Wikimedia Discovery/Meetings/Interactive team health check 2016-10-06

This month, instead of a conventional retrospective, the Interactive team participated in a health check survey. This page summarizes how the team feels about itself, within each of the focus areas.

FOCUS AREAS

Delivery:

• Some issues around deployment automation and integration. Otherwise generally good.

Communication:

• Within the team seems fine. There have been issues communicating with other teams; hopefully having a dedicated person will help with that.

Quality:

• Great. Features are not always complete, but that is intentional incremental development. Tech debt does not seem to be increasing (or decreasing).

Value:

• Unclear. Should know more after this quarter. Some trade-offs around delivering powerful features that only a few can use, or lesser features for a wider audience.

Pace:

• Nobody feels pressured to work unsustainable hours. Making really fast progress in many areas, but slower in others (mostly due to resourcing). Speed causes some friction with other teams, and some churn with rapid changes of direction.

Mission and goals:

• The team lacks a roadmap. Graphs vs. maps is a bit unclear.

Fun:

• The team is having fun. Evening out the speed would help. In-person time helps.

Learning:

• Lots of learning on the job. Some don't feel like they can take their 10% to do other learning.

Support:

• The team generally feels supported

Destiny:

• The team feels in control of its own destiny

Community involvement:

• Generally good. More would be better. Technical users (SPARQL, GeoJSON, Vega) are more involved; The rest have certain demands, but are mostly passive other than saying yea/nay.

Action items:

NOTE: The team already had plans to experiment with having product management help, starting around the time of this health check. So that doesn't show up as an action item.

• Consider experimenting with having people work on tasks outside their primary area. This could balance the load, reducing cases where the front end lags behind the back end.
• Improve communications with other teams.
• Try to better understand the value the team is delivering (or could deliver).
• Create a roadmap.
• Try to better understand how to best serve both the more technical and less technical user segments.