Wikimedia Product/Technical Program Management

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
• Jazmin, Program Manager
• Lani, Associate Program Manager
• Max, 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 ceremonies such as standups, sprint planning, retrospectives, and backlog grooming, 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.

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.

Approaches and styles for specific roles

• Team Effectiveness Coach

Teams we work with

Grace

• Product Technical Program Management
• Product Leads
• Technology Program Management
• TemplateStyles

Jazmin

• Growth
• Editing

Lani

• Mobile Apps (Android & iOS)
• Reading Infrastructure
• Better Use of Data

Max

• Readers Web
• Community Tech
• Multimedia
• Product Analytics

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
• 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.