driving One of the key attributes for a Product Manager is the ability to take the driver’s seat in developing a product roadmap. These are slides and notes from a presentation I did as PM for Wikipedia Mobile, which are an example of my taking ownership of a product roadmap.

(Admittedly this is from October 2013, so a bit old now, but these materials aren’t protected by NDA since the Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit, so it makes showing my work easy).

In this presentation I shared analysis and set a year-long roadmap (through the end of 2013 and through 2014) for my team that focused on three items:

  1. Acquiring users, the release of editing features was a much more successful account creation vehicle than originally anticipated (slide 34). As a result, I focused our team on making improvements to our acquisition funnel: editing guides to get people past their first edit, getting started guides to get people past their first 5 edits (worked across teams with another PM and eng team to accomplish this), etc. I have a more in depth analysis of this here.

  2. More advanced contributory features, in addition to realizing that editing features on mobile were a strong account creation vehicle, through user interviews and analyzing user behaviors I saw that people were making long-form edits on mobile (slide 48). A bit of a surprise, since we expected more short-form edits. I petitioned successfully to speed up the development of more sophisticated editing tools on mobile such as: user messaging, watchlists, etc.

  3. Analysis also showed that the users on mobile were predominantly new users (slide 44). As a result, my boss and I made a strategic decision to test UX changes on mobile where existing users would be less likely to complain about changes. This was a highly collaborative effort with the design team where we tried experiments like a feature to help “Humanize Wikipedia”.

What was the impact of this roadmap: The key metric we looked at with Wikipedia was active editors (5+ edits per month). This metric had been in decline since 2007 reaching a low of around 35k active editors per month. Through 2014 our product team turned this decline around, reaching active editor numbers around 38k. Since then the number of active editors per month has climbed up to around 45k per month. My team, the mobile team was the leading driver of this turnaround in 2014, and my roadmap in 2014 was key to that turnaround.