The Drupal Core Leadership Team collectively determines Drupal's long-term strategy and makes decisions on what community-suggested improvements to Drupal core should be committed to the core software.

There are several areas of focus for the leadership team:

  • Product managers: Responsible for product strategy and vision, roadmap, and alignment with end-user needs.
  • User experience (UX) managers: Responsible for user-visible features, out-of-the-box experience, and other aspects of the user experience. 
  • Framework managers: Responsible for the technical architecture, API consistency, and other aspects of the developer experience.
  • Release managers: Responsible for creating Drupal core releases, managing the release schedule, evaluating allowed changes and potential disruptions, and defining issue and release requirements.
  • JavaScript committers: Responsible for maintaining the standards and integrity of the JavaScript code in the project, and for maintaining standalone JavaScript packages.
  • Committer team facilitator: Leads committer team meetings, organizes strategic contribution events, leads compliance with core processes, and communicates core governance decisions.
  • Initiative facilitators: Coordinates core initiative teams and mentors initiative leads.

Many (but not all) members of the Core Leadership Team perform final peer review on core merge requests, and choose when and whether to accept (commit) these changes to Drupal core. They are therefore often referred to as "core committers".

For more about these roles, see the Drupal core governance; to see who currently holds these positions, see the core/MAINTAINERS.txt file in the latest development version of Drupal core.

Impact: 

The Drupal Core Leadership Team members are the final decision makers on the direction of Drupal core development.

How to get started: 

Members of the Drupal Core Leadership Team are typically people who have previously contributed to core as Topic Maintainers, Subsystem Maintainers, and/or Initiative Coordinators, as well as contributing to Drupal core generally for at least a year. They are always experienced mentors and reviewers. They are reliable, decisive when needed, open to feedback, and able to give others feedback constructively.

Members of the Drupal Core Leadership Team  typically start as "provisional" maintainers for a term of about twelve months, with ongoing appointments thereafter.

Skills required: 
Local development environment installation
Mentoring
Software testing (quality assurance, or QA)
Wrangling volunteers