What’s up folks – we’ve been away for a while but we’re back and in full swing for season 2 with even better content than season 1.
Today we’re going to tease some of our early season 2 episodes and catch you up on what we’ve been up to since our break.
JT, in August of last year, your world changed in two huge ways. Your wife gave birth to twin boys Felix and Clyde.
You might hear them in the background of a few episodes as we usually coincide with feeding time.
Man – a huge family of 6 now, 2 girls, 2 boys… are things starting to settle down a bit now having crossed the 6 month mark?
As a hopeful parent one day myself, I have many questions, the first is: with your twin boys, did you ever mix up which baby was which and just went with it?
Is it true that even in identical twins, belly buttons are always different and the best way to tell them apart?
Walk me through the routine of managing a tsunami of children. When does Jon go to bed, between all the diaper changes, do you get any time for yourself, are you still finding yourself able to get up super early?
You’ve said to me that having a 4th baby is like being handed a baby while you’re already treading water… Do you still agree that going from 0-1 is the biggest transition?
Tell the listeners about your freaking sauna and how it’s changed your life LOL
So after your parental leave – you took back the helm of leading Klipfolio’s marketing team. What’s exciting you the most about what the team is cooking up over there these days?
Phil, you started at Automattic / WordPress.com in June last summer, you’re coming up on 10ish months now. Having only ever worked in startups before, how’s it been adapting to a 2,000+ person org?
It’s been pretty wild honestly. Automattic is like a mini Berkshire Hathaway – a holding company of sorts that houses many different products and brands under one roof. I have colleagues that work on Woo Commerce (the open source Shopify), Tumblr (Taylor Swift’s favorite social media platform), and some that work with me on WordPress.com. But we also have WordPress VIP, JetPack, Long Reads, Simplenote and during my early days there we acquired PocketCasts (the best podcast app) and DayOne (a journaling app that I’ve been using for many years).
So wpcom isn’t a 2,000 person company, we’re like 400 but yeah biggest marketing team I’ve ever been part of for sure.
Biggest transition period for me was less about working with a bigger team and more about working asynchronously across multiple different teams. We use a tool called P2, its an open source collaboration app built on Gutenberg/WP and it’s how we mainly communicate with each other.
Aside from a few HR emails, I don’t think I’ve ever had an email from a colleague. Everything is on P2 or on Slack. We do have some synchronous zoom calls, but any key decisions is always posted back on P2.
Missed a week because of a vacation, you don’t need to have a colleague catch you up in a meeting, you have a nice list of unread P2 posts and you’re right back into it.
It honestly feels like a different world… but I think it’s where the world is moving.
What excites you the most about working at WP almost hitting the 1 year mark.
I’ve sharpened my growth experimentation skills and my email copywriting skills but I find the product fascinating. I got to take a tiny part in rolling out FSE, WordPress’ big 5.9 update which came with some huge changes to the product. It’s already been downloaded by 60M sites across the world and it’s been really fun tagging along and seeing the next lineup of changes.
So with all the stuff going on, we definitely leaned on guest episodes to start season 2 and we’ve got some big names, some folks are huge on twitter, some folks are c level in big tech, some are up and coming super stars, you know us, we've got a nice mix of folks with wide ranging topics and opinions.
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Intro music by Wowa via Unminus
Cover art created with help via Undraw