User:Keegan (WMF)/PDP/CL MX notes

The origins of this page are from a community liaison off-site in Mexico City, Mexico pre-Wikimania 2015. The purpose of the exercise was to identify the questions we ask of ourselves, product managers, communities, and/or other stakeholders in the WMF product development process.

Understand/Concept/Plan

 * What problem(s) is this intended to solve?
 * For whom?
 * Based on what evidence?
 * When/timeline? (When do you want to start, and how long will you dedicate if this is successful?
 * Did anyone request this?
 * Will this replace an existing tool?
 * Will this break anyone's workflow? To a significant extent?
 * What are the boundaries of tech support for edge-cases? (blind users of screenreaders, old browser compatibility, text-only feature-phones, etc)
 * What can be measured?
 * Has this been tried before, internally (staff or community)?
 * Are there industry standards around this?
 * Does this already exist in the outside world?
 * Will it scale? (both to small wikis, and to large wikis)
 * Will it add to editors' workload if it's a success?
 * What are the allocated resources? For how long?
 * Where are you documenting this?
 * Where are you discussing this with the communities?
 * Product name - Is it international? Is it unambiguous? Is it permanent? Has it been reviewed by comms? Is it the same in the code and in the docs?
 * Is it local or global?
 * Are you affecting people who are not your target? (e.g. French wiki research email, stewards and SWTF, etc)
 * If yes, can precautions be taken to not do so?
 * Have all appropriate WMF teams been consulted?
 * Define the product's individual definition of alpha/beta/release

Develop/Release/Maintain
Questions for Alpha/MVP stage: Questions for the Beta stage: Alpha has told us this is the design and feature set we're going for, what are the Beta questions…? Stable release questions: All: Perhaps we need to break it into buckets Tools like:
 * What is the minimal feature set for MVP?
 * Once deployed, What are the repercussions if it breaks for hours / days / weeks?
 * What is your criteria for moving to 'Beta'?
 * Have you gathered enough outside feedback? Where are you doing outreach/notifications?
 * Did you incorporate the feedback from the public ideation announcement?
 * What kinds of feedback are you looking for at this time?
 * Timing, evaluation, scenarios
 * Do you have a backup plan(s)? (will you roll it back?) - danger of some editors saying "it is never ready"
 * Are there any (predetermined, and potential) pivot options?
 * Are you going to do any A/B testing of beta iterations?
 * What is your criteria for moving to full-rollout, default for everyone?
 * Have you started your rollout plan?
 * What else is happening during your proposed deployment? (avoid Fridays, April 1, EU/US holidays, other major planned changes/breakages/deployments, etc)
 * Is your documentation internationalised/translated?
 * How long do you plan to keep supporting this product? [How long will we CLs support it?]
 * Do the results from Research or A/B testing show that it does no harm, and support the product's release?
 * Do you have a backup plan?
 * Are all your major bugs ironed out?
 * Have the edge cases that need to be resolved, been agreed upon? (pick our battles)
 * Have you incorporated the feedback from beta
 * longterm/shortterm
 * disruptive/not
 * one-time or continual
 * experimental
 * Really big disruptive products, like VE, FLow
 * One-time configuration change
 * community requested
 * design change
 * replacement of an existing product (feature parity issues)
 * surveys
 * site notice
 * blog
 * newsletters
 * village pumps
 * social media
 * tech/news (gets posted to many VIllagepumps, but is very over-simplified)
 * phabricator (pub/pri)
 * talkpages (pub/pri)
 * email (pub/pri)
 * irc (pub/pri)
 * documentation (pub/pri)
 * meetings (pub/pri)