How do you and your team decide which innovations to prioritize?<\/b><\/p>\n
Day to day, I prioritize my work based on the team\u2019s immediate needs\u2014to innovate, we need our systems to be sound. I collaborate with our Dev, Business Intelligence, and Product Management teams to make sure I\u2019m working on the most critical pain points.<\/p>\n
In terms of the team\u2019s innovations, the work is a data-driven process. Last year, for example, we embedded several new verticals in the browser: games, shopping, travel, and news. To encourage users to try them out, we offered incentives like discounts. But before we decided which features to keep long-term, we gathered a few months of data to see what people actually found helpful\u2014and ultimately, we decided to focus on news and games.<\/p>\n
New features are always a balance. We only have so many engineers, and we want to be thoughtful about how we use our resources. But you have to give things time to work, too, and make sure you keep iterating and exploring.<\/p>\n
![\"Daisy](\"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/files\/2020\/04\/Daisy-Photo-cropped-300x320.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
What does collaboration look like, within the Taipei office and beyond?<\/b><\/p>\n
The QA team works closely with our PMs and engineers to figure out our priorities\u2014if there\u2019s a crash, for example, we\u2019ll identify the root cause and make sure we understand the impact, then meet to decide what action we should take. I also collaborate a lot with the devs to build out infrastructure and make sure our testing is scalable across different features. And there are members of the Data team in the loop, too; once a PM has a spec ready, they\u2019ll get a data engineer involved to determine which metrics to track.<\/p>\n
We have all of those roles represented here in Taipei, so unlike a lot of Mozillians, we usually don\u2019t work from home. Of course right now, we\u2019re staying home to stay safe, but I\u2019m looking forward to getting back to the office. It\u2019s nice to be able to have daily standups face-to-face and to go directly to a teammate when you need to have a quick discussion or get some feedback. Being co-located helps us work with other functions like Marketing, too; if they hear I\u2019m going to release something, they\u2019ll come by and offer to update the screenshots on the Google Play Store, or if we\u2019re getting ready to release a feature in additional countries, they\u2019ll ask if they should translate the listing. They\u2019re very proactive, which I really appreciate.<\/p>\n
As far as collaboration beyond Taipei, we do work with teams in the U.S. It takes a little planning to navigate around the time difference, but it\u2019s usually as simple as scheduling a video call. QA also communicates a lot with people in other countries, to make sure testing for an area is complete before we turn on new features. We also have Slack channels with some external communities; if we release a feature in India or Indonesia, for example, we\u2019ll tag the people there to let them know, and they\u2019re always really enthusiastic about trying it out and giving us feedback.<\/p>\n
Tell us more about the team culture.<\/b><\/p>\n
I feel like we\u2019re all free to really speak up and contribute\u2014if you have a new idea or think we can improve the user experience in some way, people are happy to discuss it. The automation work I do is a good example. I\u2019d worked in QA for several years before I came here, and I think that experience helped me see things from an engineer\u2019s point of view and imagine what would be helpful to them. So when I joined Mozilla, I recognized that with the number of people we have, engineers probably weren\u2019t going to have time to handle testing automation and the release process on their own\u2014but if I took it on, it could save them a lot of repetitive work. It\u2019s an investment that benefits all of us, because we can spend more of our time working together and making the product better.<\/p>\n
What are you excited about in the year ahead?<\/b><\/p>\n
There are so many possibilities! We\u2019re setting up Mozilla\u2019s first \u201cinnovation studio\u201d here in Taipei, which we\u2019re all very proud of. The first projects will be focused on internet security\u2014things like using blockchain for identification\u2014so some of the people in our office are starting to work on that. We\u2019re also looking at using AI for audio analysis, so our users can speak rather than type, regardless of their accent. And there are some new upcoming partnerships I\u2019m excited about, too.<\/p>\n
To me, the first question when we\u2019re deciding what to do next is always, \u201cIs it worth it?\u201d With every project, we have to think about who it will help and how much, what success would look like, and how we\u2019d get there. Then, once we\u2019ve decided that a new idea will really benefit our users, I can put my whole heart into it.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
Interested in working with Daisy and the rest of the Mozilla team? Check out our open roles<\/a> in Taipei and around the world<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Daisy Liu knows how to prioritize. The QA Engineer on Mozilla\u2019s Firefox Lite team understands she\u2019ll never have enough resources or time to tackle every single challenge on a given … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":144,"featured_media":313,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[451108],"tags":[27794],"coauthors":[306191],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}