Talk:Design/Team/Process/LQT Archive 1

Questions & Answers

Q: What if my team or project isn't mentioned?

A: Try as I might I can't always be aware of every project that’s going at all times, if I've missed your project or feature please get in touch with me and I will make sure I do my best to make sure we provide design coverage for you.

Q: How will you handle new designers being added to the team?

A: As you can see above, even with the Design team growing many members are doing double duty as both Primary and Secondary on for multiple projects, as new designers are added to the team we will load balance as needed. Mostly likely new designers will join a project as a Secondary to get up to speed before being assigned to a new project or iteration of an existing one.

Q: Does this mean I'll have the same designer(s) for the length of a projects?

A: This is the goal, especially for the Primary, however as projects and resources change the Secondary assigned to a project may change if they are needed as a Primary on another Project, and vice versa.

Q: What is the analogy between agile terms and Primaries and Secondaries (for instance, is a Primary a scrummaster? a design tech lead? and a Secondary an engineer?)

A: I had to do a lot of thinking about those roles and how they fit with design, if you must draw correlations between this framework and agile, the Primary is more like the Product Owner, In most teams both of those agile roles are already well covered and I'm not attempting to replace them. The Primary may also not be the one doing the most work on a feature area, but they are the main point of contact for other stakeholders.

Q: Will Primaries sit with their teams?

A: Maybe, this is up to the individual designers, I'm not going to mandate it, since each designer is a Primary for multiple teams (for now) it might end up with a lot of moving around day-to-day, also the designers like to sit next to each other so they can bounce ideas off each other.

Q: What is the schedule?

A: Designers have blocked out on their calendars Wednesday for Focus, and Friday for Explore, starting the week of 10/14

Q: When is Explore Wikimedia Design?

A: Monthly, dates TBD.

Q: How will explore projects be built?

A: In the case of Brandon and Pau, they may build their Explore projects themselves, in the case of the other designers, the monthly Explore Wikimedia Design brownbag share out will be a venue for developers to see things they are interested in building during their own time/20% time.

All of the Explore work will be on-wiki both for feedback and for the community to be inspired by, We can work with Quim/Sumana to see if there is interest/availability in the community to build some of the explore features as well.

Q: Is there a possible consensus/collaboration-driven way of handling designer/team assignments in the future?

A: I can see this happening for future projects, but right now my focus is good coverage on projects that are already underway. I'm certainly open to individual designer mutually agreeing to swap roles for projects as well.

Q: Will weekly design critiques go back to being design only? How will other teams hear about the decisions and discussion?

A: Yes, Design reviews will be designers only going forward, they way they were originally, we've tended to post the feedback/notes, on a per project spaces, but we can also have a more general place to post these notes as well.

Q: What if the days for collaborates for a team don't leave this flexibility in the schedule (no single match point)?

A: This new schedule may alter the team velocity, however I think it will also increase quality and team happiness. Therefore it is in line with the tenant of "Do less, better" I'm ok with this. Are the other teams?

Q: How do we determine how well this arrangement is working? or "What does success look like?"

A: At its simplest level, success is a happier design team, where members feel like they can think further out in the future, and develop a creative vision with me for the future of our projects, they don't feel that now because much of our work is reactive to all the things that feel like they need to be done right now.

The other major factors for success to me are a backlog full of designs that are interesting to foundation and community engineers. A clearer vision of the design roadmap. Elevation of the WMF as a place where great designer and designer flourish in an open (source) environment. A clear direction for where we want to be with design for the projects in 6 mo, a year, 3 years.

Q: What does failure look like?

A: Designer feel like they have too much work and spend explore doing assigned projects. Designers can't time-box themselves to focus on projects with the right balance. A lot of time is spent on Explore designs and no one in the community or foundation wants to build them. Explore projects don't feel like they form a cohesive vision for the future of design at WMF.

Q: What is the role of Primary & Secondaries when interacting with the community?

A: Both roles will be responsible for getting designs on-wiki, and responding to user and team comments on-wiki this is the current process and I believe it works well.

Both roles will be in contact with their PM & CL to have the CL to do community research, and outreach. I don't see this part of the process changing much, I'm not aware of any issues with the current state of things in this regard, let me know if there are issues I'm unaware of.

Any questions don't hesitate to contact Jared Zimmerman.