Answering questions about being an Architecture Wrangler

Last week in a WordPress slack community, I was asked a question publicly about my job. I love questions and, inspired by being asked about my job, I am writing this post to share a bit about what I do and why. For transparency, I made up this title 🤠 and it may change as my role evolves.

Relevant Background Context

Within Automattic, we’ve unified engineering teams, along with design and product. Matt talks about it on a recent podcast around 28:50 for more context than I can give. Previously, I worked in the division that was mixed up with designers, developers, community wranglers, etc that were all dedicated to the open source project (we called it the “DotOrg division”). Now, in this new role, I’m firmly planted within the Architecture division, which houses our engineers. I report directly to the division lead on a very small team that acts as a unit to break down work, bring teams together, cross collaborate with other divisions, and more.

What do you do in your role?

This means before I was working with a smaller subset of folks (100ish total if I remember correctly) across varying roles. Now I work with closer to 300 developers across our array of products at Automattic, including folks who previously worked on the open source side. I don’t manage anyone so I am free to strategically roam up, down, and across. I work directly with our lead of leads, division lead, and my two teammates on my immediate team. This is both a new role for me and a new approach for the company so I expect all of this to evolve rapidly every 6 months, which is par for the course for my entire tenure at Automattic. Things change quickly and I’ve learned to adapt just the same.

At the highest level, I see myself as a doer, dot connector, and accelerant who tries to find the root to problems and solve them there. I care deeply about code and culture: how each shapes the other, and how both are essential to building enduring, high-impact teams and systems. I work at the intersection of strategy and execution, often hopping between both. To make this work at scale, I collaborate closely with others, zoom out to help identify what matters most, then dive in to build momentum where it counts. That can look like driving cross-org initiatives, unblocking complex projects, implementing trainings or processes, rethinking the structure of teams for sustainability and focus, ensuring clear communication around key concerns, or connecting the right people at the right time. I’m careful and intentional about what I take on but I’m not precious about what that work is, especially if it’s high impact and necessary. For folks who have worked with me, I like to live in the “in between” spaces acting as glue and this role has thus far given me ample opportunity to center that.

What does this mean practically?

As it stands right now, this is a snapshot of some of what I’m working on or have recently worked on:

• [In progress] Finalize a 6.9 draft for feedback, pulling together various threads, and sharing it with WordPress teams for more input before ensuring we get it published.
• [In progress] Working with others to establish a proper triage process for a subset of our dev teams.
• [In progress] Jumped in to support 17 team leads after a key leadership transition, helping them navigate uncertainty and realign priorities.
• [In progress] Working with our developer experience team to implement new programs we need and take over some current work to better scale our collective efforts.
• [In progress] Wrangled a townhall for this new Architecture division
• Created and circulated a division-wide Playbook outlining our values, rituals, success metrics, and collaboration norms.
• Helped some folks who want to contribute from different companies get plugged into work that aligns well.
• Established a DRI model (directly responsible individuals) for key areas of working and a reporting structure for recently shipped work.
• Worked closely with our Happiness Engineers to understand what the top pain points are across our products but, in particular, with the Site Editor. Speaking of, this came up recently if anyone wants to dive in: Post content block: iterate on placeholder to help prevent removal and convey block’s purpose.
• Hosted calls for both our developers in the APAC timezone and for our women in engineering group to build more intentional community for each subset of the division.
• Created a guide for how to connect with customers across our products, as each has unique approaches and opportunities, like customer councils or a research arm.

As you can imagine, all of the above involves a lot of working with others and none of it can be done in isolation. That’s part of what makes this role fun and interesting. Usually each week, I have a very narrow focus on 2-4 things that I must get done that I know will move the needle and inevitably I’m brought into a number of reactive situations to help with. I keep my “Up Next” items intentionally long as you never know how momentum will shift and an idea that didn’t make sense three months ago now does.

What does this mean for contributing to WordPress?

An important aspect of my role is serving as connective tissue between Automattic and the broader WordPress community. Because I work across teams that build our products and contribute to Core, I help ensure that what’s shipped in WordPress is informed by real-world usage at scale and that our engineering teams are actively engaged with the future of WordPress itself. This feedback loop strengthens many sides: Automattic gets to build better experiences rooted in community needs, the open source project gains contributors who bring varied experiences from our products from enterprise to commerce, and I can advocate for building solutions that solve problems across every realm.

With this unified approach for engineering, it also means we can look across our products for shared problems and bring solutions to WordPress that fix those for all. This last point is particularly important as I look across both the community and Automattic to find common problems. For example, people really want responsive controls and struggle more than they should with editing their homepage in the Site Editor! We hear from our special projects team, our happiness engineers for WordPress.com, agency partners, etc. This completely mirrors what I hear in the open source project. This allows me to get a layer deeper with more direct insights about what that specifically means, like add min & max width on Columns blocks, both internally and externally to then better prioritize what we might be able to contribute back. Here’s a recent and small example of what this means practically.

Alongside this, I will continue much of what I did before: pulling together roadmaps, aligning contributors with key areas of the project, hosting important convos via hallway hangouts, helping communicate the value of our work, creating feedback loops/testing things like wild, and unblocking whatever I can where I can.

What about some of the random stuff I see you doing?

You caught me! I draw outside the lines by nature and only when my work is rock solid. I dabble in running the Museum of Block Art, facilitating connections with WordPress YouTubers (hoping a session I submitted for WCUS gets approved along with some other surprises), and doing various LGBTQ+ related initiatives (like the recent Share Your Pride photo drive). I try to have side projects that fuel and stretch me.

P.S. Enjoy this bizarre AI generated featured image. I finally gave up trying to get it to come up with more options but am trying to use it more to see how it improves (or doesn’t) over time.