WooCamp

Simplify. Work out the kinks. Re-focus.

That’s our plan for 2012, discussed in meticulous detail over the past couple weeks during Magnus’s visit to Cape Town. Exactly what that entails remains top secret for now. What we hope will increase happiness levels amongst our users is our quest to make our support structures more efficient. Working out the kinks.

With 123 themes and 123 theme docs, and other support resources including a knowledgebase, FAQs, a support forum, tutorials and a video library catering for over 130,000 users it’s very much a daunting work in progress that we are tackling one resource at a time. Below details some of the work going on behind the scenes recently.

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This is the backstory… We pride ourselves on being transparent, honest and proactive when we talk to our customers. We’ve never avoided a challenging discussion and we’ll also be first in saying sorry when we have screwed up. The reality is that it doesn’t matter how awesome we are 99,9% of the time, we will have slip-ups, we will frustrate some users sometimes, and that’s why we are quick to apologize and quick to react & rectify a bad situation.

Back to the current day…

A couple of weeks ago, we were made aware of serious security flaws & vulnerabilities in the TimThumb script (by a 3rd-party developer), which we use to dynamically resize user images in our themes. We reacted immediately by updating & securing all of our themes and making these new versions available to our users. In our mind, we had taken due action, and based on the minimal bad reports we had from our users, this didn’t seem to be a widespread problem.

Things went relatively quiet for the few days after the blog post and we were helping out a small handful of our users that had been adversely affected by the security flaws. But then we started noticing that more & more users were complaining of an issue and two weeks after the initial blog post, we released further updates to our themes (to make it easy to spot & fix the vulnerabilities easily), as well as sending out an e-mail newsletter to all of our users, advising them that the issues were indeed critical and that it required urgent & decisive action on their part to resolve this.

Unfortunately this was too late for some of our users, who had already had their sites compromised as a result of the vulnerabilities. This is what we’ve learnt from this experience:

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In our continuous effort to improve the way we work, we’ve recently implemented two new concepts in our workflow: hackathons & teams.

Before I share the details of these concepts, I need to provide some context. Basically when we started WooThemes 3+ years ago, Mark, Magnus & I did so without any type of “best practice” programming background, which meant that we were simply doing whatever us novice programmers thought yielded the best result. As we’ve grown up, those initial days and workflows have become part of our core processes and routines, which made us a very well-oiled machine.

As time has gone on though, and as the team has grown, we’ve realized that whilst our existing workflow obviously isn’t broken, it could definitely do with some improvements. Improvements in turn means increased efficiency & value for the WooCommunity.

So with that in mind, we’d like to share the two things that we’ve recently implemented that has already made a huge difference to how we work. Neither is groundbreaking or unique in its own right, but the benefits we’ve experienced already at least justifies a blog post.

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Earlier this week I was staring at my computer screen, looking at a blank WordPress post page, trying to figure out what the headline for the release post of our latest theme, Statua, would be. This was admittedly a hard task.

I eventually settled for “To All Photographers: Meet Statua”, which is one of the ideas that didn’t seem too stupid or repulsed me.

The thing is that I know I could’ve done something simple. Maybe something like “Statua V1.0 Released”. That’s clear, concise and communicates what the post is about: we have released a new theme called Statua. Simple. It is however also boring as hell.

We don’t do boring. It’s never been one of our brand attributes to be boring and we’re definitely not gonna start being mundane with the headlines of our blog posts either. I regularly laugh at myself for the headlines that I end up using for blog posts, because there are some really silly one’s in there. But at least they’re not boring. And some of them are even quite quirky I’d think.

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In Getting Real, the development industry’s manifesto by 37Signals, introduces a concept of “releasing when ready”. This basically implies that date-based milestones / deadlines aren’t that important and that if you’re developing a new product, or aiming to release an updated version of your product, you should release it when it’s ready (and not give succumb to the community pressure of releasing some rushed, half-assed version).

So quite a while back, we decided to implement this into our workflow in the WooHQ, as we were continually finding ourselves rushing to meet the deadlines that we set ourselves, which just caused a working environment that wasn’t much fun, due to that stress associated with meeting those deadlines. For quite some time, this has served us really well, since it most definitely eliminated the stress of those deadline rush days.

But recently we started noticing that this mentality also caused a few negatives to creep into our workflow…

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One of my favorite parts of working with the WooCommunity is hearing from a satisfied customer. We aren’t always able to make everyone happy, but for the most part I’d say we get the job done and have many happy WooThemes fans from it. 100% Satisfaction is always something we’re striving for, but for some people we just won’t ever be able to put a smile on their face. I do think I’ve developed a bit of a strategy though in my short time and experience working with Woo.

Here are the ways I’ve found to make and keep WooUsers happy…

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“Personal” experiences / opinions should generally be reserved for my own blog, but I figured for this WooLessons post it’d make sense to share a recent personal experience to further illustrate the importance on one’s team (something which has actually been covered quite extensively in WooLessons since we started publishing these).

So last week I decided to take some time off and spent a couple of days at a nature reserve in the Western Cape with my wife. No mobile reception, minimum internet and a bunch of non-work activities (i.e. sleeping, relaxing by the pool, etc.) to keep my mind out of work. Blissful & some much needed downtime just to recharge the batteries.

But that’s not the point of this post… During our time there, I checked in on WooHQ activity, because I’m the curious kind, and also because I never manage to completely shut down when away on holiday.

I saw that Cobus had posted some mockups for a new top-secret project (see these two mockups if you’re curious) and was asking for some feedback. Since I was very close to this specific project, I immediately felt the urge to jump into the conversation to “make sure” that my vision and ideas were being implemented. Yet I stopped just there…

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Are we making the right investments to help grow the company? How do we determine which projects we need to commit to?

This question popped up recently, whilst we were scoping out some new functionality – the working title is The WooThemes Concierge for now – that we hope to add to WooThemes.com in the next couple of week. The functionality is basically aimed at making the lives of our users – especially prospective users – easier when they are faced with the “challenge” of deciding which theme to purchase (which has become more difficult, considering we have 90 themes as I write this).

If I was an outsider and I asked myself the same questions (as above) applied to this project, I’d probably like to know:

• How the WooTeam decided on committing resources to this project instead of alternatives;
• What the alternatives (direct or indirect) were; and
• How this decision was evaluated in terms contributing to a return on investment.

So here’s an overview of how we made this decision…

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WooVille has become a really popular feature since we introduced it towards the end of last year.

Initially we thought that it’d just be fun to share a bit of behind-the-scenes insight into the inner workings  of the WooTeam, whilst also generating some traffic to the site (this was probably our main motivation to start this up). Since the first WooVille went live though, we’ve found that the series has been a great addition to our workflow for a couple of reasons…

We hope you get to know us better. Sometimes joking about oneself is the best way to kinda be honest and share insight into who you are. And that’s what we’re attempting with WooVille: it’s not meant to be corporate, but instead it should give you an idea of who we are and how we work. We think that our customers enjoy the fact that they know who is behind the computer, the e-mails they receive, support tickets being answered and themes being released. It’s just our way of making sure we’re as personal as possible. 

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When we first launched WooThemes, it was only the 3 co-founders on the WooTeam, which meant that most decisions could happen pretty quickly, efficiently and without having to involve a massive team with varying opinions. 3 decision makers also seems to be a perfect situation in that no decisions will be caught up in a “draw”.

We have however never enforced a 2 vs 1 situation that is sometimes just natural when 3 individuals have to make a decision. Instead we’ve preferred to spend more time discussing our decisions and whilst it would be impossible for all 3 of us to be similarly passionate about each decision, we at least want everyone to feel comfortable with the suggested decision(s).

There thus is no majority vote at WooThemes and we’ve never used the 2 vs 1 situation to force a decision through. This just isn’t the way we do business.

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Last week we hired Ryan to be our new Community Manager after receiving more than 30 amazing applications for the position. Generally these decisions are pretty hard to make, because comparing CV’s is probably not the most efficient way of deciding between 30-odd candidates. There was however 2 characteristics which made Ryan an obvious choice for the WooTeam (something which was also evident in our 2 other short-listed candidates): individualism & passion.

Ryan created a whole “Hire me WooThemes” page, which included an incredible video – which he shot & edited himself – to sway our opinion and hire him instead of the other candidates. So sure – we realize that not every candidate had Ryan’s videography skills and it goes without saying that our decision to hire was obviously not made as a result of his videography skills (as this itself doesn’t – yet – seem to be a beneficial asset to the WooTeam), but heck did that video sway our decision-making so much…

But, what’s in a video? We’ve obviously never met Ryan, which makes our hiring process a tad more complicated since we can’t actually have a sit-down and judge the character of the person applying. But with the video we could see two things:

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We have a team of 10 hard workers dotted around the world, and whilst we’re absolute ninja’s at most the things that we do, we still have one constraint: time.

We realize that most of you reading this will sit there and think “Sheesh, I wish I had 10 team members to help me out” and that’s a valid point, but we obviously have a growing, hungry user base to support. Consider that there’s 45 000-odd of you in the WooCommunity, which means each member of the WooTeam is roughly responsible for 4500 users (or “clients”), quite a daunting thought…

The problem isn’t necessarily insuring a memorable, and positive experience for every single WooThemes user, we have a constantly evolving membership system for that (more on that soon), but it’s finding the balance and time to spend on developing and releasing new products. If you consider that we’re hitting our goal of 2 themes a month relatively easily (along with the fact that we’re continuously releasing improvements on the WooFramework / old themes and the themes we’re developing are becoming more complex), we’re not doing a bad job of managing our time.

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Developer Tools, the “batbelt” of developers everywhere, generally stirs up conversations telling you about what you should and shouldn’t use. However, I’ve always had a different take on it, I change my toolset based on the work that I’m doing. When I was a .NET developer I worked on Windows and in Visual Studio. With WordPress and PHP development, I’m not going to use those tools as I don’t have to.

So having said all that, I’m going to tell you what works for me and in general I try to use the bare minimum to get stuff done here at WooThemes. With so much code to write, I don’t want a million apps and settings to go by – I just want to login, write code, and deploy.

So here’s my setup…

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How do you know that your products work the way they are intended? You use them yourself.

We’re firm believers in using our own products, which means that exactly the same WooFramework that goes into our themes, is the one that WooThemes.com has been built on and is powered by. We believe that this best communicates our trust in the themes that we develop, and makes for a healthy marketing campaign.

Three examples of us actually using our own stuff:

• We recently hired Ryan as our new community manager and we used our jobs board (the theme is not ours, but we’ll save that for another blog), WooJobs, to advertise the position and handle the applications. We got 34 top applications in the space of 4 days and managed to hire an incredibly talented individual to the WooTeam in less than a week.
• The WooThemes Showcase has been using a slightly modified version of Snapshot (a free theme we released back in the day). The Showcase these days features almost 1500 awesome modifications of our themes and is still running strongly (probably due to the continuous improvements that has gone into the WooFramework which powers Snapshot).
• For our Express iPhone App marketing we use a modded version of our Apz theme to showcase it’s features and act as a sales tool.

There isn’t a much better testimonial than that, is there? 

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A while back, we wrote a blog post detailing how we’ve been successful as a team, because we’ve allowed the individuals on the team to specialize in the stuff that they’re most passionate about. This however comes with one proviso: there’s still a to-do list and all the tasks need to be completed; so everyone can’t *just* do what they want or feel like on any given day.

The way to achieve this, is to balance out the specialist skills by also diversifying the skill set you have available on your team. This should be done in two ways (using the example of a web design / development agency or most online startups):

1. Make sure that you have a good balance between designers & developers on the team, but furthermore a balance between designers who prefer Photoshop over CSS, and CSS over Photoshop. Similarly make sure that you balance out PHP or WP or jQuery skills on the team, so that you can cover all of your bases equally well.
2. If you have a developer who is great at PHP, have a secondary developer who is almost as great at PHP, but prefers to do mostly jQuery work. You do this as a contingency plan to make sure that if your #1 guy is away from work for weeks (due to illness for example), the team can still function without him or her. Neither diversity or specialism should come at the expense of making sure that the team can still function when some of the team members aren’t present. That’s just silly & semi-suicidal.

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We’ve blogged about how important & valuable design is for any business before, but we’ve not yet explained how we believe that it’s even possible to design our code.

Looking around the web, you’ll see that all of the most prominent platforms (i.e. the one’s with thousands / millions of users like Google, Facebook, Flickr etc.) understand one thing: to service that amount of users, you need to be designing & developing a product that is usable in the hands of their community. This means that things like a superior UI becomes paramount in their ability to influence both the emotions & experiences of the users whilst they are interacting with your product(s).

Since they are however hosted platforms, the users never touch the code behind the UI, which means the UI itself is purely a question of how well the designers & front-end developers have executed their jobs. Sure, we all know that there’s obviously thousands of lines of code that are making that awesome UI do its job, but the users themselves never comes into contact with that code. Which simplifies the whole situation greatly…

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