Personas/Uplift Post Mortem

What went not so well?

• Coherent plan for transition from product to feature of Firefox
  • Messaging (personas vs. themes, amo vs. getpersonas), features, etc
• Missing clear ownership of product early on
• Committed to uplift before defining features, future
• Time between committing to uplift and string freeze/launch was too short
• Difficult to make decisions when we thought Firefox was launching much earlier
• Personas uplift was very separate from Firefox planning/product delivery
  • Communication broke down
• No communication between Firefox devs and Lab devs about implementation
  • Could have benefited from Labs' knowledge/experience
• QA feedback
  • 3 different people working on the project
  • Inconsistencies between extension and client experience, wasn't clear if intentional or not
  • Product decisions were made on the fly, difficult to know what was intentional or not
• No decision made to kill extension or not
• Epic project management fail - Beltzner :)
• Didn't reset priorities as schedule changed
• Server transition was disaster
  • No communication of IT -> Labs that transition has happened
• Website was not reviewed for security
  • Assumed that because it was live it was safe, ready, etc
• Marketing could have benefited from earlier communication and information about plans for integration
• Fighting between Personas brand vs. Firefox experience
  • Constant discussions, never finalized
• Brand management was weak (Persona is a contraceptive in Germany)
• Upsell to add-on was confusing
• Need automation for when stats break
• Nightmare moving site from Labs to WebDev
• L10n sucked, only 3 locales
• International issues

What went well?

• Firstrun page was awesome
  • Interaction was great
  • Response was great
• Security bug was fixed within hours of being found
• Proved Labs model that they would explore new ideas and Firefox would use the successful ones
• Video was awesome
• Chris Howse's mockups were awesome
• Weekly email updates were helpful
• Stas' review of the site was helpful
• Made a lot of people happy
• We achieved the base use case set out for (no restart simple theming)
• Everyone was passionate about the project
  • Company-wide effort
• Hand-off from Suneel to Pascal was great
  • To-do lists, tasks, info, etc
• Legal was awesome

What can we do better next time?

• Concrete specs that everyone agreed upon and was available to all and is one person's responsibility
• Need to create plan for Labs assets/websites
• Need module owner/central point of authority
• Need more communication
• Smaller meetings, separate meetings for each component
• Have 1 website (move to AMO)
• Unified experience for users
• Focus on Firefox's success, not Labs project
• Labs should document their process and goals

• Lead for future of Personas experimentation