new role at mozilla – director of web platform

For the last couple of years I’ve been responsible for our wonderful Evangelism group at Mozilla. We’ve been responsible for a combination of developer relations, standards work and outbound developer-focused communications. If you’ve followed our work on hacks and devmo, especially around the release of 3.5 and 3.6 then you’ve familiar with the pretty amazing work of this team.

But over the last few months I’ve been focused on one aspect of that job more than others – helping to drive the web-facing side of our platform. A big part of that work has been listening to web developers who are building on top of the web and understanding what they need. (This is a big part of the role of the Evangelism group inside of Mozilla.) I’ve also been working closely with Mozilla’s engineering team to help determine what’s important and what’s not. I think that I’ve discovered – and others inside of the project have discovered as well – that having someone doing that full time with a specific focus on the web platform full time is really important. (In the past that role was spread across various parts of the project.)

To that end I’m moving on from leading the Evangelism team and moving to help manage the web-facing side of Firefox full time. It’s easiest to think of this as a product manager for the web.

This is going to be an interesting job, to be sure. It’s entirely built of soft skills: listening closely to web developers, both frontend and backend. Working with the Mozilla community to communicate and understand where the web needs to go next. Working with partners to build great partnerships and products. Working with our user and developer engagement groups on the best way to talk about the web. Maintaining a roadmap for Gecko. And, last but certainly not least, working every day with the people on the ground doing the great work that make Gecko the best platform to advance the web.

I expect that I’ll keep posting on hacks and on this weblog. But expect to see different kinds of questions from me from now on. I expect that I’ll be spending a good bit of my time on what the web will look like 2-5 years from now and what we can do at Mozilla to make that happen. That’s going to require looking for the best ideas that people have and working to make them a reality through the Mozilla project.

The web is a platform that’s still ripe for improvement and change. So I’m looking forward to your feedback and your help.