Lead Product Manager, Wikidata Platform

Summary

The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a collaborative Lead Product Manager to lead the vision, strategy, and roadmap of the query platform for Wikidata, one of the world’s largest open linked databases. Wikidata facilitates much of the structure of Wikipedia content and contributor activities, making an impact on billions of users across 300+ languages. It is also a critical resource for libraries, universities, and other technology platforms. Our vision is a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all human knowledge. This includes access to data for editing workflow support, research, feature development, and advancing artificial intelligence responsibly.

As the Lead Product Manager for Wikidata Platform, you will shape the future of how users query and access Wikidata at scale. You will guide the short- and long-term roadmaps for Wikidata Platform to maintain stable, reliable, and sustainable data access.

The Lead Product Manager shares responsibility with the Engineering Manager and Tech Lead for the delivery, development, and operations of Wikidata platform products and services.  This role is an individual contributor role, reporting to the Director of Product, Abstract Wikipedia, and Wikidata Platform. Wikidata application product strategy and development is primarily led and resourced by our affiliate organization, Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE), and so this role will also work closely with WMDE product management and engineering counterparts. 

The Lead Product Manager will join the Product and Technology organization at Wikimedia, working alongside product teams building and operating features, products, platforms, and services used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. This is an opportunity to do good while improving and increasing the impact of the data platform for one of the top 15 websites in the world.

In this role, you will be instrumental in modernizing our data access infrastructure, improving self-service capabilities for our communities, and guiding Wikidata query services to meet growth in data and demand. 

Our engineering environment includes open source applications developed in-house and off-the-shelf, with a wide variety of technologies and stack components, hosted primarily in collocated data centers. A highly successful candidate will also serve as a thought partner to the Vice President and Director of Product and to affiliate partners on strategic and tactical roadmap development. 

This is a remote position; open to candidates residing in a range of different locations in the world. Some travel is required.

You are responsible for:

• Product lifecycle management of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) and related successor services 
• Collaborating with technical stakeholders to discover user needs and translating them into prioritized system requirements based on goals and intended outcomes
• Developing and maintaining prioritized product roadmaps
• Tracking and communicating progress on product development goals, especially towards key results (in our OKR framework)
• Ensuring the privacy, security, and integrity of our data products
• Iterative and measurable progress towards longer-term goals
• Maintaining an understanding of current developments and innovations in structured knowledge representation technologies
• Persevering through setbacks to ensure team goals are met, or communicating when a pivot may be necessary.
• Developing an understanding of our movement and how it drives our work

Skills and Experience:

• 8+ years of product management experience with large-scale, API-driven data platform products with technical user bases
• Deep understanding of database and knowledge graph representation technologies and standards
• Experience navigating issues associated with privacy-sensitive data
• Past success in breaking down ambiguous projects into clear tasks
• Past success working with multiple stakeholder teams to deliver results through lateral influence and collaboration.

Qualities that are important to us:

• Strong collaborative problem-solving skills and ability to lead a product team effectively to deliver a project from idea to production
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, with an ability to clearly and proactively communicate plans and results to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Able to navigate and make decisions in circumstances with limited, incomplete