Does WordPress Understand the Future of Work?
A Review of The Year Without Pants
The Year Without Pants by Scott Berkun is fascinating. Berkun, a former Microsoft program manager, does an incredible job of documenting the strengths and weaknesses of WordPress.com’s culture and organizational model. He also describes his team’s creative journey as they build social media features for bloggers and the popular “Jetpack” extension. It’s not a guide for how to how to implement a work from home program. Rather, it describes from an insider’s perspective how WordPress.com has managed to build one of the most popular and highly trafficked web properties by pushing control into the hands of those who make the product. It’s also a book about the concept of work itself, demonstrating how work can be something of deep meaning and value rather than a source of dread and frustration.
How I learned about the WP model
I first learned about WordPress’s unique approach during a discussion with one of their engineering leads. He explained that they were organized into a set of teams, each focusing on a different area of the product. Each team is autonomous, deciding what to build and managing their own, planning, development and release. He explained that everyone on the team was required code and that there was typically no dedicated program or product management. (Berkun seems to have been an exception to that rule). He explained that there was also no traditional marketing department with each team sort of taking care of that on the side.
Having worked for years in more traditional, functional organizations doing product management and marketing, I was intrigued. I continued to ask questions but he told me that I should just “read the book” which as you can guess turned out to be this book about working from home with no pants.
It didn’t matter if you were pantless in your living room or bathing in the sun, swinging in a hammock with a martini in your hand. What mattered was your output.
