Product development

In the MediaWiki community, product development is the process of:

researching and prioritizing the users' needs;
This includes: reaching out to users for user research, discussing with them to gather feedback, triaging and prioritizing feature requests, etc.
deciding and specifying what to build;
working with designers and developers to implement or change features in the software;
and analyzing if the solution is efficient and effective at solving the problems originally identified.
This includes: managing incoming and prioritizing bug reports.

The most visible product development work is done by the Discovery, Reading, and Editing teams in Wikimedia Foundation's Engineering department. Each has product managers responsible for product management along with analysts, designers, and a community liaison.

But there are also many volunteers doing similar work, often without formally calling it "product development": they're the volunteers who participate in software discussions, request and describe new features, report and triage bugs, and even complain on mailing lists.

Some of this work overlaps with what tech ambassadors do, and some is more about specifications and prioritization. In any case, your help is needed to ensure developers build features that are desired and useful to users.

Standalone projects

If you're looking for relatively Big Projects to tackle on your own, or with other volunteers you're going to convince to join you, you might want to think about doing user research and defining specifications about:

WikiProject support: Features that help Wikimedians better collaborate within WikiProjects.
Social media posting: Help Wikimedians make visible their contributions by allowing them to publish updates on social media sites about the work they do on wikis.

Standalone projects

See also