Why Storytelling Matters in WordPress Product Development

Jonathan: Welcome to another episode of Do the Woo. I am your co-host today, Jonathan Wold, and I am joined by your new co-host with me, Tammie Lister. Tammie, welcome.

Tammie: Oh, thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

Jonathan: It’s great to have you. So, for those who don’t know either of us that well, let’s dig a bit little bit into our backgrounds, and I’ll start with this. For you, when did WordPress first come onto the picture, come into the scene in Tammie’s life?

Tammie: Yeah, I describe it as I was torturing my own code, my own blog. I think a lot of people, and this is back in the day, were trying to create their own thing because everyone thought they had to create their own thing. Highly insecure with PHP and trying to write because everyone thought they had to write on the web and do something to get your words out there. Someone just said, “Hey, you enjoy creating the design layer more and creating that aspect more and the words. Try to think of WordPress.”

I think I resisted it for a while, because I was like, “Yeah, I like tinkering, but this is the way we’re meant to. We’re meant to make our own thing.” As soon as I discovered the theming and the customization, that was me, the ecosystem and everything grew up from it. It’s quite early stages, but that’s how I discovered it.

Jonathan: Do you remember what version of WordPress it was?

Tammie: It was right back at the beginning because I just joined when theming was starting to happen.

Jonathan: For me, it was right around WordPress 1.5, which I think plugins had just been introduced. It was in the 1.2 to 1.5 transition, but 1.5 is where I started. I remember that the admin gotten a bit of a remake.

Tammie: The admin had several remakes over its time around then, and it kept on changing its clothes.

Jonathan: I had a similar experience where I’d been playing with PHP. My motivation was a bit different. I was always looking for the shortcuts and so I was happy to do PHP, but as soon as I learned about WordPress, I was like, “Oh, this is cool. I don’t have to be figuring this folder structure stuff and inheritance and all this. I can work on WordPress.” I discovered the community pretty early on. When did the community first come into your experience?

Tammie: So community’s always been a thing with me. I was in the Linux communities before and I tripped into the community, if that makes sense. So, I discovered the product, discovered the community, and that was like, “Okay, well, I get this. It’s part of that.” I was already in the blogging communities or those things. So, it was a natural fit for me. Then the contribution, it felt right to me that you pay for the free software that you get. That’s always been part of my thing.

Jonathan: This is part of the exchange. Yeah.

Tammie: Yeah. So, that was pretty soon on my contribution journey though. It was a little bit varied. I went around and tried to find the space that worked for me, because back then, it was very vast is the best way I can describe it. There wasn’t so much a theming and there wasn’t so much a plugin. It was very core was a vast space. So, I landed in BuddyPress after a few years because BuddyPress felt like a space I could work on, not close, but a very distinct product. I’ve done theming. Themes were great because they were like a package. I could understand that. Then BuddyPress, I could understand as well. So, for me, it was always about things that I could understand that had an application that was my product brain kicking in. What about you?

Jonathan: So it’s been a long time in WordPress for me. So, the online portion was always a piece of the puzzle for me, but my first WordCamp and if I’m recalling correctly, so I’ll come back to that moment. Do you remember where we first met?

Tammie: No, which is awful.

Jonathan: No, no, no. Well, it’s interesting because it would have been very memorable for you, but it was for me. I think it was my first WordCamp, WordCamp in Europe in Vienna. I was with XWP at the time. I have an agency doing enterprise work and this was my first WordCamp, right? I’ve been in the community for more than 10 years.

Tammie: Huge first WordCamp.

Jonathan: Yeah, it was phenomenal. I recommended it. It was a great experience. This has been for a number of reasons. One, WordCamp has been on the weekends. It had always been a struggle for me with a young family and not working on Saturdays and just the travel in general. So, it’s just been something I hadn’t made time for. So, I’m at this first WordCamp and there’s a lot of people that I’d connected with in different ways online, but there’s something about the in-person. So, I’m at one of the dinners that XWP put on and you were there. This is reminding me of an important lesson that I’ve learned over the years of not making assumptions about people based on first impressions.

Tammie: What did I do?

Jonathan: You didn’t do anything, you were great. But for me, as someone who was just coming into the community experience, the impression that I walked away from that was that you were too cool. I’m like, “Oh, Tammie, she’s super cool. She’s doing this stuff over here.”

Tammie: I’m so not cool.

Jonathan: We didn’t really talk. It’s not true. You were quite cool. It was a big dinner and I remember seeing you there. I didn’t know much about you, but the people that had invited you were really excited to connect with you. It was an interesting experience. This has happened to me a couple of times because you and I have since become good friends. We’ve worked together on a number of different things and that was an important reminder to me in reflecting back on it of just the importance in general.

Tammie: I think it’s a reminder to me that we can wrongly associate idolization or say people are cool or whatever when they’re really not. Maybe they’re just working on a project that’s the hot thing at the moment, but that’s just because the work they’re doing at the moment’s hot. There was a many, many years of contribution that I was doing that I was not cool. There’s many years after that I’ve not been cool. I just happened to work on a project that was hot at one point and that’s a different thing from doing the thing. My first WordCamp was just a regional WordCamp, which was such an easier way of doing it. My first ever speaking at WordCamp, I was so uncool.

Well, no, my first biggest speaking, I walked off stage not realizing you had to ask questions and answers and spoke too fast, just to show how uncool I am. But I think sometimes we’re all contributing to the same thing and we’re all making the same projects. I think that that’s just to get to know people. I’ve tried over the times, I think I’ve had the same thing in this project with different people when I’ve turned up in spaces. I’m totally shy. Just trying to listen to their story and see the things that they’re creating I think is so important.

Jonathan: One of the things, and for anyone, if you haven’t been to WordCamps, it’s going to be a tricky thing, especially when you are working on a hot project. There is that sort of association and it’s tricky, because I’ve done this, we all tend to do this. It’s like you can form a conclusion of someone based on a first impression.

Tammie: Well, that person’s probably completely tired and they may be working 20 hours a day because they’re working on the hot project.

Jonathan: Especially at a WordCamp.

Tammie: Yes, they’re working 20 hours a day on the project. They may be working back to back. I think sometimes people don’t realize if someone is working on either… It’s not just a hot project, it’s a hot product. They could be working on something that they’re trying to release for that WordCamp and then they’re either trying to pitch at that WordCamp. Pitching the product in core is the same as pitching a product at the WordCamp if you are a company. So, you’ve worked all the hours that you could fit in beforehand and then you’re working all the hours when you are there.

You are not in your body at that point. So, you might appear to be very cold, calm, and collected, but your brain is maybe not in your body even though you’re trying to connect. I think that’s the interesting thing. People are trying to be present and there, but WordCamps are very overwhelming for people. But there’s such an opportunity as well.

Jonathan: Yes, they can be overwhelming. On the opportunity side, I think at least for me, I try hard to not have a fixed schedule when I go and to just really enjoy it and take it in. I love standing in line, they often have incredible food, which is just wild for the price that you pay to go into a WordCamp. But standing in line and just talking to folks. Now at this point, for you and I both, there’s many people that we know, so there’s a familiarity piece. But I also have this joy of just meeting people that I’ve never met before over and over again and learning about the project that they’re working on, the product that they’re trying to get up and running. There’s incredible value in that. For anyone listening who hasn’t made time to go to a WordCamp event, I highly recommend it.

Tammie: I love going to the sponsor areas. It’s something I learned a few years ago. I don’t think anyone told me to do it or anything. I think it was more just I happened to wander and just discovering. I’d now try and make time for it and just try and particularly the smallest sponsor areas, because that’s when you get the new products, like at WordCamp Europe this time. You got to see. I get very excited.

Jonathan: Sponsor is a big deal. You don’t get much for it.

Tammie: The hallway tracks are great as well. So, those are good for me to sit and get that information from people. At lunches, if you can sit not with someone that you know for at least one lunch I think is always my best advice. That’s a good thing.

Jonathan: When did WooCommerce first come onto the radar for you?

Tammie: I think it was when I was working for client work and this was before I worked at Automattic and it was free Woo themes and it was through that aspect for it. I think it was known by something different then. It was a different product. I don’t remember what name it was before it was WooCommerce, but it was a commerce product before that and then it was that. Then when I was in Automattic, it was through that. So, it was that path for me. Yeah.

Jonathan: For me, e-commerce, because of just the nature of what I did the first, 10 years of my career in WordPress were doing all sorts of development projects of all shapes and sizes. E-commerce came on pretty early. So, there was WP eCommerce, there was Jigoshop.

Tammie: Magento, I remember trying to get Magento to work as well.

Jonathan: Yup. I did some work with Magento as well. Then WooCommerce just became pretty prevalent early on. I was also an early Woo themes customer. Yeah, it was interesting to see this aspect of WordPress that was far from its initial great tool for blogging use case. I think Woo to me was one of the best ways of seeing just the much larger than obvious or the ecosystem aspect of growing out of the project where it’s like people are building an entire eCommerce businesses on this piece of open source software and Woo brought that front and center.

Tammie: I remember trying to template with Magento. I don’t want to speak badly of any software, but trying to template with stuff like that doesn’t work and it particularly doesn’t work if you have a very particular frame of mind of WordPress templating, which it is a particular way of doing things. So, it naturally fits that. I think the space was ready for it. The space needed it. The fact that it’s grown in unison with the product has really helped a lot.

The same of having the bolt-on plugin technology and that ecosystem and that marketplace approach. I always go back to my BuddyPress days, but that ecosystem and the bolt-ons and the plugins, there’s something really special about having that in our Woo and WordPress because it’s adjacent. Therefore, it creates businesses, it creates those livings from it as well.

Jonathan: So you joined Automattic. What did you start working on first?

Tammie: So because titles are weird in Automattic, I was a theme wrangler, theme developer. So, I worked on themes and that was originally really my thing was theming. Hybrid is the best way to put it. I’d specialized in community for quite a while and worked on BuddyPress and done a lot of work with that. But really I joined because I just love that balance of UX and theming. I worked on that for a bit and then did more UX and then this little thing that I don’t think anyone knows called Gutenberg happened.

Jonathan: So you end up focusing on Gutenberg. What were some of the highlights of that experience? That was a good chunk of your focus there.

Tammie: Yeah, that’s a good chunk. Learning product, I think. When you’re doing a theme, it’s a small snackable product. That’s the best way I can describe a theme because it’s tiny. But you learn everything about a product. You learn everything about shipping, so you do the whole lifecycle, but you don’t learn marketing. Kind of, but it’s small, it’s shippable. You do updates. But learning mass scale and learning by doing, learning by making mistakes, learning by just so much deliverables. I think that that’s one of the biggest ones.

One of the highlights is I think some people get projects in their life and I feel this is one of those projects that I’m lucky enough to be a part of. Editors are so core and essential to anything that you do. You therefore learn foundation across all products and all things as well. So, I flip that back. Oh, sorry.

Jonathan: How many years were you focused on Gutenberg?

Tammie: So I was in Automattic seven and a bit. So, at least three or four. It’s something like that. Several. Let’s go several.

Jonathan: It’s going to be really interesting. It’s already starting to become… So, to look back on the introduction of Gutenberg and the challenges surrounding it, one of the things I noticed earlier this year, we’ve had a big move where the Gutenberg editor’s gone from one star to two, the reviews.

Tammie: I used to reply to every review.

Jonathan: Did you really?

Tammie: That is one of my jobs. Yeah. I tried to reply to every one-star review.

Jonathan: I think most people now who look back saw… The journey is not done, right? There’s still a lot going on. It’s a tough project for a lot of different reasons and only tougher too because of the just increasing size and scale of the ecosystem. Yet most people who are following it closely agree that it was the right move. We can say what we want to about execution, the way things we could have done differently. It’s always hard.

Tammie: I think that’s the thing, you have to learn lessons collectively in open source. If we are making the same mistakes we were making in phase one at all, then we need to look and we are not 0.1, but we’re all adults, but adults make mistakes, adults learn. Adults also do some things right. In reflection, some of the decisions are right. In reflection, some of the decisions aren’t right. I think that everyone’s older. Everyone’s different. Everyone would make different things, but you can’t like time travel and go back.

Jonathan: So themes began, it sounds like, your product interest.

Tammie: And also most people who are involved in Gutenberg have a theming background, which is a curious thing that a lot of-

Jonathan: That is interesting.

Tammie: It’s a curious fact.

Jonathan: You have a couple of years working on Gutenberg, this product at a much larger scale, and you’ve continued to work in product since then and wearing just a number of different hats. Any highlights that stand out from your experience post-Gutenberg in the product side of things?

Tammie: I worked in WordPress and then I went into an agency. I worked in startup with Extendify, then I worked in agency with XWP. But after that, I wondered what I wanted and I’ve worked in WordPress for a very, very long time. That’s great and amazing, but I wanted to see what else there was and challenge myself. I think what I’ve been trying to do since I left Automattic is challenge myself.

Jonathan: Why is that important to you?

Tammie: I think if I’d chosen the easy road, I wouldn’t have chosen open source. I don’t think anyone would choose open source if they chose the easy road. I mean that with a beautiful open heart, but the easy road is probably… I don’t know. DIY is not the easy road.

Jonathan: So why then? Are you just a glutton for punishment?

Tammie: I think I’m just a tinkerer at heart. It’s not I’m glutton for punishment because there’s so much reward, right? It’s not punishment without reward. Otherwise, I’d just be some masochist and I get so much reward. I’m a tinkerer. I just like engineering and I just like that approach.

Jonathan: What do you think the reward is?

Tammie: Community. The reward is being able to make things, being able to turn things around quite quickly. Even when I went outside of WordPress, I went to a very small startup, which was GitBook, but that was such a lesson in product work. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to choose what I need to learn, whether I think I need to learn it or the world has decided I need to learn it, whatever. I learned a lot about rapid product work in that space and I got some really great lessons. Then from there, I’ve gone back to work at Inpsyde now and to do again agency at scale, but I’ve come back as development, because really for me, product work is multiple sides. For me, that tinkerer in me likes to know all those sides. What about you?

Jonathan: This idea of the reward is interesting. So, first, I’m an optimist by nature. So, when something’s interesting to me, it doesn’t take much. I can deal with a lot, but there’s something deeper here. It’s been 18 years now for me in WordPress and I’m looking at what I expect to be the next 10 years of my career in WordPress. It’s interesting to think about what the motivation is. For me, there’s a couple of things. I remember working at WooCommerce and I was in charge of community. So, WooCommerce is a for-profit commercial organization and I was in charge of community. I had volunteers who I had the privilege of working with, who are giving their time to this for-profit project that yes, it’s open source and all this stuff, but it motivated me to dig deeper.

What is it? There’s a few things that stand out to me. At first, there’s just the basic shared concept of shared ownership, which is inherent to open source. There’s this sense whether people are conscious of it or not, that when you work on the project and I work on the project and it’s the same thing, we’re both increasing the value for each other. So, when I help you learn WordPress, when I help you unlock something, I’m also helping myself. So, open source and the WordPress as a project benefits, it’s not dependent on altruism. There’s this sense of when I help you, when I contribute, I’m also helping myself.

I’ve seen that all the way up to enterprise where large organizations invest millions into the project with confidence that what they want is for their things to be used by others because that’s a benefit to them in the long run. This concept of shared ownership is key, but you could have that just generally in open source. There’s a number of ways. So, at least for me, there’s something about the impact, seeing your work life. There’s the satisfaction that comes from that.

Then even deeper for me, I can’t but see the connection between WordPress and the open web broadly and the sense that the healthier our project does, the more that people benefit from WordPress and WooCommerce is such a great microcosm of this. People’s lives have been changed because of the businesses that they’re able to build and own in this sense of it’s theirs. To me, the open web impact, I feel like I’ll still be poking away at this for years. Yet the framework of motivation is there where the work that we do in this project makes a difference.

Tammie: I think the word I would use is potential.

Jonathan: Okay, I like that.

Tammie: So yeah, I say DIY, tinkerer. That’s a pure selfish thing, because honestly, if I can take it apart, I probably will. If I can tinker with it, I probably will. That’s just my nature. But there is a real potential that you don’t get enclosed. It’s the access, the ability, the inclusion and the ramp and just the ladder anyone has to climb to be able to access something more. The scale to get help is just so significantly more. You get a lot. You get mentored, you mentor. That’s an underwritten rule of open source, right? That’s part of what you’re doing. Over the years, so many people have put into me. They knew that by putting into me, I would therefore be putting into other people.

There’s a contract there. That’s part of it. People with products, the whole point is… I think we haven’t seen it fully yet from the product space. I think we’re starting to more, because I think people are starting to realize that there was a time, particularly with Linux, and it was like, “Okay, we can’t make money from open source. No, no, we have to be super altruistic and we have to be almost like hippie-ish about it and never have money.” Actually, we do need to eat. Actually, the open source people are getting older. We do need to live and maybe they’ve got children and maybe they’ve got lives.

People want to do this for the rest of their lives and they want to have this way of life and this way of life has actually enabled them to live a life that has been pretty okay. If they can pass this on to next generations and build these products, that’s okay. Then they can take that outside of what they’re just doing in their product because open source philosophy and open web philosophy isn’t just about how they’re doing their product. Just to get a bit deep there.

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Jonathan: So you start out playing with PHP. You have sort of this development background, the Linux piece. You get into theming, this product side of things. You go into UI, UX, go pretty deep under the product side. Now you’re at Inpsyde, which is just a great agency in this space and you’re doing development. So, I’m biased towards range. I think there’s an incredible value in having a wide range of skills, but for you at this stage in your career, what do you find interesting about development?

Tammie: So It’s actually returning back. So, I actually started in software engineering and art before that. So, it’s not like a 180 for me. If you think of a graphic equalizer, I’ve always wanted to have the graphic equalizer. I’ve wanted to have all my cake and eat it. No, I’ve wanted to understand that. Again, the tinkerer in my brain wants to understand how things are made. When I don’t understand the technology in something, it doesn’t worry me, but it does worry me and I really want to make the things are in my head. To do that, I need to understand some of the technologies now. It’s like design and product, yes, you can mock it up, but there’s a gap.

Technology changes and there’s so much amazing technology to be able to play with and create. So, even be able to get a first prototype out of my brain is great. Being able to understand how the bones and the engine works means I can advise and create better products. So, that’s part of it as well for me.

Jonathan: So here’s a challenge. So, for me, I’ve had a similar experience, started out in development. There’s very little in the product lifecycle that I haven’t done, done marketing, sales, product design, product development, contributed to UI, UX, just a bunch of it. This is 18 compounded years and a fairly nonstop learning. I’m still learning. Similar to you, I’ll jump into something just to learn, just to explore new things. So, there’s all that context. Then you have this next generation coming in of product founders who have an idea, who don’t have all that background.

Especially in an open source ecosystem, there’s this curious tension where the bar is low, you can just jump in and do something, but it’s also high at the same time where it’s success in this space for a number of reasons. So, from your perspective, when you think about product and you look at the size of our ecosystem, according to WebPros’ data, there are over 92 million active WordPress sites. It’s a good chunk of the web, right?

Tammie: It is.

Jonathan: If you are a product creator coming into this space, let’s just focus on WooCommerce for a moment of which WooCommerce by install base is larger than Shopify. Say you have an idea for a product that’s going to be a hit with merchants, but you’re new to sort of all this and you can be drawn in by the size and by the low bar that anyone can play. Then reality begins. So, I’m getting ahead of myself. From your experience, what are some of the challenges or opportunities that stand out to you for someone coming into this space when you think about it from a product creator’s perspective?

Tammie: I think you said it earlier is when we go to work, we know people. I think it’s one thing when you walk in a room or a space and you know people you know who to talk to. But for the first few years, whenever you walk into using a product, particularly open product, you have to learn the product base and then you have to learn how… So, you’ve got to learn how the things work and how you can connect them. Then in our space, you’ve then got to learn who to sell to and who’s already using it. That’s a lot.

So, I think the challenge isn’t for the people coming in, the challenge is for the people who are already there would be my reflection. That’s what I feel is to create a space where people can be connected to each other more easily and where people who have already made those connections are visible or people who are willing to make those connections are visible is also something, which I think is a mature market, which is what I hope we’re starting to see.

Jonathan: I like that take because one of the challenges that we have, and I think you just voiced something I’ve felt for a few years now. I don’t want to see people try to come into our space and then get discouraged and leave.

Tammie: Otherwise, it’s like people walking into like… Okay, I love American supermarkets, but they scare me, right? Because they are so many different products.

Jonathan: That’s great.

Tammie: The English mouse going into these products and it’s so daunting, but even big English supermarkets are scary to me. It’s like that, right? You’re putting someone into these giant spaces and saying, “All right, now thrive.” You cannot do that. You cannot have someone do that and you cannot have those connections. That person might have the brightest idea, they might have the best skills, but they’re never going to thrive.

When I first turned up to contribute, I ended up finding the quietest corner of contribution because it was the only place I could go where I felt calm. Honestly, I wandered all the way around Core. I wandered all the way around WordPress. Eventually, in BuddyPress, I found a super calm little space where I could be heard and it was lovely. Honestly, that’s how I started to contribute was just from my voice being heard and nurtured.

Jonathan: It’s interesting that you would go from that to probably the least calm space.

Tammie: But you grew. But I was nurtured. So, it’s weird analogies, but how do you grow a seed? You don’t just put it… You can, but good luck. Not all the seeds are going to work if you just throw seeds in the big field. Not all of them are going to work, but if you put them in a tiny little seed grow and then nurture them up, they’re going to work. Then put them in a bigger pot, slowly grow them. Don’t just shove them and then hope it’s going to grow. That’s what we think we’re going to do from a business perspective. We don’t have that nurturing.

Jonathan: Have you seen the movie The Lorax?

Tammie: Yes.

Jonathan: I’ve watched that recently with my kids and I loved it. Just this idea of taking a seed in the end, just let it grow, but you have to plant it and you have to give it that chance to do so.

Tammie: You’ve got to nurture it. We’re not nurturing people and we’re going to miss out on opportunities if we don’t do that.

Jonathan: So I want to just pick on that a little bit further because I think you’re spot on. Those of us who have been in this space for a while, it’s in our collective best interest to make it more and more accessible to newcomers because we all benefit. When a new product founder comes into our space and says, “Hey, I want to create something for the WooCommerce ecosystem, we want to create incentives for them to succeed,” we all benefit from them doing so. I think that’s an important reminder for those of us who are in this space to continue to…

A lot of this for me comes back to this concept of decentralization. It is one of the big benefits that we enjoy, but the trade-off is that it’s very easy to be siloed off and disconnected from each other if we don’t do the work, attending WordCamps, connecting with each other, reaching out, having conversations to make the connection, to mitigate those trade-offs and make those connections happen. For those coming into the space and listening, it’s important to realize that you’re not intruding. We want you in this space.

So, when you see one of us at a WordCamp or you see someone, our incentives are aligned to help you succeed. Also, there’s a lot of things to consider with open source. So, you’re going to get candid feedback. People might be pretty direct about things. There’s all sorts of curious, just general people stuff and also unique to open source and WordPress. We tend to be cynical as a culture. So, that can be a little off-putting for folks, but overall, we have an interest in seeing newcomers succeed in our space. We know that to be true.

Tammie: I think that cynicism, sometimes we really as a community need to park for the new things because we need it shattered. I say that about myself as well. I feel super old sometimes. When someone comes up with a new shiny library, I’m just like, “Ugh, really? I’m too old for this, right? Ugh, can we just not have the old thing? Oh, can we not?” But pretty much every time I’ve felt that way, I’ve been shown to be completely wrong. Whenever I thought I was too cool with what I used to know or old and I thought I’ve hung on to something or I’ve been like, “Oh, this is the way someone has shown me,” it’s not the way.

When I’ve sat and listened, it’s because they’ve got a really good reason and I just haven’t found that reason for it, which is 100%. But we need these people outside and I don’t mean outside, but outside of WordPress to show us, because then we learn more, outside who have technologies that we are not yet using fully and embracing. Also, because we’re a really small community of contributors if we only look inside and navel gaze and only look internally to ourselves.

Jonathan: For me just speaking to the need of why the outside, WordPress is for the web. Ultimately, the way I like to think about it is WordPress at its heart these days is about empowering creativity on the open web. For that to be the case, we have to think about the web as a whole and WordPress, we see this over and over again. WordPress already plays a big influence. If you want to see a standard adopted across the web, WordPress is the place to make it happen or it’s at very least a key part of that work and the narrative. For us to continue to improve, we have to be drawn from the outside in and making that connection between the two.

Tammie: Yeah. I think, well, we forget that WordPress used to be back in the day, one of the places where people would go and test ideas. You’d test an idea for a website because you could spin it up super quick. You used to create a website, just spin it up on WordPress, grow it into a product. When it out scaled, you would build it into something else or whatever or products even. We’ve lost that try it fast because there’s two aspects to this one. We can’t rely on WordCamps for people to turn up, I think. We need to look at our ecosystem outside of just contribution and outside of WordCamps and I mean that was all the love in my heart because contribution isn’t just turning up and putting a line of code.

Contribution is being part of the business of WordPress as well. But also, we really need to look at the components, the products, the things, the libraries, the things that we have that are connected to the product. Because if you can’t build on top of Woo and you can’t build on top of WordPress and you can’t extend it, then people aren’t going to want to build on top of it if they can’t find the thing to connect, to build on top of it. If they can’t find the thing they want to do, they’re going to go somewhere else where they can just spin it up using a JavaScript library or not using anything at all.
If they can do that faster and get around WordPress, they’re going to. That’s what we have to remember, that it’s a different world now that these technologies exist. If they can do it faster, which they should be able to, by using the preexisting components, the preexisting everything, which we have so much potential to do, then we’re onto a winner, because then they can spin these ideas up really quickly.

Jonathan: There’s a beautiful tension there. I remember when I was hosting WooCommerce meetups, there’s some people who would think Shopify is a dirty word, and I’m like, “No, what we actually care about is success. We want people to have success.” There are some benefits and trade-offs we’d like you to consider, but ultimately when you embrace it, because when we think open web centric, the proprietary platforms have an important role and I’m all for people getting the success that they need to. What I want is entrepreneurs, folks who innovate, they can do it in the proprietary spaces. I want them to think about open source. I want them to think about longer term. As they succeed, especially by being customer centric, that also inspires us.

That reminds us, that keeps this, “Okay, how do we stay customer centric in a big project like this?” When you think about how to connect those pieces, when we embrace that rather than just seeing proprietary as the enemy, it’s this like, “Okay, yeah, there are benefits and trade-offs. Let’s be conscious of those.” We don’t want a web that’s like dominantly proprietary. We can have them coexist though and make WordPress stronger and stronger for it. I think about all the people who do migration work and integration work. There’s so much that we can do to create a healthier ecosystem.

So, Tammie, I think for both of us, we see plenty to hold our interest for the next decade in this space. So, going forward, we’re going to start bringing more product founders on. We’ll be exploring that more together, which I’m excited about. To give folks a sense of what to expect from us, what are some of the things that you are interested in unpacking with product folks?

Tammie: I want to know their stories. I am so curious. Why did they take investment? Why did they not take investment? Why did they do this decision? Why did they not do this decision? How did they get to where they got? That’s what I want to know, just knowing more about the stories behind the products, yes, but also stories behind the people behind the products because I think that that’s really, really important. We don’t necessarily have hack days all the time where we can see that and spin up with people. We don’t necessarily see the blog posts of people telling their life stories or those things.

Sometimes you do occasionally, but I would love the opportunity to really dig in. You get the release of this release does this on the change log and you can see that about their product, but let’s go behind that. Let’s not just find out what their feature set is. Let’s find out what were their decisions. Why did they take that investment at that time? Why did they not? Those things. What about you?

Jonathan: At this stage in our ecosystem right now, I spent some time, about a month or so back thinking about the future of WordPress in the next 20 years. I like to think a lot about trajectory and inertia, momentum. At this stage, I see so much opportunity for us to improve the way that we do product in the ecosystem, to get past some of the challenges that we have with monetization, to see products tap into more of the distribution available. When I think about founders, I want to see more momentum. I want to see more founders who figured it out and went from a hobby or maybe some confused incentives, because there’s a fair amount of me doing that happens where someone does pricing this way.

You have preconceived notions about like, “Oh, this is how you have to do it in WordPress.” It’s just not true. But we get stuck in these loops at times and I want to see more people break out of the loops and then do so in this open source centric way. So, I think that for me, it’s finding more of the people who figured that out and extracting the key parts of their stories to share and inspire others to do more of the same. I want someone to listen to hear how a founder figured out monetization in an open source space. That’s something we can unpack for a while, to figure out how to 10X their distribution, to tap into more of that and then inspire others to do the same.

Because going back to where we started with this, we all benefit from people succeeding in WooCommerce, in the broader WordPress ecosystem. I think you and I digging into more of those stories and just trying to do our best to pull out some of the highlights and inspire, and then ultimately, what I want to see is people who are listening empowered to say, “You know what? I can do that too.” To recognize that not only are we cheering for you because we see all the benefit, but we want to help and it’s in our best interest as an ecosystem, as fellow WordCamp attendees to be a part of making that happen. I think that that’s a big thing for me. Plus, it’s always fun meeting more people and you never know where it’s going to go.

Tammie: Yeah. Plus one, two, Fred does it a certain way, so we all have to do a pricing table a certain way. WordPress pricing table has to be done a certain way because that’s the way it went. No. So, we need to see that, okay, someone tried doing it that way, it didn’t work. They looked at some other product that wasn’t even in WordPress and they did a pricing table. Oh, look, it worked, or they just tried this that’s absolutely against all the rules and it worked and this is why it worked. Everyone thinks that there are these paths that are cookie cutters or paths you should follow of a product.

Generally, the people that have been the most successful and success is a real eye of the beholder because I would also like to hear from people that maybe they have got to a point and they’ve gone, “That’s enough for me,” because that would be really interesting. People who have said, “Nope, this is enough business for me. This is me and my family. This is enough for me.” They haven’t sold and they’ve capped it. That equally is interesting to me as people who’ve grown and grown and grown and grown to a point and exponentially. So, those are all super interesting because you don’t have to give up your job, eat soup for a year. I don’t know. All those different stories that you hear product like you don’t eat for a year whilst you’re doing whatever, all those debunking of the myths.

Jonathan: I love it. We’re going to be at WordCamp US next month. We are excited about that. In the meantime, so for anyone who’s coming, look for us, we look forward to connecting with you there. If anyone wants to connect with you online, what’s the best way to do so, Tammie?

Tammie: Yeah, you can find me on @karmatosed to all the things.

Jonathan: You got a couple of web projects that you’re working on. So, you have of course your own tammielister.com. What about this Next Labs. What types of things can people expect to find there?

Tammie: Long written blog posts. I haven’t done any in a little while, but I’m trying to write thoughts and essays is where I’m going. I’m trying to bring back the old web in a good way, thoughts and reflections on things. That’s where I’m going there.

Jonathan: Excellent. Well, we’re going to have a lot of fun.

Tammie: How about you?

Jonathan: Yeah, for me, jonathanwold.com. My WordPress site is the home of my writings. I’m a little bit confused about what social media I do or don’t do these days. I’m not really confused. I’m more curious to see how things settle. Yeah, I’ll look forward to seeing folks at WordCamps. If you’re not already on Slack, the wordpress.org Slack is a great way to reach either one of us as well. So, excellent. Thanks, Tammie. We’ll see you on the next episode.

Tammie: Thank you.