The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a Senior Product Manager to join our newly formed MediaWiki Product team, reporting to the Director of Product, MediaWiki and Developer Experiences.

MediaWiki is the software platform that powers Wikipedia and its sister projects, used by hundreds of millions of people each month. MediaWiki has been built to enable the creation, moderation, storage, discovery and consumption of open content in different languages and at scale. As a free and open source software, MediaWiki is also used by many other projects and sites.

MediaWiki can be extended and automated using various mechanisms: MediaWiki extensions (180 of which are used in Wikimedia’s production ecosystem), user-maintained scripts to automate workflows on a wiki, and web APIs (MediaWiki Action API, MediaWiki REST API) which e.g. are used by tools that aid with editing and curation tasks on Wikipedia.

As a Senior Product Manager on the MediaWiki Product team, you will contribute to the product strategy for MediaWiki and its effective execution with focus on defining and evolving the interfaces that developers use to customize and extend the capabilities of MediaWiki to support diverse use cases.

We are looking for someone eager to develop a deep understanding and systemic view on the pathways to build upon the platform, who can break down complex problems into actionable steps, and is comfortable working and communicating in a public environment.

You will work as part of a geographically distributed group of platform product managers and engineering teams and in close collaboration with other teams at the Wikimedia Foundation as well as Wikimedia’s technical communities who contribute to extensions, develop standalone web applications or write user-maintained code. Your working hours will need to overlap with UTC-5 to UTC+2 time zones.

You are responsible for:

• Acquiring an in-depth understanding of the technologies that enable users to customize and extend MediaWiki (APIs, hooks, extensions, user-maintained code), challenges and opportunities to improve and evolve these systems and how users utilize them
• Collaborating effectively with peer MediaWiki product managers and engineering teams as well as other stakeholders to enable a cohesive cross-product vision, clear interfaces and synergy effects
• Translating product/technical strategy and goals into a roadmap containing well-defined stories and requirements that enable iterative development and evolution of MediaWiki’s interface capabilities
• Designing curated pathways that improve coherence, usability and security of our interface capabilities while navigating trade-offs between platform optimization and the need to develop and ship end-user facing features (fast)
• Working closely with engineering teams and volunteer developers to clarify use cases and requirements, and resolve questions and issues that arise during development
• Managing incoming requests to engineering, including triaging, clarifying, generating estimates, prioritizing, and managing stakeholder expectations
• Working data-driven, using both qualitative and quantitative methods to inform product goals, define success criteria and measure the impact of your work
• Continuous engagement and communication with internal stakeholders and the technical community at large, including contributing to the monthly MediaWiki Insights emails

Requirements:

• Demonstrated experience in designing, building and shipping capabilities that enable a rich feature ecosystem on top of a platform, as a platform product manager, engineer or equivalent role
• Ability to manage, align and prioritize work within a broad scope and to break complex problems down into an action-able product roadmap
• Strong technical grounding and ability to explain product vision and technical concepts, trade-offs, challenges and opportunities to technical and non technical audiences
• Ability to recognise patterns across products and user needs and identify opportunities to improve and streamline underlying capabilities and interfaces
• Direct experience in companies or initiatives that have pulled together disparate products or services into a common experience for customers
• Excellent interpersonal, communication and presentation skills, with the ability to design narratives tailored to different audiences – such as developers, other product managers, or editors

Qualities that are important to us:

• Know and live our values
• Experience with large-scale, global developer ecosystems

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Experience contributing to an Open Source project and community
• Familiarity with MediaWiki
• Experience working with systems powered by large, monolith code bases
• Experience editing Wikipedia or contributing to other wiki projects
• Experience working with internationally distributed teams or organizations
• Fluency in a language other than English