Lead Product Manager - Abstract Wikipedia

Position Overview

The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a collaborative Lead Product Manager to spearhead our work on Abstract Wikipedia. This visionary project aims to revolutionize access to encyclopedic knowledge by enabling more people to share knowledge across more languages. Abstract Wikipedia explores the concept of writing articles once in an abstract form and then translating them into any language through a community-edited natural language system. The technical foundation for this initiative is Wikifunctions, an open-source catalog of code functions.

This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of the internet and significantly expand access to free knowledge. You will be part of an international team operating across time zones UTC-4 to UTC+1.

Responsibilities

• Product Strategy & Roadmap: Develop and maintain a product roadmap that balances short-term execution with long-term strategic goals.
• Vision & Alignment: Build consensus among stakeholders and the community to define and execute the product vision and strategy.
• Product Lifecycle Management: Own the end-to-end product lifecycle, from ideation and development to launch and iteration.
• Data-Informed Decisions: Utilize qualitative and quantitative methods to inform product decisions, identify opportunities, and measure impact.
• Community Focus: Deeply understand community needs and release features iteratively to deliver value and validate hypotheses.
• Process Improvement: Establish and refine product development processes and best practices.
• Prioritization & Decision-Making: Bring structured thinking to product discovery, prioritization, and decision-making. Lead the prioritization of new products, services, and the product backlog.
• Communication: Clearly communicate trade-offs to drive product decisions and advance the team. Communicate a clear product vision to both internal and external audiences.

Skills and Experience

Required:

• Minimum 7 years of product management experience in software development.
• A structured yet flexible approach to product development, adaptable to team and organizational needs.
• Proven experience in developing and refining product management frameworks, demonstrating a strong understanding of product strategy, execution, and decision-making.
• Demonstrated success in breaking down ambiguous projects into clear, actionable tasks with a bias toward action.
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clearly and proactively communicate plans and results to stakeholders and collaborators.
• Excellent follow-up, attention to detail, time management, and project management skills.
• Ability to interact effectively and build productive working relationships with management, peers, and communities.
• Experience and comfort working remotely with a distributed team across different time zones.
• Adaptability to evolving requirements and priorities in a dynamic environment.

Preferred:

• Experience with natural language processing, computational linguistics, or knowledge management technologies.
• Experience with multilingual products or platforms, including a good understanding of internationalization and localization.
• Experience editing Wikimedia projects.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world where every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute to our shared knowledge and should have free access to it. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects and build software to support them.