Life cycle of a feature at Wikia/Notes

How does a feature or product come to be? Using the new feature, Special:Insights, as an example, Stanley and Trevor take us through the process.

## How do ideas become features?

* Scientific Method used to determine if a feature is viable
	+ Gathering a hypothesis, gather data, analyze data
* Product development
	+ Ideas become prioritized and developed

## Product Development Cycle

* Ideas
* Prioritization
* Research, Design & Definition
* Development
* Feature Release
* Follow-up
* Repeat!

## Where do we get our Ideas?

* Problems in the current Wikia product
* Our users
* New technology
* Wikia employees
* Inspiring Products
* Market Trends

## What inspired the Idea for Special:Insights?

* Users wanted a better platform to view various stats/data
* Special:WikiStats was limited and considered “technical debt”
* Other major websites offer their users comprehensive data

## Prioritization

Allocating time on projects can difficult to balance with employees times.

* prioritization in a nutshell; “dedicating employee time on \_\_\_\_\_ will best help us achieve our goals”
	+ Special:Insights Example - “Dedicating employee time on surfacing site data to contributors will best help us achieve more complete article pages.”
		- Why? The most requested feature from our active users is data.

## Research

* Sources for research
* Surveys
* A/B tests
* Discussions with users
* User testing
* Industry analysis
	+ Special:Insights Example(s) -
		- What are the trends of our users?
		- What do other sites offer their users?
		- What kind of data do our users want?

## Design

* Designs have many drafts and iterations. They evolve and adapt according to the research stage.
* What to consider when designing:
	+ Audience
	+ Feasibility
	+ Internationalization
	+ Multi-device support
	+ Consistency with the rest of our products

## Definition

* Minimum Viable Product aka MVP
	+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum\_viable\_product
	+ Delivering fully functional feature or product
	+ Instead of taking 1-2 years to make something that might fail, making a product with many versions for quick feedback and learning from each iteration
		- Special:Insights Example
			* Focused on making the feature encourage edits as opposed to just showing data
			* MVP was 4 lists that we could quickly get out of the door

## Development & Release

* “Fail fast” - build intelligently yet quickly so we can validate hypothesis against real users. Then iterate.
* Multiple release vehicles available
	+ One single alpha community
	+ Labs
	+ By languages
	+ Opt-ins
		- Special:Insights Example -
			* Recycled existing special pages for quick go to market
			* Built and tested in 3 weeks
			* Shipped to a small handful of test communities

## Follow-up

* Collect & respond to user feedback
* Bug fixes
* Measure and reflection. Did we achieve our goals? Where can we improve? What are the next steps?
	+ Special:Insights Example -
		- User feedback
			* Feedback has been mostly positive
			* The data is ok, but not really what I asked for. I want more!
			* This isn’t new, I already have these special pages
		- Usage data shows
			* Most users fix one or two issues back to back
			* Some users/communities have never used the feature
			* Popular issue: The lists are finite
		- Potential next steps
			* Expand on lists - Give users more relevant data
			* Explore and experiment with participation drivers