Senior Product Manager, Language and Product Localization

Wikimedia is looking for an experienced product manager in our Product and Technology department for a team that creates products and features for audiences visiting the multilingual Wikimedia sites. The Product and Technology department builds the wiki experiences that enable our communities to achieve our vision: a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. This is an opportunity to have a tremendous impact with one of the most beloved parts of the internet.

Wikipedia is one of the most popular media properties in the world, visited by over 1 billion people a month across over 300 different languages. All this knowledge is created and managed by more than 200,000 volunteer editors.  This position is for the Language and Product Localization team at the Wikimedia Foundation. Our aim is to make meaningful product innovations to build workflows that are visually rich, mobile friendly and multilingual. The team maintains several products and services used for internationalization support and localization, and translation tools. Connecting the large numbers of diverse users who are globally dispersed provides unique opportunities to innovate. The team recently celebrated a milestone -  the Content Translation tool for translating Wikipedia articles has been used by Wikipedia editors to create more than 2 million articles since it was introduced in 2015!  The challenge is to uphold the multilingual stronghold of the Wikimedia projects and at the same time address the inherent inequity of knowledge on the Internet and use existing knowledge sharing practices to create solutions. 

As the product manager with the Language and Product Localization team, you will work with community members, researchers, engineers, designers, program managers, and external & internal partners to drive the strategy, build the roadmap, and deliver products that excite and inspire people to consume, contribute and share free knowledge in their own language and through innovative new forms.  Your work will also be an important part of defining a broader strategy for our multigenerational vision for the Wikimedia movement.

For suitable overlap with the rest of the team, we will prefer candidates based in locations within UTC+0000 and UTC+0530.

You are responsible for:

• Developing and driving strategy for user experience on Wikipedia in alignment with global trends evolving around knowledge creation and consumption.
• Becoming an expert in the goals and challenges of users joining the Wikipedia community from different backgrounds, geographies, and experiences.
• Building the product roadmap; defining products, writing requirements, prototyping, developing and launching products and features
• Determine concrete proposals and timely decisions through effective collaboration, data, and feedback process.
• Managing products through the full product lifecycle, using both qualitative and quantitative methods to measure the impact of your work and clearly articulate long term vision for them.
• Working with a cross-functional team to build products.
• Collaborating with volunteer community members around the world.
• Coordinating and collaborating across other departments, such as Marketing, Movement Communication, or Partnerships, that participate in expanding user engagement.
• Releasing and iterating intentionally to provide incremental value and validate hypotheses.

Skills and Experience:

• 3 to 5 years of demonstrable experience as a product manager or equivalent role defining, designing, building and managing user-facing products
• Demonstrated success in growing a new user base or in launching new products
• Expertise in user-facing products, mobile application development and mobile user experience, creating demos and interactive prototypes
• Experience working with users and digital communities in the Middle East, Africa, South and South East Asia, or Latin America
• Experience writing requirements with the ability to translate complex technical requirements to make effective decisions and business cases. Experience in large refactors and migrations is a plus.
• Proficiency with data, reporting, analytics, or A/B testing
• Experience working with cross-functional teams
• Experience working in an agile or iterative software development environment
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in relevant work experience

Qualities that are important to us:

• Ability to clearly communicate product plans and results to stakeholders and collaborators
• A desire to make meaningful contributions to knowledge equity, free culture, and open access
• Awareness of multilingual digital content practices

Additionally, we’d love it if you have:

• Enthusiasm for user communities who love to create and contribute
• Experience working with communities, volunteers, or open source projects
• Experience working in a fully remote, geographically distributed, and asynchronous teams
• Experience with digital marketing tactics
• Understanding related to assessment of regulatory, geo-political, and policy impacts on product
• Experience with products backed by machine-learning
• Experience editing Wikipedia or contributing to other wiki projects
• Fluency in languages other than English

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive. 

The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive donations from millions of individuals around the world, with an average donation of about $15. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

As an equal opportunity employer, the Wikimedia Foundation values having a diverse workforce and continuously strives to maintain an inclusive and equitable workplace. We encourage people with a diverse range of backgrounds to apply. We do not discriminate against any person based upon their race, traits historically associated with race, religion, color, national origin, sex, pregnancy or related medical conditions, parental status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristics.

The Wikimedia Foundation is a remote-first organization with staff members including contractors based 40+ countries*. Salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are set in a way that is competitive, equitable, and consistent with our values and culture. The anticipated annual pay range of this position for applicants based within the United States is US$108,565 to US$167,564 with multiple individualized factors, including cost of living in the location, being the determinants of the offered pay. For applicants located outside of the US, the pay range will be adjusted to the country of hire. We neither ask for nor take into consideration the salary history of applicants. The compensation for a successful applicant will be based on their skills, experience and location. 

*Please note that we are currently able to hire in the following countries: Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States of America and Uruguay.  Our non-US employees are hired through a local third party Employer of Record (EOR). 

We periodically review this list to streamline to ensure alignment with our hiring requirements. 

All applicants can reach out to their recruiter to understand more about the specific pay range for their location during the interview process.

If you are a qualified applicant requiring assistance or an accommodation to complete any step of the application process due to a disability, you may contact us at [email protected] or +1 (415) 839-6885.

More information

U.S. Benefits & Perks

Applicant Privacy Policy

Wikimedia Foundation

What does the Wikimedia Foundation do?

What makes Wikipedia different from social media platforms?

Our Projects

Our Tech Stack

News from across the Wikimedia movement

Wikimedia Blog

Wikimedia 2030