AI & Remote Work: Powering WooCommerce Agencies

Mitch: Yeah, sure. I’ll jump into that before I introduce you a little bit. So Ash, I met this crazy guy in I think it was Berlin. No, it was in Belgrade the first time. And that was cool. And then we hung out in Berlin, but if you’ve ever seen Ash, he’s probably got a bike in his hand because he’s an avid biker, which is really cool. And I’m not talking like light work. Like he does really long distances, which is super impressive. But Ash, the reason why we’ve met is he runs Lightspeed Development which is also a WordPress agency. They focus primarily on WooCommerce.

They used to have a strong focus in the tourism industry. But they’ve since diversified. COVID was a challenging time for Ash, which I’m sure you can shed some light on after. He’s been running the agency for a while. I think since 2003 and your wife later came on as a partner in around 2010 ish. And here we are. Yeah, to answer your question, I’m originally from Canada and now I’m living in Lisbon in Portugal. And I think like a lot of people there was a cataclysmic change in how they live their lives during COVID. And I decided to leave Canada and move to Portugal.

Ash: Yeah, a lot of foreigners have been moving to Portugal with the beneficial tax laws for expats. Few of my friends have moved there from South Africa, bought land. A friend of mine from the tech industry, she actually bought a working vineyard and restored a couple of hundred-year-old house that’s on the property.

Mitch: That’s amazing. Nice.

Ash: Whereabouts are you staying in Lisbon, in the heart of the city or?

Mitch: Yeah. Right now I’m pretty much in the center of the city. It’s been good for networking and funny enough, now that I’m here, I have many more people visiting me than I ever did when I was in Toronto, Canada. So in that benefit, it’s nice, but I’m, I very much love nature. So like your friends did, I’m going to start exploring the countryside a little more.

I think on that note, then let’s dive in because right now you’re in Thailand. I’m living in Portugal and we’ve both built lives for ourselves that allow us to live that life, which is incredible. I guess for one we’re decentralized and we work more or less on an asynchronous schedule.

Can you tell me a bit more about your agency and how that works?

Ash: Yeah. In 2014 it was more like, the New Year’s of 3/14, my wife and I did a trip to Brazil and I read a couple of books that changed my life. Firstly, The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris. And then The 80 20 Principle by Richard Koch. And those two books sat in my mind and when I got home from this trip in the first part of 2014, I messaged my team or they were still coming into the office at that point.

And I told my team, listen, we are going remote. So you guys are no longer going to be coming into the office and we will be working from home. And that was a bit of an adjustment. We were using for project management and task management and all of that. We were using Asana it’s a great tool. We actually started using it back in 2012. One of the co-founders of Facebook started Asana and since then it’s been our main tool for project management and also largely communication because we use a free version of Slack. Our messages disappear after 10,000 messages. So to star things in Slack, it doesn’t really work for us.

We also use a free version of Asana because we don’t need the paid features. And what we’ve done is over the years, we formulated a way of working where the team simply update the status of tasks as they go, either they tag a teammate because they want to engage them for feedback or they simply say it’s a lead that is in the As a task.

And every time you engage that lead, leave a comment, just saying sent an estimate. How to call something like that. Maybe there’s a point where you need to engage a teammate to say take a look at this and I need your feedback. But when the guys when they’re flowing with that, there are times which it’s difficult when work is really pumping, but most of the time we try not to overload people so that they are able to get to this kind of communication. So along with Asana we use Figma and GitHub and Figma we use the comments functionality and also dev mode and a few tools that are built into that to alert each other when designs are ready or when things need to be looked at for approval and then with GitHub using effective GitHub workflow means creating issues for enhancements or bugs or whatever you need to. And then using, we use their projects functionality to map out on a Kanban board, current tasks that issues that are being worked on as well as pull requests.

So when we merge those pull requests and close the branches, all of those notifications feed through to a channel. And when I speak about this, I’m mainly speaking about our open-source product development. Because we don’t do this type of workflow with GitHub for our client projects. It makes more sense for our own open-source software.

Mitch: Yeah, do you require any times during the day where you guys are synchronous? Do you need some overlapping time or are you able to do this completely on different schedules?

Ash: yeah, that’s a good question. Because the team, even though we’re remote we’re all based in South Africa, we were spread out over Brazil and Chile and South Africa at one point. But then COVID hit and we scaled back the team and now everyone’s based in the Western Cape in South Africa. So in the morning at 8:30 we’ll have what we call a stand-up meeting. It’s, you might have heard of stand-ups.

Mitch: And everyone needs to be there.

Ash: We try our system administrator, for example, he doesn’t really need to be there, although he posts a stand-up to Slack. So we’ve installed geek bot into Slack, which prompts the team every morning to answer the three questions.

How are you feeling? What did you do yesterday? And what are you doing today? And do you have any blockers? When they typed the answers to those questions, Everyone does that by 8:30, then we start a Google Meet via an add-on that we added to Slack because we use Google Meet and we just type meet, stand up, and it starts up the meeting.

Everyone joins. Some days I don’t join sometimes my wife doesn’t join, but pretty much always I have my development team and my project manager joining. So they’ll run through what’s already typed. And posted to a Slack channel and that guides the discussion. So it’s what we ask each of the team members to do before the meeting is just read through it, their teammates stand-ups and thumbs up or put whatever little emoticon they like my wife uses a bee because her name is Barbara, my sysadmin uses Batman because we call him Batman.

Mitch: So is this the only synchronous part of the day?

Ash: Yeah, this is pretty much the only time then what we do in the standup is say there is an item on today’s plan where it requires that person to interact with another person. We’ll at mention their name and say, need to meet and that will trigger an interaction either during the scrum to agree on a time.

And, the guys, they pretty much plan their own schedule. We don’t expect them to work a rigid nine to five kind of job. Everyone has different highs and lows in their day. As long as they’re online for the standup meeting, that’s fine. And if they agree to any other meetings that is also, you agreed to the meeting, so stick to that.

But for the first time ever, my team, I’ve got three team members with children. So they need to consider their children’s lives and fetching children from school, or maybe there’s no nanny, so they have to look after the kids. So we’ve got a flexible enough schedule to allow them to do that, which makes a big difference.

Mitch: that’s a huge plus. I feel like there’s pros and cons to being in the office, being remote. And I think people who seek that flexibility, remote is incredible. Be anywhere and be flexible with your time. It’s funny. I just want to summarize some of the things you said, because I feel like this happens with a lot of us.

There’s always some sort of event which triggers you to go down that path. And you said it was like 2014. And it’s interesting. You said how you primarily use your PM tool and your Slack is only on the free version because when you’re using Slack for a lot of your day to day a lot of the information can get lost.

And I’ve heard from other companies that use like Trello or Asana and they’re like all conversations go in here. And the ones who have successfully made that shift I think that the organization of their information is a lot cleaner and the things are easier to find.

We don’t do that personally. We have a little too much data in Slack. And so we’re always trying to figure out how to leverage that. And we can talk about this after using AI and starting to build your own networks and things like that, which is interesting because then now you can start training them on all your historical Slack data. And, hopefully, it can retrieve the information we need without me having to sort it and things like that.

Ash: I’d like to say something on that topic of the AI. So I’ve I’m investigating Notion at the moment because I still see a shortcoming with information in Asana and information in Slack because every now and then we actually need to extract that info and document it. We’ve got a

lot of things in Google Docs, but it’s

it’s looking to me like a notion with built-in AI could actually help create a repository for sorting some of the info because through the asynchronous discussions, quite often they’re little gems that come out and then trying to find that info again later can be challenging. Usually I find it. But I have acknowledged that is a weak point and that I need to address that.

Yeah, it’s something I’ve been mulling over in my head over the last three days while I investigate Notion and, yeah, I think that it could be a good solution.

Mitch: it’s crazy cause these are new problems and new solutions are being made for specifically, like information management. A friend of mine runs this company, but what does a digital elitist look like these days? And it’s fascinating because, and that’s where I put a lot of my effort now, because there’s just too much everywhere and you need some sort of order because there’s enough chaos in our heads.

Ash: Sorry, what did you say? Digital what?

Mitch: Elitist like specifically where information should go, how you structure it making sure your inbox is clean and you’re assigning tasks and breaking things into projects into ideas. So that you keep that information, but it’s in a way that can easily be found and used versus, just heaps spread out everywhere.

Ash: I’ve never heard that term before. It’s something that I pride myself on doing is sorting order to the chaos. And that’s actually a book called Getting Things Done by David Allen helped give me a framework to approach that. I started with his first edition book. Which admittedly drove me mental because he kept speaking about filing cabinets.

The book was written, I think, in 2000, 2001, and was based on a lot of his experience in the 90s, I would guess. And that’s… Like I think back to my dad’s business and when he had filing cabinets and files that you put in the railings and you put a piece of paper in and a name on the front, the times have changed, definitely.

But then he released the second version of the book in, I think, mid-2010s. And the second version of the book I bought an audiobook for and I listened to it and I decided to do a workshop with my team. One of the things that the book taught me is to have a system, one of the items in the system is a two-minute rule.

So when you’re going through your tasks, if there’s something that takes two minutes or less, do it then or there, then and there. Or if it’s going to take longer, defer it till a date that’s going to work for you. Then there are a few other items in the system, but one of them is a weekly review, so I try to do a weekly review with Asana and just my inbox as well because a clean inbox is a lot easier to work with than one that has a thousand mails in the visible part of the inbox. So I archive everything that I’m not working with or maybe set a date to bounce it back in. But yeah, teaching my team how to work with this framework empowered them to make decisions of their own. And we use harvest time management app and or time tracking app, should I say, and then forecast, which is another app of theirs for projecting what’s coming and the two apps speak together so if you properly project as effectively as possible, project the work on a project. And that project is maybe a hundred hours long and you’ve projected 150 hours for the remaining work. You’ll see on the project and harvest that you will run out of time approximately in the future. And it’s a good tool as long as everyone uses it properly. So that’s my team are pretty good at that. But every now and then things do get a bit crazy as in the industry. What do you guys use for tracking time and managing projections with your forecast of work?

Mitch: Yeah, our time tracking app is called Hubstaff. We’ve always had good luck with that one. And then for projecting, I wish I could get more into the weeds, but thankfully I’ve got such a great team. Guy Diego, he manages all the forecasting and making sure everything’s in its right place.

But I’d say if we could zoom out and one of my priorities is we did this thing ages ago called the value stream, but you basically zoom out and you map your whole operation, like every step along the way, and then you put like a, the time in between and how long each one takes. And so you can see, Oh my God, from the second a customer comes in to, once we deploy something, this is the whole journey and these are the people involved and it’s a, it’s pretty eye-opening.

So now what we’re doing is we’re taking the low-hanging fruit, like which one has the biggest time delay, and where can we start automating little pieces and where would AI come in because it’s like the big question right now is how to use AI and I think sometimes it’s just like on a lot of really simple things that accumulated over time or over time, it’s a lot of time. So that’s what we’re doing right now.

Ash: That’s exciting.

Mitch: Yeah, it is. It is. It’s I like the big picture stuff, I know, as you can imagine being in your position.

I really like zooming out and thinking about that. By the way, Marcus is it’s cool. This we’re talking about, stuff. When I met Marcus, he I guess this is public information, we’re always selling, we’re always in sales mode. And I remember he said that he sold his first million-dollar deal.

And I was like, yo, that’s really cool. That’s a really nice landmark.

Ash: Wow, that’s that must have been a hell of a project

Mitch: Yeah. And, I could, he’s only going to do it again and again. So I was like, like what a nice flex.

Ash: Yeah, that’s I wish I could say that we are able to sell those kinds of deals in South Africa, but the truth of the matter is it’s a bit of a challenging market in South Africa. We have load shedding, which means we have some days up to 12 hours of no power.

Mitch: So how do you mitigate that? Actually, you’re being a digital nomad you work online, one of the most important things is internet access. So in order to have that, you need power.

Ash: Yeah, so everyone in the team has a UPS for their router and everyone works off laptops.

Mitch: Is that a requirement to work with you?

Ash: No, it’s just because we bought them the UPS route for the router because otherwise, they couldn’t work. So when the power goes down if there’s still power going to your router, it’s not going to affect the internet because the line still works.

So if you’re running off a laptop, the laptops will run for the four-hour, four and a half-hour power cuts. They schedule them over the day. So they don’t all happen at once. And it’s not every day we have 12 hours. It depends on the load-shedding stage. So we have stage one to six. They were speaking about stage eight before I left for Europe a few months back, which that’s a frightening concept.

Mitch: All right. Yeah. Okay. I would love to dive more into that, but I think let’s stay on on track. Cause we do, this is about agencies in our, in.

Ash: Just to give you a concept with the way the team works. So they they basically, they have power for that period. And if, for example, they run out of power we give them, we say to them you do what you can to keep yourself busy for that time frame. So in some instances, if the internet’s a problem, if it’s a developer, they can work offline.

Most of the time, the internet’s pretty essential to what we do. We’ve managed to get around that. And my team, if they were offline for any amount of time, they’ll just go and do something else and then come back to their work when they can. I’m very fortunate in that sense. I’ve got a very dedicated team and I don’t have to worry about them.

They just do their work and they work around the challenges. I’m sure a lot of companies don’t have that. But I’m just very fortunate and

Mitch: You said a lot of your team has been with you for 10 plus years. Good metric.

Ash: my lead developer is coming up for his 17th anniversary. Yeah. And I did a calculation earlier, including my years with the company and 20 years with the company. The seven of us together have been with the company for 60 plus years.

Mitch: It’s a lot of accumulated manpower,

Ash: Yeah. And also over that timeframe, we’ve been able to just adjust our workflow. year on year. And what we’ve discussed in the past, you and I met short, the events is how the WordCamp events have facilitated innovation and improvements within our business. And I’ve been attending WordCamp since 2008.

I went to, I think it was the seventh WordCamp ever held in Cape Town and Matt Mullenweg joined for that. And I was, it was quite amazing. It was so early days because we started with WordPress itself in 2007. So we were novices. We were working with Kubrick theme back then. And it’s. WordPress was in the two-point something version.

So it was a long time ago. And then I rebooted the WordCamps in Cape Town in 2011 and did another one in 2012. After that, I handed over to the community and Various people in the community continued the events that’s helped recreate the community in Cape Town or in, in the Western

, in South Africa.

And in 2014, the year we went remote, I attended the WordCamp San Francisco. That was another one of those moments in our career where our trajectory changed. We, there were, there was a contributor day, there were two days of conference, and then I managed to get invited to the WordPress Summit where we decided the roadmap for WordPress for the next year.

Did you attend the Woo Conf in that year? In 2014 in San Francisco.

Mitch: No, my first Woo Conf was in Austin.

Ash: Okay. When was that?

Mitch: Man. I think that was like. 2016, I want to say.

Ash: Cool.

Mitch: Woo Conf was great. We could go down a rabbit hole with that one. I think I think on the topic of WordCamp and there would be some other things I want to bring up too, but yeah, WordCamps are great. I’m curious what you get out of them. What’s your primary objective when you go there?

Cause I’ll speak to the first one I went to and it was in Toronto and I volunteered and I was like the camera guy and I remember my very first WordCamp was like an aha moment because I really got a lot of value out of it and I from the talks and then just the people I met and it was really rewarding.

And then, as the years went on and I gained more experience in the industry, for me, it wasn’t about the talk so much anymore, but it was more just. Seeing the same faces and maintaining our relationships and just seeing what everyone’s about. And, I’d mentioned Marcus was on the, I’d send a message and he had done his sale and we had talked about this a bit like selling in WordPress, but a lot of people, like when I see a lot of new companies come in, like I know one recently they’re, backed by investors and whatnot.

And the first thing they told me when they went to a WordCamp was like, Oh, we didn’t close any deals there, like on the spot. And I was like, Oh dude, granted, some people might be able to. Pull that off. But that’s generally not how WordCamps or the whole WordPress ecosystem works. It’s very much a partnership based and it’s about, who, and who you’ve built relationships with.

So for me, when I go to WordCamp now, it’s just, familiar faces, making sure we’re still in the game, sharing information, leveling up. So I’m curious how you use them now.

Ash: Yeah. If I go back to the 2014 WordCamp we, that was when WordPress moved from IRC to Slack and that’s when we moved to Slack and that was that was it was quite incredible because. At the same time of moving now these people that I just met and especially at the the WordPress summit I was so inspired by chatting to these people who are involved in core development for WordPress in making decisions on the direction of one of the most popular soft or pieces of web software.

And now I could chat to them directly via Slack. And that was quite amazing. But then for example, going to Sevilla in 2015, I chatted to Noel Tok, one of the co-founders of Human Made Agency, and he got me onto a sketch. So that was the year that we moved to Sketch for design and that was, it was quite a big change.

Definitely one of the best choices that we made. It was a bit of an adjustment skilling up. But my team embraced that and took it on. And then fast forward to the 22 WordCamp in Porto. I discovered block theme development. And started to really hear a lot more about Figma and Figma was actually, it was quite an easy migration from Sketch to Figma because they just.

They work like all the Sketch designs imported. So that was a big help. I wouldn’t have made that change without the WordCamps. I would say that for sure. But if I look at the 22 WordCamp I went to the contributor day, sat at the theme review table. And there was nobody there. It was the weirdest thing.

And then I realized, because I’d been on a sabbatical for a year, and then I spent the first half of last year doing sales drive, and not really focusing on technology. So I had like about a year and a half where I hadn’t been monitoring the WordPress ecosystem and technology developments as closely as I usually do.

I didn’t even monitor it. I just, I needed a break. And coming back in, then I eventually figured out that block theme developments had become the thing. And Carolina Neimark she works for Yoast now she’s got fullsiteediting.com. She’s an incredible lady. She’s been with the theme review team for a long time and she really inspired me to go back home and switch our methods from classic theme development to block theme development.

And that was no small task that was a massive undertaking because the way we worked before was just radically different and, I, at the beginning of…

Mitch: Question, are all your sites that you build now using, blocks and full site editing?

Ash: Yeah, now they are, from this year onwards if they’re using a classic theme, it is simply because There isn’t sufficient budget to upgrade or yeah, mainly that’s the reason sometimes you just have to work with what you have until such time is the budget allows us to migrate. But we are, every new site is certainly being built using a block theme and blocks.

We’ve been using Gutenberg, I think, since 2019. It started in late 2018. That was a challenge.

Mitch: Yeah, in the early days, yeah.

Ash: And again, that was all because of WordCamps.

Mitch: Yeah. So it sounds like WordCamps for you. A lot of it is this kind of a, skills progression.

Ash: The people that I’ve met, I see year on year, as you said, and I’ve, and again, as you said it’s not really a place where I go to directly sell. I will bounce ideas off people. I’ll pitch them something I’m working on. But it’s, Yeah I think mostly it’s about going to the talks that appeal most to me and where I want to take my team and then the networking events and the free booze, free food and free booze.

Mitch: Funny though are there any events you go to that are maybe WordPress events outside of WordCamp or completely outside of the ecosystem that directly benefit your business?

Ash: We used to have WordPress meetups in Cape Town and Jonathan Bostinger has just started rebooting those. I haven’t made the last couple. But yeah, WordPress meetups, they’re hosted via meetup.com. I’ve been to some in Europe and I’ve been to quite a few in Cape Town. I’ve organized them in Cape Town, should I say those I find are more networking and more social in the social interactions, we definitely speak about tech, but it’s actually just really great to Chat to peers and whether we talk about business or not, you form that connection and bond.

And the next time you see each other, it just grows.

Mitch: That’s good. It’s good to hang around with other people in the industry. You can talk about similar challenges and how they’re solving them.

So that’s cool. Yeah. Cause I know one, one event that is popping up now more is, the enterprise events, which happened before WordCamp and how do we really move into that market? I know WordPress is successfully done it. WooCommerce is a little bit different. We work. More or less on very medium enterprise businesses.

And we’re very much focused on moving WooCommerce to the enterprise. There’s some great changes coming out now, like hyper high-performance order storage and, cleaning up how the database manages information, which is great. But yeah, I think I’m super excited for the future of WooCommerce personally, because I remember in the earlier days over 10 years ago, and it was very much small niche sites.

And then a lot of those sites have now grown up and, they’re making some of the millions of dollars a month. And using WooCommerce, no problem. And now I’m like, okay, how do we get to the really big businesses and how are they using this software? Because I, like for me, like I, I want to ask you like, why, like our most productive hours in the day, we can build any type of anything we want. And we choose to spend that time on WordPress or in WooCommerce. Like why do you use WooCommerce?

Ash: We were using WP eCommerce pre-2012 and being based in Cape Town, the WooThemes agency not agency, WooThemes company was based. Probably 500 meters down the road from me. They had an office there. Not that anyone went to the office, but they had an office there and it was it was really, it was great that they launched WooCommerce at the WordCamp 2012 that I that I organized.

And I made the decision because I supported WooThemes. To switch from WP eCommerce to WooThemes, or WooCommerce. And it was, in the beginning, it was a little bit limited, but I think that they’ve grown from strength to strength. And if you look at the progress they’ve made over the last nearly ten years it’s damn impressive.

Now with the blocks that they’ve built. It makes building a store so much easier and it’s only going to get better. Looking at the roadmap, that’s another thing I love about WordPress and WooCommerce for that matter is you can see the open roadmap. You can see how development is progressing.

And that’s something that I monitor quite closely are the core make blogs and also the developer WooCommerce blog. And the guys are doing a phenomenal job on WooCommerce.

They consistently releasing new WooCommerce blocks versions, WooCommerce core version. And if you read each of the release posts, you get a clear idea of what’s happening.

You relate that to the roadmap. And it helps you plan your own roadmap. So

Mitch: Interesting. So it’s sorry to interrupt you here, but I’ve heard two overlapping things. Like one, you love the transparency of the platform. You could see the trajectory of where it’s going. And another thing you mentioned already was. You loved on the contributor day that you could like directly Slack with people who are more or less building the internet.

So it’s this transparent fabric where like people are accessible. The software is accessible. You know where it’s going. There’s no it’s all very clear. Is it, would that be an accurate?

Ash: Yeah, definitely. And I think one thing I’ve learned from following beta versions of software, my lead developer, he put his foot down at one point and he said, we’re not going to be working with beta releases anymore because that we learned. A long time ago, we were working on a site for the D. A. in South Africa the Democratic Alliance. And we built a BuddyPress blogging network that was used to, used for the national elections. And we built it using a beta version of the very first BuddyPress. And then when they released the alpha, quite a lot changed. And when they released the final version, quite a lot changed.

So eventually, we lost a lot of time with that sort of thing. You can’t really. You can’t explain to clients why things go wrong in that sort of instance. So that was a big learning curve back then. So we might follow the roadmap and what’s happening in the beta releases, but we don’t really have enough resources to fully be testing all the beta releases.

And we wait until release candidates come out or full releases. And we develop our open source software around full releases.

Mitch: Do you work exclusively with open source?

Ash: Yeah, I have. Pretty much since about 2001. That’s when I got introduced to Linux and the club Cape Linux user group. So that, that inspired me back then. I was just amazed at how this group of people would meet up regularly and we, they do talks and they didn’t get paid to do it.

They just did it because they loved what they did. And when. When I wanted to learn new things, the people that I met at those meetups way back then I would message them and they’d send me information back. And that only got better over time because workflows and communication platforms and integrations and all of that have improved over the years.

And that’s 22 years ago. Then things were done with I think it was mailman list,

Mitch: But why do you use open source? I’m curious.

Ash: Because that’s a good question. I liked the idea that it’s free, but you, you can pay for the services if you want. Paid versions of, or it’s mainly you paying for support when you’re paying for open source and I find that open source fosters communities around it, people contributing to those communities, they do it because of passion passions, what drives me in business or in life for that matter, if I’m not passionate about something, why am I doing it?

Sometimes you have to do things you’re not passionate about, but generally I, I design my life around my passions and I would say WordPress is definitely one of those. And it’s entirely because of the incredible people that I’ve met through the community and how I’ve seen the software grow from strength to strength.

Mitch: also barrier to entry more or less with costs and the community around it. Very cool. I guess on that note then, what do you see as the future of WooCommerce? And, I know a lot of the listeners here are technical and this is agency chat, so let’s try and weave it in with like agency trajectory.

But I’m curious your future of WooCommerce, E-commerce, WordPress, and like how are you going to leverage that in your at Light Speed?

Ash: Yeah, that’s something that I plan on figuring out over the next couple of months. I, yeah, with what we’d mentioned earlier COVID decimated the tourism industry. That was one of our main focuses. And we’ve been struggling to bring in business on that front that is sufficient to fund fund the kind of stuff that we want to do on open source.

So now we’re shifting our efforts towards WooCommerce and block theme development and blocks. Whereas, yeah, I think that’s all I, as I said, I’m still refactoring my strategy. And I want to put down ideas, but I’d like to hear more about what you think of the future of WooCommerce and where it’s going, especially considering you guys work with enterprise clients and large scale transactions and large traffic sites.

Mitch: Yeah, I I’m really grateful because now a lot of priority is being put on performance, which is great because there’s two conflicting pathways. Like you have the WooCommerce that wants to compete with Wix and Weebly. So you have WooCommerce Express now, which is taking care of the small stores.

which is fine. And then you have the other side. It’s we need the big power players to the internet running on WooCommerce and I’m more in that camp. So the performance has been a really great bump, but I think it’s just about creating things that are, with blocks, creating a much more easier editing experience.

I think too, like with around hosting and. Especially around plugins like it needs to be so simple to use this site and so simple to not make mistakes because as you can add any myriad of plugins, there’s no quality control on it. So I know some of the things with WooCommerce and talking about transparency of the community, which I love like.

I was talking to the CTO, Bo, and it’s just they’re going to make standardized a lot of things. So like development we’ll tell you if you’re building a plugin Oh, you shouldn’t do it this way. Like it’ll give you a notice. It should be more like this. And then when things are uploaded to the app store, it’ll go through more filters and more reviews to make sure that it’s following some sort of standardization.

And then that way, I think if they’re all falling at the same, like at least the same coding standards, even the way like notifications are done are all handled in the same way. And the design elements are similar. It’s going to be a lot easier for the customers to run their store in a really well-built way.

Because at the end of the day, like WooCommerce, since it’s wide open it’s as good as the person using the tool, and that’s where I see and what we focus on, because I don’t want to mention any names, but I want to see a world where we get the ownership. That you get with open source with WooCommerce, where it’s this is my data.

I can send it where I want. I know where it’s being read or used, but I want the convenience of say, like a SaaS, where I don’t have to worry too much about updates and hosting. And I think that’s where we’re going. A lot of the hosting providers are getting more niche down. They’re getting more specific.

And then with the block editor and the way Woo is investing in the app store, it’s going to get a lot more clean and standardized.

Ash: Very well said. Yeah, the user experience in the back end is still too varied. And I think it’s improving though, it definitely is and that’s where yeah, the developer blog has actually been putting out some great information. I noticed like a while ago you, it was difficult to edit the checkout block.

And I noticed that there was a tutorial posted in the last month or two. Somebody who did a talk at WordCamp Europe and they took that talk and they turned it into a tutorial on how to add a new shipping option to the checkout process checkout block. Which, that’s great. Through more documentation and clear information on the topic, it’s easier to, for the community to, Follow a uniform way of doing things.

On that front, I’d like to just mention when at the beginning of the year I discovered a site called WP development. courses. By Frank Klein, and he’s one of the lead engineers at Human Made, and he’s put together the most brilliant block theme development course and block academy or block theme academy, and then block development.

So I, I bought the course and being from South Africa. What I usually ask for is parity pricing. He was more than welcome to accommodate us, which was it’s a big like feather in his cap. I appreciate that sort of thing. So I got my team to do the course and it was incredible, really great information, probably some of the best I’d found on the topic.

Because there really wasn’t, there still isn’t a lot of information that’s really at that level. And I then got a mail from Frank on his newsletter saying that he was going to do one on one sessions. If people were interested, they needed to pay for them. And I decided to Invest in that. And it was right at the beginning of us starting on you block theme development exercise.

And over a period of six weeks, Frank took my team from not quite zero to hero, but took us from knowing a fair amount from his course and from our experience to being confident. In what we’re doing and he didn’t just teach us and mentor us on block theme development, but he impressed upon us the importance of a proper git workflow and a few other things in our workflow that He didn’t need to do that, but he’s passionate about what he does and He was just incredible.

And it was one of the biggest boosts in my team’s skill level in, I don’t know, just one of the, probably the biggest boost in skill level in the shortest space of time.

Mitch: I’m glad you bring this up because one thing you were taught when we were talking about your team and

how they’ve been with you for a long time, I wanted to ask you about how you facilitate like team workshops. We’re all going to need some skill progression. And it sounds like you just hired a consultant.

And did you do like a whole group class and you all just rallied around it together. Cause I’m curious how you implement these like educational strategies for your company.

Ash: that, that was a one-off scenario where we. I made sure, so it’s four sessions over six weeks, and they were about an hour to an hour and a half, where we prepare in advance topics that we felt we were unsure of, and we included maybe a little bit more than we could within the hour, but we prioritized the ones that we had to do.

So we went into the session, and we’d cover the topics and make notes. Everyone would make notes of their own notes, and then those notes we’d take and mull over in our heads, and then apply them to a round of development. Before the next session, which would then yield a further set of notes for the next agenda and Frank then did code reviews.

It was only my lead developer and front end developer that joined for that and myself because we wanted to keep it small and focused. But what we’ve done in the past for workshops is Being remote, there’s, it’s a bit more difficult to do workshops, so we have once a year a team retreat,

Mitch: Yep.

Ash: where we’ll rent a house and get everyone together, and we’re small enough to be able to rent a fairly large house.

At one point, we were out of the 12 team that we had back then, I think 11 of us were there. So then I would map out certain objectives. So we’d start in the morning, the workshop would be on certain topics. Like the one year, we did the getting things done by David Allen. And we did that workshop over two days and then we built in some social time.

Mitch: Yep.

Ash: Yeah, that, that kind of face time, I believe is very important and I’ve modeled those retreats and what I’ve learned through the people that I’ve met at WordCamps. The automatic company, they do a yearly meetup, but also quite a few of the other large agencies, specifically human-made Noel would mentor me on what they do and how they go about things.

I really like the way human-made look at how they interact with their team and the things that they do. They’re a great company.

Mitch: Nice. Yeah. We call ours the Saucal experience. And I think with the remote teams, yeah, you need to. Definitely meet up once a year and we’re going to be meeting in Cartagena in January.

Ash: Oh, wow.

Mitch: Yeah, once you get to a certain size too, it’s funny because like we’re just a bit over 20 and so it’s like I’ve reached the capacity of all of us staying in one place. So fortunately I found this compound, there’s enough rooms and bathrooms for everyone. And then I think it’s just going to get to the point where you have to rent whole hotels. But yeah, the team workshops are interesting. It’s cool how you did that. And because we’ve tried experimenting all those things too.

Like I find with the team retreat, that’s where you save some of the really important stuff that’s good to do in person. The only difference we’re going to do now this year versus other years. Is we’re going to meet in advance in November and we’re going to do like with just a small group of us and we’re going to have a coach and he’s going to help us do a lot of strategic planning.

So whereas instead of having a workshop at the retreat, we’re going to do a smaller workshop and then we’re going to be presenting it to the team and discussing and dissecting it because it’s really like here are the pillars of the business and here’s how we’re going to grow and what we’re focused on.

So that’s the variance I’ve done now. And on the education front. We right now the team is doing some react courses because we just decided, a lot of some of the team needed to level up and traditionally to we’ve had like virtual seminars where like all it could be all hands on deck.

But now we’re spacing it. So we have one or two people working on it for two or three weeks and then they take their notes about what they think is important and then the next cohort will come in and start doing it and they’re going to build off the notes that the first group did.

So then hopefully by the end of it, we’ve got pretty good documentation about what they need to know about, say react with WordPress and and that’s how we’re experimenting this round with leveling up the team on a certain subject.

Ash: That sounds like a great idea. I actually just made a note about that because I think that’s something I’d like to consider for our team. Although this year, I don’t know, we’re probably going to end up doing our BVLAC camp trip. BVLAC is a national heritage, Campsites or narrow national heritage area in South Africa.

It’s about two and a half hours drive from Cape Town. And I take the team camping and we are offline. We don’t talk about work and we drink beer barbecue meat. So in South Africa, as we say, but I yeah, we, but I meet and,

Mitch: That means rice barbecue.

Ash: Yeah, but if you’re South African, you don’t say barbecue.

Mitch: Interesting. Okay. Okay.

Ash: Yeah. And we, what we had before we had a teammate who is a whiz in the kitchen and specifically making a South African dish called a poiki.

So that kind of interaction where there’s no requirement for discussion about work or anything like that really fosters great relationships. Between the team and last year our designer came with his partner and. One year old and that was really great. So yeah, it’s that’s a different type of event, but I do think that we need to do another one of those meetups where we have the team and we talk about strategy.

This is what I’m going to be working on for the next couple of months while I’m in Thailand and just out of my normal environment and thinking about what’s next and where are we going?

Mitch: Yeah. For me, it’s important to have both of those elements, like the fun and the work. Because when we’re at the retreat, cause all of our interactions all year being remote is work. More or less. We have some fun days, some fun chats. So we really stress like guys, we’re just here to have fun and hang out with each other.

So we do a little bit of work at the beginning, just so we do get those important things out of the way. And then from then on, we’re like, let’s just have fun. Like we have Sam on our team. He’s a Brazilian and he makes the best caipirinhas.

Ash: I love that.

Mitch: We used to be so stingy, it wasn’t a stinginess actually, but it was just like, we only wanted people to bring like a carry-on bags because sometimes we would go to two different locations and we’re waiting for bags would be really slow. And so we always talk about with Sam, like how he’s got like a blank check.

It’s dude, you can bring as many suitcases as you want. Cause he brings. All the cachaça from Brazil. And then we have our caipirinha night, which is always awesome. So we go by the pool and we just drink and just have a ton of fun. And those are the, that in the workshop is the ones that are burned in my mind.

It’s like the core memory that I really enjoy. So you need both, and I would just say to, my friend, Alex at Elliptus, they they do marketing and WordPress and outside of WordPress now, but. He had a team retreat recently and he backed it onto a word camp which, is another strategy we could talk about.

And I know like after eight days, they were exhausted. And one of the first things I asked them, I was like, dude, did you allow A free day, like a one or two free days where people can just, use their time as they see fit. Some people just want to hibernate in the room. Some people want to go shopping and he said, no, I didn’t.

I was like, yeah, dude, like that’s major key. Like one, one thing we always have at a retreat is like a one or two days where the whole afternoon is just free. And it’s you just go do whatever the heck you want. Cause we all recharge differently.

Ash: Yeah, totally. How long are your retreats?

Mitch: we do seven days. Yeah.

Ash: Oh, wow. I suppose then a bit of work also happens along the way is still run.

Mitch: we enjoy it because then it happens organically. Whenever we tried to force it, like we would have a hackathon or something, like it just felt very inorganic. Whereas now it just happens naturally. We’ll be like, Oh, remember, I don’t know, some, something we were working on, it’s yeah, and then we start brainstorming and then it someone starts taking notes and we come up with new ideas and we don’t force it.

It just happens. And then it’s really fun.

Ash: Yeah, that’s a great idea. I’m definitely going to take notes from that.

Mitch: Yeah. I we’re at time here, so I don’t want to go too

Ash: I think that we’ve had a great session and you have been a fantastic co-host. Thanks for the wonderful insights and yeah I thoroughly enjoyed this.

Mitch: Yeah. And now let’s give a shout-out to Bob, of course, Do the Woo. For his fantastic podcast and being very consistent,

I think he’s like a glue for the community in that sense that he’s always cranking these out, no matter what, like he just shows up getting his reps. And so I got a love for him, especially now he’s my Portuguese brother or whatever.

Ash: Yeah, man. Living in Porto, you living in Lisbon.

Mitch: Yeah. So it’s cool.

Ash: Cool. Thanks and cheers from Thailand.

Mitch: Yeah. Cheers, Ash. Take care, man. And all the best. And I know I’ll see you soon.

Ash: Dude, I’ll chat to you soon.

Mitch: Sounds good, brother. Adios