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

Format

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

Action Items from last month

• Dan: Circulate a specific plan for handling hiring while Dan is out
  •  Done by proxy

What happened since the last retro (May 31)

• Wikimania
• Texcat a/b/ test data analysis
• language dropdown a/b test data analysis
• YO WE ARE GETTING A NEW ANALYST \o/+1
• Mikhail went to his first professional conference and represented Discovery/Analysis
• Legal requested and received analytic assistance from Mikhail
• Mikhail released a public version of the BCDA R package and has made significant updates to it https://github.com/bearloga/BCDA
• Deb is officially the product manager of Discovery Analysis (this needs a formal announcement)

Thumb: Thumbs up--something that went well

• communication with Mikhail on various issues that popped up (legal work, metrics, etc)
• Dashboard updates: first visit clickthrough (Portal) and U.S. regional traffic (also Portal)
• Handoff of analysis product ownership from Dan to Deb was about as painless as could be hoped, and went even better than one could have hoped :-) \o/
• Filtering out referral requests from ourselves on the portal dashboard
• Deb handled analysis team product management super well
• Dan gave a talk during monthly metrics that touched on analysis and portal work
• Uh, hiring. We hired someone. Seems worth including in here. :-p
• Mikhail's interviews with candidates -- was specifically told by a candidate afterwards that it was great to be treated like an actual person
  • (I kind of want to write a blog post at some point about our hiring pipeline from the work we did on writing the inclusive JD to how I approached the design of my interview questions.)

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

• Mikhail did well and kept a fantastic attitude during everything

Middle finger: Something that did not go well

• TextCat A/B test was restarted due to data issues then not enough data was coming in, so it dragged on for a while
  • Although these are issues, it's good that we are actually AWARE of these issues, finding them, and fixing them; better than them just going undetected, or going unfixed
  • Team(s) handled the communication well--no complaining, finger-pointing, etc.
• The fact that we had to do work outside the scope of Discovery's... scope (legal stuff)

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

• Our dashboards are a source of admiration from other teams; one person described them as "That awesome analytics platform that you use"
• Our dashboards actually see use by other teams to track how well *their own improvements go*!
• Personally not a fan of upper management reaching out for data analysis support directly instead of going through product manager(s)
• Our relationship as a team is easy-going but we're still hard-working, and I actively look forward to our sprint planning and backlog grooming meetings!
• Oh! Mikhail's Data Visualization Literacy lesson/presentation to the rest of Discovery!
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeYhYJI_drI

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

• Mikhail has handled the switch to a single analyst really excellently, and I'm looking forward to him not having to do that any more so he has more space to think and do awesome ad-hoc analysis+1+1
  • I get 10% time again! :D

Action items

• Dan: Make sure Deb & Mikhail confer on onboarding tasks/documentation before new hire arrives
• Dan: Announce Deb's new position re: analysis
  •  Done
• Dan: Follow up with upper mgmt about going through proper channels