We spent a sprint addressing your requests — here’s how it went

This is a good effort; the uptick in visible development work, even outside the flood of edits to status-review and status-deferred, was noticed and appreciated. This is pretty much exactly what we've been asking for a long time - more attention to community requests. This is a major step in the right direction.

In addition to the benefits the Community Asks Sprint brings to the community, there are also some internal benefits: this is an opportunity for engineers, product managers, and designers to work on issues they may not get to encounter on a regular basis and to touch on areas of the product they wouldn’t normally touch.

I'd love to hear a bit more about what the impression was of perhaps the more niche parts of the system. For instance, there was work on the election nomination page, and the review queues, neither of which are relevant to e.g. Teams and don't see much work on a regular basis. Did people learn a bit more about how the public system works?

One final note is that I was a bit disappointed by the initial set of comments on this post. They were, by and large, much more negative than I was expecting or felt was deserved. This was a major effort, involving over 30 different people, towards working on things that we've asked for, the lack of which has in the past been blamed for increasing tension between staff and community. So when steps were taken to fix that on the staff end, it was disappointing that it wasn't reciprocated with some positivity - or at least not outright negativity - in the initial community response.
If we want to see improvements to the platform and the community/company relationship, we need to be recognizing good faith efforts and responding in kind, not being immediately negative and potentially jeopardizing future similar efforts. Hopefully we can do better.

First and foremost, this sprint was great--all sprints should be like this (I know they can't really all be about shipping long-desired features or bug fixes, but still)!

Please convey to company leadership how happy users are that dev hours are being committed to bugs and feature requests your customers/users care about! The network's image and reputation among developers as still the go-to place for programming (or any specific topic) Q&A will only improve as more dev hours are dedicated to clearing the back-log of long-standing community requests.

I am especially heartened by this bit:

this is an opportunity for engineers, product managers, and designers to work on issues they may not get to encounter on a regular basis and to touch on areas of the product they wouldn’t normally touch.

Hopefully this means not only a greater appreciation for the complexities of the existing core product, but also will lead to a lower barrier to entry for devs to start addressing other issues that previously may have seemed too thorny to tackle.

but an older post would only climb the queue if it kept getting community attention despite its age.

I would urge you to be wary of this; just because a bug report does not have recent activity does not mean it is not still an important issue. Users can only make trivial edits to a post so many times before it becomes clear that we're basically just bumping it, which serves little purpose and is annoying to other users. Constant activity should play much less importance compared to age and score.

There's also, you have to admit, the large period of time where it seemed like SO staff was not interested in fixing bugs/implementing features that users asked for, which may have discouraged users from even trying to report on them in the first place. I know I have held off on posting a bug report before because I felt it wasn't worth the effort to provide detailed reproduction instructions when it was unlikely to ever even be acknowledged by devs, let alone worked on and fixed.

our plan is to dedicate time, across all our public-facing developer teams, to work exclusively on requests that have come in from the community

This is awesome and I can't find words to express how pleased I am :)

I really look forward to what this will produce, and I wholeheartedly agree on the internal benefits of getting staff exposed to the public sites.

My personal thanks to each staff member who participated in this first sprint.

I'm also glad that this is regularly scheduled (quarterly is great imo! honestly- more than I hoped for) and defined as a sprint (that is- it has a defined duration- whatever duration your sprints are). It gives me confidence that there's a plan and commitment to keep this going. And I'd really love this to keep on going long-term.

On prioritization

an older post would only climb the queue if it kept getting community attention despite its age

What kind of activity contributes to this? Like Tyler, I'm a little skeptical of whether this will produce a prioritization reflecting what we care about and how much we care about it.

This platform and its culture are pretty anti-noise. For example, we can be pretty disciplined about not piling on "I'm having this too" comments years after a bug was reported. I can only upvote once, and even if a post gets bumped enabling me to un-upvote and re-upvote to signal that I still care, that's not how I want this system to work. In other words, the system doesn't have a proper mechanism for me to say that I still care about something. And I personally think it's fair and workable to assume that if I cared about something X duration ago, I still care about it now.

Also, on the subject of prioritization, I wonder if (and that is my polite way of communicating personal values) a better way to start this off is to first focus on lower-hanging fruit that affects a lot of our quality of life. Stuff that's easy and non-controversial to implement, and maybe seems insignificant at a glance, but where the small improvement affecting a large group of users, or a relatively smaller, but highly actively helpful set of users results in a large net benefit. There are quite a few small rough edges that I face every day in my use of this platform and I can't help but feel like many of them shouldn't be too difficult to address, and that if they were addressed, my user experience would be much more pleasant.

If you're looking for ideas on mechanisms to see what users currently want prioritized, I'm not saying this is necessarily a good model (but just that it came to mind as something that stood out from systems where you just upvote once for all time), webpack has a thing. I don't know exactly how it works but it looks like there's some sort of mechanism for using more or less of your voting power on individual requests. Not sure if votes are movable at any time.

Firstly - whoa, quite a lot of old requests across the network were looked at, and retagged. The effort is appreciated. I do feel like there could have been better visibility, as Dan Mašek alludes to in the comments that - it had been announced first, and a follow-up posted to let folks know of the outcome

In general, while it occasionally makes sense to knock off a whole load of work/technical debt at one, it's also stuff that's accumulated over time. It is heartening to see the issues on hand are understood by folks, but there's also a matter of considering the core issues

it is not as effective as we’d like it to be at producing responses to the posts you’re escalating, nor at ensuring good backlog hygiene — at least not without regular coordinated clean-up efforts.

In a sense, many parts of the public platform are somewhat 'mostly' bugfixes at best, duct tape and good intentions at most. Since I was a MSE mod for a good chunk of the time since the current process started - I'd say to a significant extent, non 'bug' escalations were on the company's roadmap.

I'd note with no roadmap at the moment (Unless I missed it) - folks would be less inclined to bring up non bugfix issues, and practically, if things haven't changed, they wouldn't be escalated through these channels.

Working on these things ideally shouldn't be a sprint, it should be more of a distance event so to speak. I do realise that this is above the paygrade of the community team or developers but a lot of our current woes, everywhere are cause people have good ideas, it's done and not followed through.

I am pretty sure from the (few) employees I am and was in contact with that they're doing their best, so I'd argue almost that it is really a matter of sufficient resources to do the thing and prioritisation.

In addition to the benefits the Community Asks Sprint brings to the community, there are also some internal benefits: this is an opportunity for engineers, product managers, and designers to work on issues they may not get to encounter on a regular basis and to touch on areas of the product they wouldn’t normally touch.

I feel like this is a significant weakness - while admittedly it was a smaller organisation, and somewhat more focused, having an intimate understanding of the issues is useful - not an encyclopedic knowledge, but there's probably some dark, musty corners of the codebase ignored for years cause either the person working on it got realigned/retrenched/downsized/retired, or it didn't quite fit.

Likewise, there's a bit of mumblings about rarely seeing staff around any more (though I swear least one of my chatrooms got invaded by devs this week) - familiarity with the platform, and folks being familiar with you is likely to make some processes easier.

In a sense - that they don't encounter these things and certain parts of product on a regular basis seems to be something that makes things harder, not easier.

I'd like to see less of these - not because it's not appreciated, but because there are sufficient resources and will to focus, and not let these things pile up.

All in all, I appreciate the effort now, but I do hope there's more to this than the occasional backlog mitigation.

Not much to add to existing answers here, so I'll focus on a concern I have.

You said:

Over the next quarter, we’ll focus on how we can turn this into a repeatable, efficient process that we can use in subsequent quarters.

It does not say "the next Sprint will be in the next quarter", but rather something more... vague.

This makes me fear this might end like the Mentorship project that was also experimental and did not continue beyond the experiment stage.

So, is there a more clear ETA for the next Sprint? Or, worse case, chance it was a one time effort? I'd be glad for any official update. Thanks!

As a small token of appreciation, I made something for y'all who've worked hard on that:

Can there be some focus on reviewing the older status-planned posts as well? There appear to be only 19 questions with this tag, and some of them have been "planned" for a very long time. The oldest one I see was tagged in 2015! Some of the bugs and feature requests are probably obsolete, but others may be fairly easy to address but just have been forgotten. (My personal pet cause is moving the bounty button.)

First of all, thank you all for this effort! It genuinely feels good to see SE Inc. rebuilding trust with the community through their own initiative!

I take it the Community Ask Sprint is also the answer to my question here, asking why the recent change of the auto-comment for voting to close a question as a duplicate wasn't announced here (but on MSO)?

Similarly to that question, I believe it would be worthwhile to have network-wide requests and changes that were voiced elsewhere get a mention here on Meta, as well (most of the examples mentioned by the OP were actually posted on MSO).
For bugs this would be appreciated but not necessary (as Makyen points out in a comment here, bugs can and may be reported on any site, anyway), but for planned feature-request changes (like changes in auto-comments), this would allow for a proper meta overview and centralized feedback before these changes go live.

Depending on the amount and of changes, this could take the form of separate posts or of a single consolidated (Community Asks Sprint) post.