Building Community and Employee Engagement with James Giroux

Jonathan: Welcome to another episode of Do The Woo. I’m your co-host Jonathan Wold and I’m joined today with a new co-host, Dominyka. How are you, Dominyka?

Dominyka: I am great. Excited. A little bit nervous.

Jonathan: Where in the world are you today because you like to travel?

Dominyka: I am in Rishikesh in India, so yeah, quite far away.

Jonathan: Awesome, awesome. And today we have a fantastic guest, James Giroux. Good to have you.

James: Good to be here.

Jonathan: We all saw each other briefly over in Thailand, so it’s nice. Now we’re making this happen, but quite spread out. How was WordCamp Asia for you, James?

James: Oh, it was fantastic. I have a not so secret love affair with Asia. I’m a huge K-drama fan and Thai drama fan, and so I have been fanboying this trip for a long time. And when it actually happened, it was like a moment for me getting off the plane, driving through and seeing all the scenes from the TV shows that I’ve been watching on YouTube and things. So getting there and walking around was awesome, and getting to eat some really great food, also amazing, the whole trip and just everyone there. It was very, very lovely. I had a great time.

Jonathan: That’s awesome. Well, let’s jump into our opening question which is, how do you, James, do the woo? What’s your kind of context for the WooCommerce ecosystem?he

How James does the Woo

James: Oh, I have a lot of different ways that I’ve been involved in WooCommerce. As a user, obviously I have WooCommerce set up on some sites. As an agency guy, I help people install and run WooCommerce. It’s been a lot of fun. I did a WooCommerce migration this weekend, so ask me how I feel about that. That was kind of fun. But just migrating from server to server, but those things are always fun. I work in the product space, so I work most recently with Stellar WP, so if you’re familiar with Iconic WP, they’re very much involved in the WooCommerce space. So seeing that and working as well in my history with Envato and a number of developers who create add-ons and extensions for WooCommerce as well. So that’s sort of my well-rounded view of it all. I sort of say I’m working my way through all the bases of the WordPress ecosystem of being a user and agency, developer, working for a hosting company, working for product companies. I’ve sort of hit all of the different bases in that.

Jonathan: Love it.

Dominyka: Amazing. So I have a question for you. What is your WordPress story? When did WordPress come for the first time in your life and how did you get hooked up on it?

James WordPress Story

James: Oh man. I got involved in WordPress, gosh, it feels like yesterday, but also forever ago, probably around 2006 I think is when I got started in WordPress. I was working, I was going to school really, and I needed a platform to build a website on, and WordPress at the time was free, which was amazing. And they had this theme directory where you could go and you could actually pick a theme for your website and then use that to build something out. And so I thought that was amazing and it certainly beat building in Dream Weaver for those of you who may remember that. But yeah, so that’s sort of how I got introduced to it.

And then from there have just been on this journey of moving around WordPress. I started out as a freelancer. I originally went to school for design and wanted to be a logo and brand designer and quickly realized that if I wanted to actually earn a living, I needed to be able to not just have the brand stuff, but also the website stuff. And lots of people were looking for that one two combination. So I jumped into web, I remember trying to learn CSS and figure all of that out in HTML. I actually bought an HTML book back in the day just to try to understand what was going on.

Jonathan: Do you remember which one?

James: Oh, I think it was… Oh, no. It was something.

Jonathan: Yeah, it’s way back. Books was how you had to do it back then.

James: Books was how you had to do it back then.

Jonathan: Obviously the web was around, you had CSS Garden and resources that you could draw from, but some of those books were excellent, they take you through the tutorial examples, et cetera. That’s cool.

James: Yeah, exactly. For me it was CSS3. I was freaking out about CSS2, right? Or CSS, just normal CSS. And I was like, what is this CSS3 thing? I started working in one of the first page builder communities PageLines, and I started building themes for them and they were using Less as a CSS framework for building things out. So I had to learn variables and how all of that worked in Less. And then they did front end compiling so you could actually write in Less and have it compiled and then put out on the front end for everyone to see. So it was really neat. And as a designer developer, that instant gratification of being able to flip back and forth from your code to the design and seeing it happen while also being able to drag and drop modules and things around was pretty innovative at the time.

So I got involved in the community there, built a few products. I started an academy, something called PageLines Academy back in the day and taught people how to work with the product. And that was really what got me introduced to the whole WordPress ecosystem beyond just being local. I started getting clients in Australia, in America. I’m in Canada, so in Europe, building these sites and solving these incredible problems and meeting these really interesting folk who are doing unique things and then helping other creators, other developers actually leverage the tool for their own businesses and for their own clients, which is really awesome as well.

Jonathan: I want to touch on speaking of that, so you spent about five years at Envato, if I’m recalling correctly, right?

James: Yeah.

What stood our for James working at Envato

Jonathan: So you have already at that point you have this kind of wide range of experience. The PageLines kind of got you into that developer space. You go into Envato and my time was a little fuzzy, but I feel like that was a bit of a heyday time for Envato. There was a lot going on. It was growing pretty fast. What are some of the highlights, any personal highlights of that experience? You already have the WordPress context, Envato is growing quickly, there’s a lot going on. Does anything stand out to you from that experience?

James: I mean, there’s a number of things that stand out to me from my time there. I feel like in a way it was my heyday as well. Sort of had a young family, I moved everyone over to Australia, we got set up in a new country and working for this company that had this incredible work culture, really good at training me to be a better leader and a people leader and really strong disciplines and product. It’s always interesting, for those of you who maybe don’t know, when you’re on the outside looking in at these tech companies, everything looks really amazing. Then you get inside and you realize most things are held on with duct tape. And so I found that to be pretty eye-opening. But for me, the experiences that I love were my first role there. The reason they brought me in was to be their WordPress evangelist.

So that was my primary function was to champion WordPress internally to stakeholders inside the company, making sure that our product managers understood the ecosystem and the culture and what happened in WordPress and what was going on within our developer community. And then also communicating what Envato was all about to the WordPress community and helping developers get a sense of how Envato worked and things like that. And one of the big things that I was able to do was actually create a worldwide tour. So basically I got to travel around like any band or rockstar might and go country to country, city to city and set up these events and meet with developers and do it all. So the first time we did it, we did it called Euro Tour, and it was around 2016, 2017 when we were in Vienna and I think Paris the year after.

And I did a tour where we did I think 10 different cities in 17 days, which might not sound like a lot, but I flew into Berlin in the morning in 2016, we did our show and we were out the next morning off to Stockholm, those kinds of really rapid turnarounds. But the events were just great. The highlight for me of doing that was I think 2019 right before the pandemic hit, we did a big tour where I went to North America, Europe, and Asia all in the same year and got to hang out with people, sitting with people in St. Petersburg and then going on this mini retreat up into the mountains of Indonesia in Jakarta to the streets of Hanoi to LA and dancing to K-Pop in downtown LA with creators and developers.

So I mean, that you can’t do with a lot of companies and being able to have that kind of experience and encounter so many amazing creators with so many incredible stories of how they got involved, not just with Envato, but how they got involved with WordPress and how those two worlds connect and the commercial side of WordPress. I see a lot of people talking about what WordPress can do and how they’re able to build a website. My own personal mission came out of my time at Envato. I like to say I help people connect creativity with purpose. And that purpose often is a commercial purpose, helping people figure out how to take the ideas and the creativity they have and turn it into something of value and of impact.

WordPress evangelist or community manager

Dominyka: That’s really amazing. Actually, when I had the look through your LinkedIn profile because yes, I stalked you a little bit before the podcast, I was very curious when people described themselves as evangelist, it sounds a little bit almost like a religion, right? In a couple of words, how would you describe being an evangelist? What does it actually entail?

James: For me, a lot of it was being in the community and listening, hearing the stories of what was going on and bringing that back and sharing that passion. Like I said before, it’s being the voice of WordPress inside of the company and being the voice of the company outside. And so when I would go to events, for example, I went to Work Camp US when it was in Philadelphia the first year and decided I wanted to do an after party and we were going to hang out at a little Irish pub and just have some fun and drinks and get to know people and no agenda. All it was was, hey, Envato’s throwing a party, we’re going to have some fun. We want to hang out with people. And it became the after party because it just happened to coincide with all the other parties ending and nobody having anywhere else to go. And so this little party I was hoping to have 30 people at turned into 150 people.

Jonathan: That’s awesome.

James: But it’s this opportunity to talk to people about what they’re doing and how WordPress impacts them. And what I would do is take that information back to the company and say, hey, so and so is doing this great thing. If we were to let our creators know about that, they might actually be able to create products in order to support that initiative. And so it helps the company, helps WordPress, helps users. Everybody sort of wins in that kind of dynamic. And then for the creators out there, Envato often has a bit of an outlier reputation or a bad boy reputation within the WordPress ecosystem because of a stance they took early on on the GPL, which by the way is not that they don’t support the GPL, it’s that they allow individual authors, individual creators to make that choice themselves.

So the position of the platform was just that we’re not going to dictate that they have to use GPL, we’re going to let independent creators make independent choice and offer them both options. WordPress doesn’t quite agree with that approach and that’s totally fine for them. So you can imagine being stuck in the middle of that where I’ve got a background in the community, I’ve got passion for the community and being in it, but not allowed to really maximize that. That was really interesting. So I could go to WordCamps for example, but I could not speak at them. I could not sponsor them. I could not do a lot of different things. So my formative years in WordPress and all of the network that I’ve built, everything that I’ve done over the years has been the blood, sweat, and tears of getting in front of people and hanging out and just being there.

Dominyka: Thanks for sharing. It’s actually quite interesting because would you say that this sort of role now is called community manager role?

James: Yeah. Community manager is actually what my role morphed into over time. Being a WordPress evangelist was very much this idea that Envato was a little bit on the outside looking in and they needed somebody to really be there to reflect them and echo back. So now it’s very much that community. And we didn’t actually have community manager as a term that we could use when I started. And that discipline of community management and community engagement has grown over the years that I’ve been involved. And so it’s been fun to get new language and new terminology that I can use to describe a lot of what I was doing back then.

Dominyka: I love evangelist. Okay? I think it sounds really much better than community manager. Community manager is very simple. Evangelist is quite, it’s the real deal.

Navigating the tension in a community role

Jonathan: James, one of the things I’m curious about is you alluded to it earlier and I think one of the challenges in a community role is navigating the tension between the interests of your community and the corporate interests. And I think it’s not trivial. There’s a lot of challenge there. And I’m curious, so as I’m hearing you and thinking back, there’s a degree to which you were in the process of that being developed out and Envato is quite the place to have done so. And as you look back on that experience and the experiences that you’ve had since, how did you personally navigate that tension?

James: Oh, that is a fantastic question and I’m really glad you picked up on that because it’s not something you really think about when you get into community management about having to navigate that tension and a marketplace is another layer. So you can imagine, I was the face of Envato to 60, 70,000 people whose livelihood was dependent on the decisions that were being made by the company that I represented. And when you’re making decisions at scale, individual circumstances are things you can’t really be considerate of. You have to look at the macro. And one of the challenges with that is everybody’s story is unique. Everybody’s story matters. And when decisions are made that are painful for some, it hurts, right? It hurts you personally. You cannot get away from… I mean, I’m empathetic in that way. I’m probably not the best empath, but hearing the stories of… I can say one story.

I was in Moscow at an event and 150, 200 authors flew in from all over Russia at the time to come in and chat with us. And I remember one person coming and sitting beside me and they couldn’t even speak English. So they had to have somebody translate while we’re there tell me the story of how they were able to focus on their child who was in the hospital dealing with some complications in their health because of the revenue that they were making out of Envato and the marketplace, that they could just leave it and earn and not have to go to work every day the way that we were doing at the time and be able to be with their child while they were sick and how much that meant to them that Envato gave them the opportunity to do that. And so you have that story sitting in the back of your mind as you’re now communicating a change in policy or a change in the percentages or the earn out calculations that will have a very material impact on how much they take home or how much they can charge.

Over the course of the time there, we made this transition from Envato setting the prices for items to individual authors being able to set the prices for items and a lot of fear because for creators who are in countries where the standard of living or the cost of living is lower, they’re able to be more price competitive than somebody based in an economy where the cost of living is higher and having to go, we need to give people the ability to independently set their prices because for those people in those countries, they need to charge more. But the down the other side of that is they can charge less as well. And watching people’s livelihoods change and the risk associated with that and navigating some of those conversations, my role was very much being front and center communicating that.

And the number of drafts that we would go through to write out a piece of comms, you can actually go to the forums on Envato now, forums.envato.com I think is what it is. Just search my name and you can see some of the things that I had to write and how careful you have to be at navigating that tension of understanding what the company wants you to say or what you need to communicate on behalf of the company. And as an evangelist or as a community manager, my role is also to bring in the human side of how are the people who have to live with the consequences of this decision going to experience this and how can I tell it like it is? I don’t want to lie, I don’t want to sugarcoat, but at the same time be compassionate and be empathetic in my responses to people. So yeah, that tension is really, really challenging.

Thanks to our Pod Friends

Managing the stress

Jonathan: I think you’ve described the tension really well, and I think what I’ll just poke at just a little bit more is for you personally, it to me seems at least from the outside in that you did a really good job of navigating that tension and it’s interesting to look at why. I’m curious if your pastoral background had any influence on that, just working with people generally. But I think the heart of the question for me is at the end of the day, there is tension, there’s the author’s interests, there’s the corporate interests, and I guess I’ll use the cliche, how did you sleep at night? How did you manage that personally? Because it can be quite stressful.

James: Yeah. There were days where it was stressful, no doubt about it. I mean, where I felt it the most is when I would go out in person and meet with people. If you’re familiar with Matt’s ask me anything sessions or his Q&A sessions that he does at WordCamp, now take that and ramp up the hostility sometimes by a factor of 10 and you’ll have a bit of an understanding. It’s funny because I watch Matt when he gives his answers and some people go, oh, he gave a non-answer. I go, that was a brilliant answer.

Jonathan: Yeah, it was brilliant.

James: Right? Because that non-answer was exactly the answer he needed to give. Because I know it. I was in Kyiv in Ukraine, 250 authors, and we did an open Q&A for an hour and a half. I stood up front alone as question after question would come at me. And they were hard. Why am I not making money? Why are you doing this bottom of the barrel or price chasing thing? Or you need to change this or you need to do this and this and that. And so the thing I had to figure out very quickly was how to not internalize the critique as a critique of me. My role there, and it’s hard because I’m the face, I am the person, I’m the official target of venting. And so you have to have a bit of Teflon in your skin and be like that. And it is, it’s empathy, being able to understand where they’re coming from. That was a big thing to try to communicate as well internally. That was probably more stressful.

The authors generally were lovely people. But it was when you would be sitting in a meeting with product managers and commercial strategists and executives and they’re making decisions about the livelihoods of people and none of them have actually been out to meet the people because that’s my job. And so I have to bring that empathy and I have to look at them as they’re going, this is a decision that we have to make that’s in the best interest in the health of the entire ecosystem. We can’t not do something. Right? But it’s going to hurt people in the short term, but it means the long term viability. And I would have to say, that’s great, but you’re only giving them two weeks to get this together. Can you extend that deadline out, for example, to give these businesses… These are not people in their garages doing things. These are people.

And that was the interesting thing was a lot of times people would think, oh, an author is just a developer sat at home in their room doing whatever they want. No, again, when I was in Kyiv, I walked through and was toured around the office of one of our teams that had a team of 50, 60. And I’m walking around their office and I’m looking at their five QA staff and there’re six designers and there’re seven developers all sitting around working to create these incredible products. I mean, that’s huge. And then doing product roadmaps and watching that go over and it’s the same structures and the same systems we have in place at Envato, this big company, they’re applying in their context as well and we’re going to give them two weeks notice about a change? What kind of business does that to another business?

So we had to start to reflect on that a little bit and change our approach and get it into the heads of our product managers that just because the development is done doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ready for launch and we need now to communicate it in a way that gives people time to adjust and get ready for the change.

Beyond WordPress

Dominyka: I really love, actually, I don’t know if the listeners know, but we actually see a video of each other. So I really love watching you James speak and the way your face lights up when you speak about things, it really truly shows your passion for what you do and what you did. So what I’m curious to know is obviously WordPress is a big part of your life. What is that you do outside of WordPress? What is your likes and dislikes and things?

James: I think I said earlier about Bangkok, I’m a huge K-drama fan, so I’ve been over the last couple years trying to learn Korean. So that’s a thing. I haven’t got very far. I do have a stack of books sitting on my office floor here that I’ve been working on. I have two kids and I love hanging out with them. We listen to K-Pop in the car and my face lights up every time they try to sing in Korean because two little white kids singing Korean is hilarious.

My wife is an artist. She loves to do that. She’s done some commission work and she’s in the middle of writing a children’s book right now and illustrating a children’s book. So that’s the kind of thing, it’s family. That’s really the big thing I do outside of WordPress. I don’t have much of a life outside of WordPress to be completely honest. It’s pandemic. So post pandemic, what does it mean to go out, do things? I’ve been into bubble tea and when I came back from Bangkok, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make the Thai milk teas that they would give us in ICONSIAM.

Dominyka: I love them so much. Oh my god.

James: I know. For $2 what I paid seven or $8 for here, I got for $2 there. So I’m like, how can I make this at home? So that’s been kind of fun. So that’s what I like, I like to tinker in the kitchen. I bought a hot pot so I can try to make Chinese hot pot. Yeah, that’s just what I do.

The story behind TeamWP

Dominyka: Awesome stuff. Awesome stuff. Well, my next question comes in, I guess you started a project, Team WP. I love its mission and it would be interesting to find out how your idea was born. How did you come up with it? I mean, talking to you, I can already see the passion where it’s coming from, but it would be interesting to hear your story.

James: Yeah. It really does, it comes out of my time at Envato. One of the really cool things that I got out of my experience at Envato was a crash course in how to be a manager, a crash course in how to be a people leader and not just a crash course in the sense that I was thrown into the deep end. No, they backed it up with training, like regular training and development and opportunities to learn and be mentored and to try out new things. And as I’ve gone to some of the other companies and hung out with people in the WordPress ecosystem, one of the things I’ve noticed is that there are very few companies in WordPress with the scale to actually be able to have people and culture conversations in an intentional way.

So you look at who we might call the iconic companies like big product companies. I would’ve said Delicious Brains a while ago before they got acquired by WPEngine. GiveWP, like a lot of the brands that are in Stellar right now, Gravity Forms, Awesome Motive. You’ve got a few of these sort of big players that are collections of these little teams, maybe without even the capacity to have an HR function or people and culture. To me, there’s two things. There’s HR and there’s people and culture. HR is the people operations, it’s the recruiting, the onboarding, the giving you your computer and your passwords and the managing sort of your legal requirements. And then there’s the people and culture side of it, which is developing people, creating culture, how your teams work together, how you do development, how you talk about things that go good versus things that don’t go quite so good. What does the learning culture look like? How are you doing development?

And that conversation is the one that I saw was missing in WordPress and I thought, let me just start writing a little bit about this and sharing the stories of things I’ve learned. So I started blogging after many years of not blogging on my own personal blog and all of a sudden was getting this traction. My articles were getting picked up by different publications in WordPress. I was being asked to write about this for Master WP, for example, and Post Status. And I thought, oh, there’s something here, right? There’s a hunger, there’s a need for this type of conversation to be happening. And my own personal experience in some of these larger companies and working with these iconic companies showed me that like everyone, we’re all trying to figure it out.

So if I can take my learning and my experience and this passion I have for people and bring that into the WordPress world in a way that’s accessible and very much flavored like WordPress, then maybe the culture that we create inside our companies, the more we can create healthier, better people-oriented cultures in our workplaces, we’ll actually start to see that leak into our community. Right? Because what’s acceptable changes?

TeamWP roadmap, an exclusive for Do the Woo

Jonathan: You’re touching on to probably the answer to my next question, but I want to just open up more explicitly. So I’ve noticed that you have an ecosystem lens both in your experience and thinking and explicitly in your positioning for Team WP, which I think is great. Looking at things holistically, I love it a lot. What do you want to accomplish? If we were having this conversation say three years from now and we’re talking back over what went really well with Team WP, what do you hope to be true?

James: This is the first place I’m going to be sharing it. So this is the roadmap.

Jonathan: Let’s hear it.

James: Exclusive for Do The Woo.

Dominyka: I love it.

James: So when I first sat down to do this, I thought obviously at some point it would be nice to generate revenue doing this, but I would much rather see teams get it better. If the one thing that happens is teams have data and better understanding of how their people feel about their work, where they work and how they work, fantastic. And I can do that day in and day out and that’s fairly straightforward. But the roadmap for me is I would like to see us have a benchmark that is well received by the WordPress ecosystem, by product companies, hosting companies, everyone as an opportunity for us to talk and reflect on how we work, not just what we work on, but how we work on it. You look at the surveys that are out there now, you look at the conversation and we’re talking about the next milestones for Gutenberg, we’re talking about the next milestones for WooCommerce at a very product level.

What are the features? What are functionality that’s coming out? No one is talking about how we get there. How does the team actually deliver that result? What’s the impact on our volunteers from a burnout perspective? Why is it that we’re rotating through contributors so much? What is it about the way we deliver that that might need to change? But if we’re not actually asking people about their experience, if we’re not doing… In Agile, we talk about retros. If we’re not actually retrying, not just what we worked on and delivered, but how we got there and how we talked to each other and how we did meetings and how we did roadmaps and co-coding together or whatever, to me, I think those are the kinds of things that matter in the sustainability of the project and the sustainability of teams. So I would love to see us have that happening.

But beyond that, I would also love to see us have some type of certification. So Team WP, I’ve been working on this as the next milestone is something called Open Teams and it’s like an open team certification. And basically any company in WordPress can do a separate survey that is kind of like, if you’re familiar with B Corp certification, it’s like a self-assessment that you do and based on how you rank or how you do and you score on that, you are certified. And that certification just speaks to the culture that you’re creating and it becomes something that you can use in recruiting and showing people what your culture is like, what matters to you.

And then from there, I’d love to do awards as well. Who are the top 10 teams in WordPress at an agency level? Where are the best places to work in WordPress and how can we amplify that and celebrate that and recognize teams that are doing great people work, not just great work? So those are a few of the things that I am thinking about and lining up, and I would love to do it all today. Can’t do that all. I’d love to partner as well. To me, my top three would be to see Master WP co-brand open the top 10 agencies and Post Status co-brand on the top 10 product companies and The Tavern publish their annual top 10 just WordPress companies in general based on the results of the survey, this benchmark that we do called the Team Experience Index. So that’s all the things.

Jonathan: I love it. That’s a great lens.

Seeing and dealing with employee burnout

Dominyka: I absolutely love it too. I think that from my personal experience, you briefly mentioned burnout, and I know that for example, me being quite new to WordPress ecosystem, you can get involved very quickly because it’s so like, oh my God, I made so many friends, I love it. And sometimes I write to somebody and on Slack it shows, oh, it’s like 2:00 AM at this person’s whatever time zone they are and they respond and I’m like, man, you should be sleeping now. So the question would be, how would you say that employers would notice that somebody is about to burn out? What are the signs and how to deal with it?

James: I can talk from my own personal experience. I went through burnout twice in the last two years. And the thing for me is the relationship between a manager, a people leader, and their direct report is the hub where all things start and stop. And one of the most important things that any people leader can do is create psychological safety in such a way that conversations around mental health are not penalized, where they’re leading by example. So being open about your own challenges, being willing to take mental health days yourself, being willing to ask, are you okay? Right? And in a serious way. One-on-ones, regular one-on-ones with your direct reports is so, so important. But not just to talk about the work.

One of the really interesting things in my last couple months, I got a new people manager at Stellar WP and she would come in and she would listen. She would have no agenda, you were responsible to write the agenda, you got to talk about whatever you wanted. And it was just a chance to talk about whatever it is that was on your mind and that could be work related, task related. But she always was very intentional about asking how I was doing, how I was feeling, and that’s really important in helping to navigate burnout and see the signs of it. I think if we can have more attentive people leaders to the people that are in our teams, that can go a long way to probably mitigating burnout or noticing it and making changes, corrective changes ahead of time. Amazing.

Dominyka: Thank you for sharing.

Jonathan: Yeah, I love the perspective that you’ve got and I love how you’re drawing just from the range of experience that you’ve had. That gives you a lot of different lenses and I think it can be easy to take that for granted. I’m excited to see what you do with Team WP. Appreciate you coming on today. For someone who wants to connect with you, what’s the best way for them to get in touch?

James: Probably Twitter if you want. I mean, you can go to teamwp.co and sign up there of course, that would be lovely. But my username or my Twitter handle is just @JamesGiroux G-I-R-O-U-X. That’s the best way to connect and my DMs are open and I check them regularly.

Jonathan: Awesome. James, thanks so much for joining us. We appreciate having you.

James: Thank you so much.

Dominyka: Thank you.