Job openings/Product Manager (Features)

YOU ARE ...

.. a talented, self-directed technologist who has defined and communicated product vision to help develop features for large websites. You're a perfectionist and enjoy gathering and refining requirements as well as working with a team of smart developers. You are passionate about Wikimedia's mission to bring free knowledge to every person on the planet. You recognize the importance of building a global community of supporters for these efforts, and you are excited about the opportunity to apply your skills towards that goal as a product manager for Wikimedia's Features Engineering team.

You thrive in a team of sharp engineers, and you're looking forward to making an impact. If much or all of this applies to you -- please send us a thoughtful application letter and tell us why you're the right person for the job! :-)

Job Title

Product Manager (Features)

Reports To

Engineering Program Manager for Features

Job Purpose

You will join the Wikimedia Foundation as a talented, ambitious, self-directed technologist and will guide our features from conception to launch. As a features product manager, your responsibilities will include gathering and refining requirements, helping to define and communicate a product vision and strategy, and working with world-class engineers to execute that strategy.

Job Summary

Duties include, but are not limited to the following:

• Develop requirements for new features as well asrefine requirements for existing features for Wikimedia web sites.
• Coordinate closely with the features engineering program manager and work with features development team to help determine the best technical implementation methods as well as a reasonable deployment schedule.
• Effectively communicate fluently with software engineers as well as with UI designers about features requirements.
• Organize, communicate and evangelize new feature roll-out across entire multi-lingual Wikimedia Community.

Required Qualifications

• A creative product thinker and detail-oriented analyst.
• 3-5 years of solid product management or product design experience.
• Experience developing Internet products and technologies.
• Familiarity with business issues, or the ability to quickly learn.
• Excellent organizational and analytical skills with strong technical abilities.
• Excellent people and organizational skills.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills.
• Experience in user experience analysis and usability research.
• BA/BS preferred in Computer Science or a related technical field (MS is a plus).

Additional Qualifications

• Experience with successful internet products a major plus.
• Experience in the Wikipedia community a major plus.
• Experience participating in a major Open Source project.
• Understanding of free culture / free software / open source.
• Experience working with volunteers in online communities.
• Experience with wikis and participatory production environments.
• Knowledge of Agile Methodologies such as Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) a plus.
• Good sense of humor always a major plus.
• Creativity, high degree of motivation, and ability to work effectively in multiple cultural contexts are major assets.
• You must be comfortable working in a highly collaborative, consensus-oriented environment.

Please provide URLs to any existing open source software work you may have done (your own software or patches to other packages), if possible. We'd love to see what you can do! Provide us your technical blog URLs, if any. And let us know why this position interests you.