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Future Audiences/Roles and responsibilities

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Future Audiences teams are comprised of the following roles, which are defined by their associated responsibilities.

Product Manager

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The product owner, in a nutshell, is ultimately responsible for the product or service to be delivered. The product owner is responsible for:

  • Providing vision for the product or service being developed
  • Being the single point of escalation for contending priorities among stakeholders
  • Managing the product road map
  • Making final decisions about trade-offs when desired functionality, or scope, exceeds the capacity of the team
  • Defining the target constituent for iterations, releases, and the overall product
  • Making final decision about whether or not work done on stories is complete ('acceptance').
  • Doing the work of determining what features the team should work on in order to achieve our user, community, and Foundation goals. This is done in collaboration with the team
  • Making sure that our products have a coherent, compelling user experience

Because the product owner has the final say over prioritization, there should be only one person acting as product owner.

Designer

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The UX Designer defines how users will interact with the product. Responsibilities include:

  • Gathering data to assess needs/requirements of users
  • Proposing designs to define how users will interact with the functionality of the product (including designs of UX in general, and the product's interface in particular)
  • Providing design expertise and guidance to engineers during code writing and testing
  • Ensuring that the product is not only useful, but usable as well
  • Assisting in narrative and user story development, particularly in the delivery of development-ready design assets and/or prototypes
  • Leading usability testing and logging associated findings

Engineer

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Engineers on Future Audiences write the code that makes our software work, but they also engage in a wide variety of code-adjacent work and conversations, including:

  • Discussing and deciding software architecture
  • Working with the Product Manager to define features
  • Working with the UX Designer to discuss, refine, and implement designs
  • Working with other engineers at the Foundation to make the best engineering decisions
  • Working with the Data Analyst to instrument and obtain information

Data Analyst

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The Data Analyst provides quantitatively-based user insights to inform decision-making. Responsibilities include:

  • Helping set up instrumentation to collect useful data without harming user privacy
  • Ensuring that data collected is high quality
  • Extracting insights from the Foundation's data repositories
  • Building dashboards and reports for tracking success and health metrics
  • Assisting with design of experiments (A/B tests) and analyzing experiment results

Engineering Manager

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Engineering Managers are ultimately the accountable parties for engineering decisions on a team. In addition, they support:

  • Delivery: Helping to ship quality products to production.
  • Engineering Strategy: Thinking long-term. Identifying future risks & opportunities.
  • Product Partnership: Bridging product guidance and execution.
  • Team Health: Building effective P+T teams. Ensuring effective team rituals.
  • Technical Expertise: Specific domain expertise / technical skills.