Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to within WordPress. Our guest today is James, and I'm not entirely sure how to pronounce your last name because I want to pronounce it very French, but that's the right.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Way to do it. Jerou, that is a French last name.
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I figured as much. So welcome for those who don't know who you are and what you do.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: My name, as you've said, is james giroud, and I'm the founder of team WP. And before that, I've been involved in the WordPress ecosystem, gosh, for about 15 years now. I think I started out as a freelancer and an agency owner doing that kind of thing, building websites for clients and customers, built some themes and plugins in the early days of page builders for a framework called Pagelines. That's sort of how I got into sort of the ecosystem, if you will, of WordPress.
From there, I joined a company called Envato, which some of you may know, and spent about five years working at Envato before heading off to Gravity Forms, and most recently over at Stellar WP home to LearnDash the events calendar cadence. So, yeah, I've been lucky enough to hang out with a lot of the creators of what we know as Modern WordPress, and it's been a lot of fun.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: It has been.
I've seen you going from place to place.
That sounds worse than I intended. But I'm kind of curious on the role specifically, because you mentioned the path. I'm kind of curious what kind of stuff did you do at Envato and then whatever came after.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: So you share a little bit more.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: About yeah, I mean, when I joined Pagelines, it was doing kind of two things. I was director of Operations and the kind of developer advocate, I guess you could call it.
I worked with all of our third party add on creators, which I was one of, as well as helping to lead delivery of releases for some of the add ons that we were creating internally at Pagelines as well. So that's sort of how I got into WordPress and started to meet people and do that kind of thing. And then the role that I was initially hired for at Envato was the WordPress Evangelist role, what we would call today a community manager or field marketing, something in that world.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Were you before or after Jeff?
[00:02:42] Speaker B: I was after Jeff. Jeff kind of was doing it, and then he left, I think, to go to Human Made. Was it human made or XWP? And then I kind of jumped in after that. So, yeah, he was my predecessor and I picked up from him and hung out and did things for a while there before becoming the author engagement lead. So basically moving from representing just WordPress at Envato to representing all of the creators across all of the different content types that Envato created.
[00:03:21] Speaker A: And that's quite a few.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: Yeah. So there's over 70,000 active creators in the envato ecosystem across all of the different content types that they do.
My primary, of course was still WordPress and I still went around and represented and hung out with creators in the WordPress ecosystem.
And then yeah, after four and a half years, five years during the pandemic, things kind of changed, my role changed and I ended up leaving and joining Gravity Forms as the Community Experience Manager, I think was my title at the time, but in practice the resident YouTuber. So I created a show there called Input. Did that for a while and after a season or so we were all kind of like, it's not quite the direction we want to go. So they decided to do something different and I moved on and within a few weeks landed at Stellar where I was for the last year doing brand and product marketing.
[00:04:27] Speaker A: Brand and product marketing, so that's generally a very broad term. Can you specify a little bit more? Because I've worked in that as well and I'm pretty sure whatever I did, it's going to be different from what you're going to say now.
[00:04:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: Did you roll until it was a.
[00:04:45] Speaker B: Little bit of everything. So on the brand side, it was working in experiential marketing, so doing some events and sort of repping the brands externally at events, helping with Earned media and paid media.
I did sponsoring of a bunch of different things within the WordPress ecosystem and helping to sort of set the brand. Like what is it that we wanted to be known for in the WordPress ecosystem, doing a little bit of strategy and thinking on that and then also working very closely with partners, like a lot of roles. I think what happens is what it's supposed to be when you join is a little bit different to what it is after you join and things kind of change and seller is very much a place of rapid change.
Within a few months, my role had completely changed and more from what I thought it was going to be and the product side of it, which was working alongside all of the product marketing managers in each of our different products, became more about me supporting LearnDash primarily and working in that area. And so I did a stint there after Chris Lemma left as sort of the marketing lead and helping to get some things aligned there and then moved on, really focusing on video development of the video program and then partner marketing as well, kind of is where I ended.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: So you mentioned earned and paid as two different things. For those who have no idea what that means, what is the difference between the two?
[00:06:27] Speaker B: Yeah, earned media is like anything that you can do to get somebody to talk about you without having to pay for it. So being on a podcast as an example of earned media or being mentioned on WP Tavern or being in a newsletter so anything that we could do, so it was building that network and helping to support that. And I confess I didn't do most of that. Michelle Frichette, who many of you know, in the WordPress ecosystem, she was the primary driver of all of that within Stellar, still is.
And then paid media is anything we're paying for. So when we sponsor a podcast or sponsor a newsletter, things like that.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: Yeah, and when you say we, that is the entire Stellar WP portfolio.
So Team WP, where does that I.
[00:07:24] Speaker B: Mean, teamwp kind of started a little bit as how would I describe that? As like, scratching the itch. So I have been a student of leadership and organizational development for 20 years golly, since I kind of left university or college and was, like, out in the world in the early days, the very early days, reading books. Like pat Lencioni's leadership fables or john c. Maxwell's five levels of leadership.
Stories like that. That sort of wet my appetite for this idea that leadership is something that can be learned and it's something that can be developed in an organization to actually move an organization forward.
And so it's always been something that I've been interested in and then over the course of the last 1520 years just had the opportunity to learn from great leaders all over the globe and gain experiences and skills in leadership as well. Been very lucky to have had a lot of opportunity to get training in team development and culture. And as I've been moving around from company to company within WordPress, I've been noticing that there are some great cultures and great teams, some good teams and some not so great cultures and experiences.
Yeah, I got to a point where I was like, in some of these environments I'm going, is what I know, what seems obvious to me isn't obvious to other people. And I went, Why is this not obvious to everyone? Why are we not doing this and why are we not doing that? And it was like this AHA moment where I went because I'm already so far down the track. I've gone from being a student, right, to potentially being in a position of a teacher where it's my responsibility now to help educate and encourage other people to think and implement these practices. So that's where teamwp came out of, was just this desire to want to share my experiences and my insights and what I've learned over the last 15 or 20 years with people in WordPress in the hopes of being able to see our teams and cultures get better over time.
[00:09:47] Speaker A: So Team WP is a one man show as an entity or how do I see that?
[00:09:54] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a one man show for now. One day, maybe in the future, it'll grow. But for now it's really started out as a bit of a passion project for me. And a side thing, I had no intention of making it a full time thing while I was at Stellar. But how do I say this? I was laid off from Stellar like a lot of people in tech. And all of a sudden I found myself with all this time and thought I've got this very short window between roles where I can invest time, effort and energy into making a go of Team WP. So I thought, well, why not do that. So I have just gone full time into it.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: Interesting. So what I'm curious about is how does that because at some point you're going to have to make some money with that, right? Yeah, maybe you already are, I don't know. But ideally same here, by the way. So if you want to sponsor this podcast, do reach out, but there are dozens of different types of routes we can take to productize. I guess what you're wanting to add, obviously it's insights and there's techniques and all of that, but how does that work? How do you see that?
[00:11:28] Speaker B: Well, first of all, we have a free employee Engagement survey, a benchmark that we're running that I'm hoping that I say we. It's the royal we. It's really me that I'm running called the Team Experience Index. And the whole idea is that if we can get and encourage employees from companies in the WordPress ecosystem to fill out this survey, it gives us a benchmark that we can measure our own teams against, right? So we get this average, this working average from there. One of the ways I'm hoping to monetize this is to actually invite teams to create their own personalized version or tailored version of the Team Experience Index, where they can have their own custom questions based on their own goals for what they want to do in their team culture.
We can tailor the survey to do that. Having it administered and conducted by a third party actually increases the likelihood of getting more accurate responses because there's that safety of it being anonymous and confidential and no individual submission being shared with the company so you can't track it back to an individual.
So having a third party come in like Teamwp to conduct the survey and then provide analysis and insights to actually support what you're trying to do and give you those action items of how you can take this forward, I'm hopeful that that's a service that people will value paid, obviously. And then beyond that, the other thing that I'm looking at is been really thinking about this, that within WordPress or within the agency space in particular, it's very common that the attrition rate of staff is around 30% a year. So basically one third of staff are turning over every year in an agency. What that tells us is that culture is a big deal, team is a big deal, and we're maybe not doing as good a job there as we possibly could and it becomes a risk factor that companies who are looking to hire agencies have to think about because who wants to have a project start? And then maybe it's a multi year project or it's like a six month project, but you've got a third of the staff turning over and you've got delays because you've got to bring new people on board and you've got to reorient everyone around the project and what you're working toward and goal setting.
[00:13:59] Speaker A: That's absolutely a risk.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: That's absolutely a risk that people think about.
Yeah. And if we can get teams to be thinking about that and do something, what I think makes sense is like certification. So, like, your team is certified?
What I call open team certification. That's an opportunity for you to think there as part of your pitch or your proposal process, that team and culture is something that you're actively trying to derisk for your clients.
That's something I think that's a value to agencies in the space as well, and product companies because it's a recruitment thing as well.
[00:14:40] Speaker A: So the second word you're mentioning that prompts me to ask the same question that popped up earlier. You're essentially moving into the HR side of things, right? So I come from an HR background myself. The way you position Team WP is essentially some elements within HR as a whole are to be outsourced towards Team WP. Do you have an idea of how to expand on that? Is this it or do you want to go like one particular set of things and then go in hard? Or is it the idea to slowly expand to, I don't know, recruitment job board?
I don't know. I've had a lot of opportunities.
[00:15:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I've had a lot of thinking there. I've had a lot of people mention that right now. I think what would be really interesting is for existing job boards and existing places out there to actually say, have like a checkbox or something where companies can say we are Open Team certified. That to me would be more valuable. I guess if you want to take a pure business lens on this, right? We can go and recreate a job board and we can do that kind of work, and we can promote the companies that are part of our network that are actually doing the survey and being certified. Then we've got to build an audience that's actually going to want to come and check our job board and we become focused on building an audience to find jobs, right? We become Indeed or we become LinkedIn.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: Jobs better than indeed.
[00:16:28] Speaker B: Yeah, but another thought was potentially becoming the glassdoor of WordPress where employees are evaluating companies or we're getting these scores around how companies are doing and maybe that's a better approach. So rather than being a job board, maybe we are being able to offer a neutral third party sort of review of a company's team and culture.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: That sounds like a daunting task. That sounds like a big thing.
[00:17:03] Speaker B: Yeah, which is why it's not my primary thing. I think right now, if we can get certification happening and getting it into other job boards, that's actually better because they're focused on hunting for that audience and building that sort of like, jobs market, and we get to act as the certifying body. That's a better positioning, and it allows us to do things in that space, whether that's consulting or advising. I'd love to see us doing, like, management training and coaching to help our teams in WordPress actually get better at leading the teams that are within them and creating culture internally.
We could go full HR and do things like creating onboarding programs and doing professional development training and all these kinds of things maybe one day. That's like a full kind of HR.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: Ecosystem version of Team WP.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: Yeah.
And part of that comes out of really just the reality that most of WordPress doesn't have the capacity right, or the financial capacity and resources to hire someone full time to be in HR or to be like.
[00:18:17] Speaker A: I think you're right.
The companies that we see in the WorkPress space, those that are mature and those that have been growing, have been doing that for the successful ones are here for 1516 years.
The second wave is about ten years ago, and I think about five years ago is the last wave. And I would say we're in a five year interval pretty consistently, but ultimately they're relatively less familiar with everything that comes with HR other than hiring, because you have to hire a way around that one. Yeah. I would say there's a lot of room for services that cover some of those basic HR roles.
[00:19:09] Speaker B: So.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: You explained a little bit on the side of leadership and learning different skill sets in that role.
What triggers you? What motivates, what prompts you to be like, okay, so this is where I see my value.
What is making James happy in this?
[00:19:35] Speaker B: I think for the first time in a long time, I am at the center of what I'm passionate about, what I'm experienced at, and where I think I can generate revenue. That ikigai sort of thing.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: Sparks joy.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: It sparks joy.
I love talking about this and what's really exciting to me, what motivates me, I think, to do this, is really kind of like coming back to the joy and experience I get out of the community of WordPress. Right. When we go to work camps, when we show up and we hang out together and there's a sense of collaboration and openness.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: What is that connection? I'm aware of it. I know. How would you describe it?
[00:20:33] Speaker B: I think there's, like, this sincere desire to be inclusive, to tell everyone that they have value and to let their value shine through in the experiences and the way that we celebrate and showcase each other at work camps. Right.
It's a community that values up and comers almost as much or more than rock stars, if you will. Right. And there's this development process of encouraging new voices and people that get out there. So I love that about WordCamps and the WordPress community, but there's also a lot of missing pieces in the WordPress community. Right. Like, when I think about our release cycles for release versions of WordPress or the approach that we take to development, I wonder. And because I'm not necessarily a developer, I'm not maybe as involved in the nitty gritty, but how do we do at ways of working or team norms and creating shared working agreements around how we're going to deliver something? How do we do retros and evaluate the success not just of what we deliver, but how we deliver it?
[00:21:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I've wondered about this very long time, and I've come to the conclusion that it's it's close to impossible to actually make it happen.
What I mean with that is that you can make rules, you can make conventions, you can have ways of working.
There's all different types of way of formalizing how we're going to work together. But if that doesn't belong to the organization that pays your salary, I think it's a tough one.
That's not saying that it's not happening. It is. I see it happening. It's more of, I think, certain things. So one of the things you mentioned in your introduction that triggered a question in me is you said something along the lines of leadership is something you can learn.
And I'm not sure that that is the case. I think it has to be in you to be activated and to be learned. Yes, but I've seen plenty of examples where there's no desire to be in any type of leadership role. I've seen people be in leadership roles. Just not being happy, not thriving, just doesn't, again, spark them joy.
And with that in mind, with what you just said, I think it's tough getting to a place where that works inside the project on all levels if it's not the same employer. Yeah, maybe that's my experience. But what do you think?
[00:23:38] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think that's a really great observation. And for me, the first thing I'll say is I completely agree with you that if it's not happening in your workplace, it's really hard to bring it into the project because you don't have the practical experience or the exposure to how it can work in a paid capacity. Right. Where there's sort of you have to conform to a particular path because that's the way the company does it. That will teach you those muscles or those ways of working. So it's hard to bring that into a volunteer situation. And that's part of even my opening charter for Team WP was how can we bring some of these best practices that hopefully we bring into our workplaces, let that trickle into the way we do things in the community. So if we can start that happen, then it becomes a little easier. But then the other side to it, as you've quite rightly pointed out, is not everyone's meant to be a leader and not everyone should be a leader.
Creating career progression where the only way to feel like you are moving forward is by jumping into management, I think is an outdated approach. Right. Being able to celebrate people who want to be just really skilled specialists is not something that a lot of our companies have figured out how to do.
[00:25:09] Speaker A: No, I fully agree with you.
The natural progression, as we've done it probably since the Second World War until now, doesn't make a lot of sense.
You're not getting the best person in the role.
One of the notions I find odd in this realm is that there's this idea that only when you have been a senior in whatever job it is that you're doing, and development is the most obvious one to think of, because that's someone who mentors and helps and onboards the juniors. And whatnot that the natural progression is from going from senior going to management. And I've seen so many wonderful senior developers also in a previous life where I worked at a large insurance company, they had no other way to go up than that, so they said yes, and then within a year they were like, can I just go back? Because I'm not happy here.
We need different ways to progress.
[00:26:20] Speaker B: I guess most people don't recognize management as a career change. They see it as career progression. But it's actually a career change.
[00:26:34] Speaker A: It's a step sideways, for sure. Yeah.
I find that an interesting realization whenever I see it happen, that somebody says, I've been working here for five years, I've been doing senior management, senior role type stuff, and I'm ready for management. But that's an entirely different thing to do.
Doesn't make a lot of sense.
If you're really good with getting your hands dirty, then you can have leadership capabilities and you can be the best leader ever. I'm not excluding it, but I'm saying it's not a logical step.
And for a lot of folks, it's seen as a logical step. And I go, Maybe it's time to let that one go.
[00:27:13] Speaker B: For a lot of companies, it's the only way to move forward. Right. I think everybody wants to feel a sense of forward momentum in their career.
[00:27:22] Speaker A: Now, more than 20 years ago.
[00:27:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: And I think that's if we're seeing one thing that's being changed a lot, I would say that's the one.
[00:27:33] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's harder in smaller companies right. To feel that sense of forward progression. So finding ways to when I say leadership can be learned, leadership doesn't necessarily mean management. Right. But you can be a mentor of junior developers. You could be somebody who is just this fount or this wealth of internal corporate knowledge that becomes a resource to support project development internally. There's lots of different ways introducing cross functional teams, for example, where your discipline of specialization is different to the output of what you're doing. So, for example, having somebody in finance who has the discipline and the skill set of finance, being able to sit on a team, to develop a product or a feature is a way to allow them to exercise a different muscle, jump into something new, provide value to the company in a way maybe outside the normal set of skills that they have, but bring a different view that might actually make that feature release ten times better than it could have been otherwise.
[00:28:47] Speaker A: As you're giving that example, I'm reminded of how the world of software is still trying to sort of play catch up on what's already happening on a larger scale. And I say that like I just mentioned, before I jumped into being self employed, I worked at a large insurance company in the Netherlands as a project manager. So I had projects, project leads in my team.
And you would typically pick people from within the business. Right. There was 50,000 people working. So whenever there was a project team, you picked those who were best and it would be quite diverse. So finance would be in there, not just tell you how much money you could spend, but also there's someone from a different perspective. Let's have them sit in.
And as you're explaining that, I'm sort of reminded of that, how that is slowly getting into the world of WordPress, into the world of software, where we're starting to I think I'm coming to a conclusion which I've done before, but your example prompts me more.
We're getting more of a mature type of company within WordPress.
[00:30:04] Speaker B: Yeah, we're growing up.
[00:30:09] Speaker A: We are.
I mean, obviously there are software companies that already have thousands of folks working for them.
Like you mentioned, we start small, then you grow.
There's not that many workers companies that are exceeding 50 people on the payroll.
[00:30:29] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:30:31] Speaker A: I think we'd be shocked to see the difference.
Most likely larger, like huge plugins. Yoast is a perfect example.
I've worked there. So this is three and a half years ago and there were a little over 100 then, so I don't know how many now you have hosting companies that have more large product and large hosting. I would say that's probably and there's maybe a couple of agencies. I'm thinking Ten up, probably ten up?
[00:31:04] Speaker B: XWP Human Made Web dev Studios yeah.
[00:31:10] Speaker A: Those would be between 51 hundred, I think. But I don't have any date on that. But it's interesting to see that the formalization we're forced to go through ends up in the maturity of company where your services actually perfectly align with now, I don't think maybe, but probably five years ago this would have been less of a match, would you say?
[00:31:40] Speaker B: Yeah, it would have been too early, which is weird to think of because I was going through it at the time, right. And been around. But yeah, it would have been too early.
[00:31:50] Speaker A: Yeah. Interesting.
So what are other things that you can see that are different now versus the five years ago position?
[00:32:00] Speaker B: Well, obviously the consolidation of plugin companies is one of the leading factors here. We've got companies five years ago, right. Like you think of automotive as an example. Five years ago they were what, 30, 40, 50? They're now over 200.
RT camp is another company that five years ago would have been around 30, 40. And they're over 100 now. Right.
Some of these companies have seen some growth. We've seen the exits of a lot of founders from the ecosystem. One of the interesting things about a lot of WordPress companies is the founders that start these things off, at least in the first 510, 15 years of WordPress, were people who saw a feature that was missing or something. On the development side that needed to get added into WordPress, who took a developer's perspective, built something to solve a problem, and then all of a sudden had a company right, and had revenue.
[00:33:05] Speaker A: And it sort of happened and happened.
[00:33:07] Speaker B: And they had to manage people and they had to figure that out. So some of these have moved on and you've got actual managers running these companies now, people who know how to lead both the commercial side as well as the people side who are making decisions. You've got formal product managers coming in now and actually setting up shop. I think of like Jack Kedering, for example, over at LearnDash who's doing a phenomenal job there.
And these product managers are bringing product discipline. And we're starting to see that these best practices that happen in the general software ecosystem, general software, are actually starting to make their way into WordPress, where before it was at the developer's Whim, at the owner's Whim, whatever they decided was going to need to be done, needed to be done right. And so it's been very exciting as a result that specialization of roles is happening. So I'll be really curious to see now how that impacts our community. For example, is there a product management track at WorkAmp Europe in the future or a marketing track, more specialized? Being able to say words like earned media and paid media actually means something and people go to a specific talk around how to increase earned media. Right. Who knows?
[00:34:38] Speaker A: I think it's going to find its way in events. I'm not sure it's going to be work Camp Europe type of stuff.
[00:34:50] Speaker B: We need like a south by Southwest type of multi day, multi tent type thing that happens.
[00:34:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say I think it's time for and I also know this is a wish of work camp Central, but I think the time has come that we're going to see more focus type work camps.
I also think the time has come that we're going to see more events outside of the Word camps, but geared towards the workers community as whole. It's become large enough. I think we've seen a change, maybe hit critical mass in the last couple of years.
Obviously the weird phase between 2000 and 22,022 didn't help, and I'm pretty sure the recession we're sitting in right now isn't helping either. But I do see that the professionalism that we see happening more and more is bound to have needs. Like you just said, I need this to be talked better and explained better and where do I go to? So it doesn't make a lot of sense to go to a conference that has zero understanding of what working remote even means because for most of us, we work remote.
If you can't take that into account of what you're doing, then you can't teach those people to do what they need to be doing better. It's a tough one. So I think we're bound to have these types of events more and more.
I'm, for instance, Thinking of Cobblecrest by Chris Lama. That's a wonderful thing, right? I've never been. I'm hoping to go at some point. But for those of you who don't know what it is, cabo Press is essentially a mastermind type event. I think it's a week long, or maybe a little less than a week, but it's essentially you're with other people running into the same problem and you're trying to find the people that make you no longer the smartest person in the room.
I think that's inevitable that we're going to see those types of events more and more.
Would you agree, or do you think it's one step too far already?
[00:37:16] Speaker B: No, I think you're spot on.
A lot of us remember the pressnomics days where we would hang out in Phoenix.
[00:37:25] Speaker A: You have to wonder if that's going to come back now.
I've heard Josh is fully retired and I haven't heard Sally say it yet.
[00:37:36] Speaker B: Well, we also have Yoast and Marika now as well, who are both a bit more free their time.
So post Yoast, so there may be an opportunity there. We're seeing also a lot of energy and enthusiasm around a non WordPress event cloud fest.
So there are these things I think I was in a conversation yesterday with Joshua Wald who's been doing these teardowns of WordPress plugins. He's been doing these UX teardowns and we were talking about how to stay involved in WordPress but also bring in some of the expertise and experience from outside WordPress. And I wonder if we're moving into an era of WordPress where you have one hand in WordPress and one hand out, and rather that meaning you're silent in WordPress. We're looking to elevate those voices of people who can bring that non WordPress view or that non WordPress experience.
[00:38:47] Speaker A: I think we're doing yeah, I fully agree. I think we're there. I think we're seeing that.
Consider the scenario where I think it's stack overflow where they do that yearly check, which is your least favorite piece of software to work on. WordPress never scores pretty high on the desirability list.
I think that's just a very elitist way of looking at it. But it underlines a problem that workers has that it is still considered to be not mature enough or not good enough, but it essentially is.
If you see it that way, it's because you're limited in the way you look at it. When you take a look outside, I see a lot of devs going from WordPress and then incorporating Laravel and then seeing so Laravel is pretty close to just more native type PHP and maybe even one step further use Zend and what have you. But to then incorporate what you learn there back to WordPress, you can work with extremely modern tools inside of WordPress even though they're still back compatibility and stuff. So I think we're right there where that's sort of what you said that sort of comes starts coming back in. It needs to happen, I think, if we're to grow to the next phase.
It's inevitable.
[00:40:19] Speaker B: That's right. And it is interesting because you look even at Automatic and all of the different pies they've got their hand in, right? Like Tumblr. Like Tumblr is not a WordPress thing at all. It's owned by Automatic, right. Like we've got day one, their journaling app, which is another thing that's doing quite you know, Automatic is one of those things. I think agencies within WordPress actually are a great example of this because they often are serving both WordPress clients, right, WordPress specific clients. But they also need to know the other programming stacks, right? Like whether that's Rails or JavaScript or whatever. Laravel right. Because the architecture or the systems that their clients are using, WordPress is just one piece of it usually.
And so they're in other things as well as being in WordPress and bringing in that expertise and some of that thinking will be really helpful for us.
[00:41:22] Speaker A: Moving, are you?
My curiosity keeps having questions pop up as you're telling things from Team WP perspective are you looking to get into? Because you mentioned certification. When I think of things of certification, there's some level of training courses and stuff like that. Is that on your roadmap?
[00:41:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I've got sort of a foundational version of like a Management 101 course that I've been working on. I think hopefully today, by the time this airs, it'll hopefully be out. Been working on a framework for what I call Open People First workplaces where we've got like eight core sort of eight core pieces of something that I call the Open Team Framework, which is underpinning what we're measuring in the Team Experience Index. And it's based on my own experience, it's based on best practices. It's compared and contrasted to some of the major models that are out there. But the idea is that we've got something that companies can sort of grab onto and move toward. Like, how are you doing at Transparent Leadership? How are you doing at empowered ownership? Collaborative decision making. And if you're not good in that, we can actually come alongside you and either provide individualized training or maybe we do webinars and courses and content to help you develop some of those practices inside your organization.
[00:43:07] Speaker A: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to incorporate that as well. And I at least know that if you're going to build an online course, you most likely have a tool for you waiting for you already.
[00:43:22] Speaker B: I might have a life and some friends that I can poke and say, hey, this doesn't work the way that I want it to. Can you?
[00:43:30] Speaker A: Also, I have a great opportunity for you to build an extra add on that's right.
No.
[00:43:39] Speaker B: Interesting. It's funny, we built the first version of the Team Experience Index using Gravity forms, and I wanted to use the conversational add on that they have in beta. Right now, it's not quite ready for primetime, so I couldn't roll out with it, but, yeah, I was poking Adam Pickering, their product designer, over there saying, hey, I'm ready to use this. I'm happy to be a showcase of this in the wild right when it's ready. So get moving on it, because I need it to work.
[00:44:11] Speaker A: Yeah, but it's not there yet. Still not there yet.
No, but you have a very interesting position with Team WP, and I think there's just a lot of great opportunity you can provide to companies, and I wish you all the best for that.
[00:44:30] Speaker B: Thank you. Yeah. And for your listeners, for anybody that's in WordPress, if you're trying to do leadership alone, if you're struggling with it, we're here. I'm here. Happy to help. Just get on a call and hang out.
[00:44:46] Speaker A: Where can they find you?
[00:44:48] Speaker B: Just go to Teamwp Co, fill in the contact form. It's just me at the end of it. I'm happy to hang out. Find me on Twitter at it's. I think the era of trying to do it alone in WordPress also is coming to an end, and we're all recognizing that we work better when we do it together and that you don't have to know it all and be right. Yeah.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: That's proper. Ubuntu. Thank you so much, James.
