San Francisco, CA
PRODUCT MANAGER, MOBILE
The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking an experienced Product Manager of Mobile, to guide development of mobile applications that are rapidly embraced by various types of contributors and users. Candidates will ideally have experience with the impact that alternative mobile hardware platforms have on product design, and the capabilities and constraints of various operating environments (particularly iOS and Android).
Based in San Francisco the Product Manager of Mobile works with design and engineering teams to envision and build products that accelerate the growth of the free knowledge on smart phones and tablets. This individual will develop products and features that promote both wider readership of Wikipedia, as well as enable users to contribute to the encyclopedia while they are on their mobile devices. Such will fall into three basic categories:
- knowledge collection and contribution;
- pre-editing of knowledge before it is contributed to Wikimedia projects, and local or connected editing of knowledge previously contributed by others;
- use and sharing of data that resides in Wikimedia projects in various forms, and that is accessible through the internet.
The knowledge being contributed, edited and used can consist of text, image, sound and video data.
The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization whose flagship project, Wikipedia, has become the largest general reference work ever compiled in human history. Consulted by over 400 million monthly, it has hundreds of thousands of volunteer contributors and more than 19 million encyclopedia articles in 265 languages, all of which can be freely shared and used for any purpose, and is the fifth most popular web property world-wide.
Explosive growth in the mobile computing space makes Wikimedia’s mobile development initiatives arguably one of the most critical for the open source and free knowledge community as a whole. The mobile products initiative will preserve the character of Wikimedia as a free knowledge-sharing platform based on open source ideals and software.
The Product Manager of Mobile is expected be, in part, the architect and strategist of the mobile product line, while understanding the world inhabited by engineers. This person will be mentor and student, manager and collaborator, strategist and tactical implementer. A keen sense of how products are market-tested, introduced and rolled out is important to the success of the Product Manager. Wikimedia teams are assembled across departmental lines by project, with reporting lines working in a matrix as opposed to a top-down hierarchy. Wikimedia professional staff and volunteers tend to organize around people able to exert influence through thought-leadership, strong communication, innovation, ambition and satisfaction in developing great product and features. Background on the Wikimedia Foundation can be found at http://www.wikimedia.org/.
For additional information, please read the full position description here, or contact David Santore or Mark Oppenheim at info@moppenheim.com.