseline. The Working Group surfaced the processes and standards already in place; including how teams make decisions, how teams consider the users for which they build, where and how inclusive development practices are present, and power dynamics within teams. From these interviews, the Product Development Diversity and Inclusion Working Group identified areas of improvements, as well as existing solutions to share across teams. The goal was and continues to be to provide support and structure to the work the Product and Technology teams are doing, identify product development principles building on prior work, and iterate and refine the product development process.

Following these interviews, the Product Development Diversity and Inclusion Working Group summarized its learnings in the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Research Summary document and developed a first version (V1) framework of Product Development Best Practices. Interested teams were then identified to implement the V1 framework as part of a beta run and provide feedback in order to update and continue to refine the framework.

Objective and Key Results
The team established objectives and key results for the efforts of the working group.

Main Objective:  WMF Product* development teams build in a diverse, equitable and inclusive way.


 * KR:  100% of Software and Product development teams use the DEI Product Development framework
 * KR:  Collaborate across Foundation to measure DEI progress

* Product development here means all teams doing software development, not just “Product”.

Secondary Objective:  WMF embodies the spirit of open source by sharing learnings and best practices externally.

KR: # People have read the blog post on the topics KR: WMF has had 2 external speaker engagements on the topic

Timeline

 * July 2020: Develop interview guide for select Product and Technology teams
 * August 2020: Interview teams to get a baseline understanding of existing best practices and areas of opportunity
 * September 2020: Synthesize findings from Product teams and read existing best practices
 * October 2020: Present findings
 * November 2020 - January 2021: Share synthesized findings and bibliographies with an expert in the field to provide recommendations
 * February 2021- May 2021: Develop draft Playbook and Principles
 * May 2021 - June 2021: Socialize draft playbook and principles internally and externally and refine drafts based on feedback
 * July 2021 - September 2021: Select volunteers to pilot the playbook
 * October 2021 - April 2021: Beta teams pilot playbook, providing monthly updates throughout their process
 * May 2021- June 2021: Refine playbook based on Beta team feedback and create strategy for scaling to other teams

How to follow along
Our working group will provide bi-monthly updates on this page. Feel free to engage with us on our talk page.

Draft Playbook
The playbook teams are stepping through to provide feedback can be found here. The PDF version is also captured below.

Milestone Updates
This is where we will provide monthly updates