What’s new at Automattic: the boomerang edition
It has been two months since I returned to Automattic. The last time I worked here was between 2017 and 2021. Coming back with fresh eyes has been energizing. Here are some of the changes that I’m most excited about:
The people
After three and a half years, there are lots of new faces at Automattic. I have been enjoying getting to know all my new colleagues and also catching up with the old ones. There are so many talented people working here.
As one of my colleagues put it: Automattic has a good filter for hiring great people.
WordPress.com as a host
WordPress.com is making a strategic shift to capture the hosting market. In my view, this is a really smart move for the company. We’re so well positioned to deliver the best WordPress experience in the world. We’ve also started embracing the developer community which I always thought was our unfair advantage. I’m excited about everything we’re working on.
Process > goals > rocks
The team working on WordPress.com has adopted a new way of working. We’re defining measurable goals called rocks. Those rocks spur opportunities, which are then shaped into projects and delivered with a timeframe of two or six weeks. It’s based off the Shape Up methodology by Basecamp.
People have been very receptive to these changes and there is a good sense of direction for the entire team. It’s nice to see everybody working towards the same goals. Marketers, developers, designers, product managers, and even support.
Gutenberg templates
During my first week back, I rebuilt my personal website with WordPress.com. Before that, I had a custom built website. It was a lot of work to maintain. I wanted to offload some of the maintenance work so I could spend more time writing content.
I was surprised to see how far I was able to take it with the free plan. I imported my content from my old site, picked a theme, and tweaked the design until it was almost right. Only at that point did I have to upgrade my plan. That allowed me to put in the final touches and connect my personal domain.
The whole process took days, not months like my last site.
Design quality
The quality of design work and thinking has gotten better than when I was here last time. All our properties look more sophisticated and polished. So are our internal communications and templates.
You can tell the extra care and attention that goes into everything. Seeing this quality of work drives me to pay extra special attention to the details. I want to meet and exceed the standard that’s being said. It’s motivating.
WordPress and AI
We’ve been incorporating AI into WordPress and I have been enjoying all the help I have been getting from it. I have been using it to take care of small tasks like writing SEO descriptions. I also use it for fine-tuning language and cleaning up my grammar. The interface has been progressing rapidly over the few times I’ve used it over the last two months. I’m excited to see where it goes.
WordPress as an ecosystem
This isn’t something new about WordPress. I just didn’t notice it before. Until now, I viewed WordPress as software for building blogs, websites, and basic web applications.
Something clicked when I got back. After seeing all the new work the company doing, I began to see WordPress in a whole new way. There are over 810 million WordPress sites out there.
People depend on WordPress to run their businesses, share their ideas, and everything in-between. There are even people who make a living building WordPress sites for other people.
It’s a big interconnected web of people engaging with each other and we’re at the center of it! I’m excited to be in a position to contribute to its existence and hopefully make it better.