Wikimedia Discovery/Meetings/Portal retrospective 2016-07-07

Format
This retrospective was conducted using the "Five finger retrospective" format.

Action Items from last month

 * Chris: Update the "Project portals" page on Meta (task T136163)
 * ✅ (enough)
 * Deb: create rough mocks of some of the ideas for the future work and add to page on wiki for further discussion
 * ✅ (search results)
 * Deb: send email(s) on production releases and upcoming A/B tests
 * ✅ (so far--more to come)
 * Kevin: Will continue to suggest A/B test retros at times
 * There didn't seem to be opportunities this past month; no tests scheduled, so moot
 * Kevin: Try to resolve code review delays
 * Kevin will continue to work on this
 * Kevin: Schedule one hour for next month's retro, since a half hour was too short

What happened since the last retro (June 6)

 * We're getting a new analyst! (Partially Portal related)
 * Qualtrics survey on "how you arrived on the portal" launched and wrapped up
 * Asked community about adding mobile app badges to the portal page (lots of feedback and the issue has been shelved for a few weeks)
 * Wikimania
 * "Portal offsite" in Poland
 * Wrote documentation about portal development process and guide to contributing
 * and thus: got some community contributions to the portal
 * Added USA regions to dashboard analytics
 * Got the ball rolling on getting portal text into translatewiki.net
 * Added first visit clickthroughs to the dashboard
 * production releases of legal links, readmes, etc for portal
 * Jan at Design offsite in SF

Thumb: Thumbs up--something that went well

 * Wikimania and (small) team offsite in Warsaw
 * face-to-face time Deb/Jan was very helpful
 * Data results from last A/B test for language dropdown (collapsing lang by article count)
 * Help from Chris on navigating community talks dealing with portal
 * Volunteer contributions to portal page ( https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/WPOR/history/master/ )
 * got the ops/script blocking task fixed for updating portal stats

Index finger: The ONE thing you want people to know about the last month

 * people are interested in the portal and everyone has an opinion +1 +1

Middle finger: Something that did not go well

 * There's apparently a sustained spike in no-actions and a drop in searches (visible on dashboard)
 * Ticket is open to investigate:
 * Jan feeling the need to +2 own code a couple of times.
 * and community pushback for doing so
 * we should have a discussion about our team norms, constraints, etc.
 * Small changes usually can get someone to +2; large visual (javascript) changes are harder to get someone
 * Julien is the only other Discovery person well-qualified to review
 * Distinction between visual (html/css) and tricky code (javascript)--or both in the same commit
 * Distinction between "does it work" vs. "is this the best technical approach" vs. "is this the right UX"
 * something about the communities response with the app badges - frustrating
 * asking the community about adding mobile app download badges to portal page (pushback from internal to WMF and external)

Ring finger: Something about relationships--within the team, between teams, other

 * Deb did (and continues to do!) a great job multi-managing teams while Dan was away
 * Jan always super helpful and seemingly glad to help +1+1
 * Talking with community members and other WMF'ers, chapters during wikimania
 * everyone wanted to know what the Discovery team was doing (or suggest things we should be doing)
 * Lots of goodwill from those conversations
 * We should do more in-person outreach (e.g. conferences)

Pinky: A little thing (good or bad) that would be easy to overlook

 * Translation setup for incorporating new words into portal (for sister project descriptive text) from community
 * Lots of collaboration between different teams; quite a bit of work
 * Splitting the translatable text out was slightly challenging, and then gluing them back together
 * Jan learned quite a bit about translations and localizations
 * Translating our (major) communications should be more common (this is on me - CK)
 * Takes effort, and also takes time (like a week). Need to account for that when planning.
 * What are people requesting to be translated? Targeted comms, such as mobile badges and question marks

Action items

 * Deb: send out email RfC for language dropdown and chat up the new updated page design
 * if all goes well, push it into production in next few weeks
 * Kevin: Carry idea of a/b test retros over to the search team
 * Kevin: Continue to work on timely code reviews
 * Chris: Communicate that after we wrap up a few things on the portal that we'll take a bit of a less active role on the portal for a while (focus on accomplishments so far)
 * Mikhail: provide some data (ticket has already been created)