 Als je er geen tijd hebt om daar te gaan, zal ik je een paar dingen van de WordCamp, dat iedereen ervoor moet bewaren. We hebben de sponsorgebouw, in de sponsorgebouw hebben we ook de zwakkabel waar je een t-shirt kan komen. En iets heel interessant dat we dit jaar geïnteresseerd hebben. Dat zijn de gamenkarten. De gamenkarten zijn een manier om mensen te ontmoeten, met mensen te introduceren en mensen te kennen in onze communiteit. En ook voor de gamenkarten, er zijn wat vragen met het. En na dit talk, kom niet weg, want ik heb de eerste vraag voor jullie allemaal. Dus please bepresent, zodat je de gamen met ons kan spelen en misschien als winnaar. Ook over de gamenkarten, als je vragen hebt over het, in de community boot, die ook in de sponsorgebouw is, er zijn mensen die je alles kunnen vertellen over het. En ook als je een antwoord hebt aan de vraag, kan je naar de community boot gaan, om een extra kart te krijgen, om te laten zien dat je ook de gamen speelt. Een wat meer generele informatie. We hebben ook een info desk op de sponsorgebouw, als je vragen hebt. En op de sponsorgebouw, als je vragen hebt. Dus als je iets vindt, please bring it there, so if somebody lost a day, can also find it. Also maybe say, and if you still have time in between the sessions and you would like to contribute more to WordPress, then you're welcome in the contributing area on level 1. And there you can go and do some more contributing. Of course very important is WordPress, WordCamp. We have a code of conduct. It's on our website. Please read it carefully. We try to be respectful of everybody and be inclusive of everybody. So please follow that. And there's also a wellness track in the morning. But that's too late for you guys. Maybe tomorrow morning 8.15 yoga. But this afternoon for people who want Tai Chi at 3. And there is a walk from 6 p.m. for the people who want to do that. Ok, I think it's time for our first speaker. And I need my paper a little bit because there's so many announcements I have to make. So our first speaker is Viola Gruner. She's from Germany and she does the marketing at Inspire site. I give you the podium. Thank you very much. Ok, hello. Nice to see you all. Oh my god, I'm amazed. Many people here. Yeah, nice to see you. I'm a little bit nervous because it's my first WordCamp Europe. And yeah, it's my first big talk. But I heard that the WordPress community is here to support and not to seeing me fail. That makes me a little bit relaxing more. So first I would love to invite you all to a living room. So assume that's your living room, where you live. And now I have a question for you. So which table is longer? What do you think? And I would love to do it with you old fashioned like. I would love to see your hands up. So I will ask you now whose table A is longer. Please hands up. Ok. Who thinks... Thank you very much. Who thinks table B is longer? Ok, some people say also table B but less. And who wants to say nothing? Hands up. Ok, some people don't want to say anything. Ok. So it's interesting because yeah, most people think um... Table A is longer and the aspect ratio is 3 to 1 from table A and 1.5 to 1 for table B. But the truth is they are the same size. And when I first saw this I was like in a restaurant drinking a coffee with my friends and a friend she showed me this example and she told me have a look, what do you think is longer? I said of course table A. And then she said no, they are the same size and I was like what? No I cannot believe it. So I took a spoon and I measured it there and yeah, I also brought you something to measure it to prove it to you because also in this picture I think it's not that true but I think the stage is way too big to measure. Let's try. No but it's really the same size. Ok, I cannot do it. It's too big. I never expected this. No, but yeah they are the same size. So the reason for it why we think this is because of the table legs and because of the alignment. So our brain is playing us a little trick here and that's also because of illusions. So if you look at this picture for me it also looked that the green one is moving a little bit but yeah it's like it is it's just a illusion and yeah we are our perceptions can mislead us sometimes so the orange dots are also the same size and that was also for me unbelievable and that's why I started with this. For you with this is examples because sometimes it's also important instead of just guessing to test and to measure and that's what we did and that's my topic testing instead of measuring my name is Viola Gruner I'm from ImPside a webpress agency and today I'm just going to talk to you about the goal of this presentation so what's also my goal what you're going out with then also I would love to explain you the workflow so I created with my team a workflow and I want to show you one example how to use this workflow then some examples from my experience so I made some growth test and I want to explain you these then my learnings also and the learnings of my team and finally you also will get the workflow so I even made your download link so every one of you you can have the slides, the workflow some examples how you can use it so you make the right decision for example how to structure your leads also and not your leads, how you structure your decisions better and your ideas and then how to grow with low budget and this talk is I think for everyone so if we are having here some freelancer who is a freelancer maybe of you nearly no one hour if you are an agency who is working for an agency ok most of you and who is working for a product and nothing of these also some people ok just for interest no but I think everyone of you can get something out here and can use this so I would love to start to talk to you about the contact form so the contact form is for a marketer something very important en we had a problem so the sales team told me Viola we need one more form field at the contact form because we really want to structure our leads better and yeah they wanted to have the monthly volume inside of the contact form and to structure them better and that was for me a big oh my god no we cannot do this first because you're here also in university I heard always ok the conversion rate will drop so also for example nail pedal they increase the conversion rate 26% by removing just one form field and image scape they even increased also their conversion rate 120% by removing a lot of form fields so yeah instead of guessing I said to the sales team ok we will test this but my god feeling said no it will not work but yeah let's test this and it was a long conversation but yeah we did this but how is here the question and yeah with my self created workflow I created this also together with my team and we have here different steps in this workflow so first is to share and pitch an idea then to rate the idea then to start the experiment and finally to draw a conclusion and to implement this test into the website so I would love to bring like with this example I brought to you with the contact form I will lead you through this different processes so first is share and pitch the idea so that's the document I know it sounded very fancy the workflow it's just a simple excel feed so here we were collecting all our ideas and we were structuring them so all the ideas are having the same structure and the same way how we were doing them so we have consistency and you can see there are different ideas and we have the item name we have the hypothesis and the key matrix and if I would like document I'm just putting it into the backlog and there you have the test the form field test and yes so you put it inside of the document and you can see also I linked this part and it's linked to a pitch card and the pitch card is just a simple google docs and I will show you how we were like what matrix we had here so I'm now showing you the pitch card so it's divided into different parts so we have the part before testing and we have the part after testing so it starts with the hypothesis so if you are adding a hypothesis you should write down what is going to happen and it's also good to write down a number so we were saying if we are adding one more form field our conversion rate will drop 12% that means from 7% to 6.1% and we had this number also it's out of research it's not just by god feeling it was a research so if you build your hypothesis please try just to write it also down measurable then we had the objective so why we are going to do it yeah because the sales team told us and they wanted to make their leads more manageable and structure them better so you just write about the why and that's also good to sometimes have also the numbers normally you try to improve your conversion rate of these tests and you have also the design inside of it and so here you can just take a screenshot for example if you see at a competitor something nice you just take a screenshot you put it there because the pitch card it's just a one page it shouldn't be too much work just keep it short, snappy and simple and then the duration so in the pitch card are a little bit more metrics than here I'm showing you now because it would be a little bit longer but it would be for this test 12 weeks so I edit you also a link to this A-B testing tool and you type in in this left side for you different numbers for example the conversion rate you are having at the moment the conversion rate you are expecting so normally increasing it and then also how many unique visitors you have and you see it's a very high number of visitors to make it significantly that means that we really can prove it scalable and if we are having more leads this number will not normally not change so and here we see also the duration and that's how we did it and the next step is to rate the idea and to rate the idea we used the ICE model and I called it ICE model and it's also called ICE model that means impact confidence and ease and it's also here in the tool so we are going from the back lock to the rater and there we had our different team members and they were also all written down everyone is counting every voice is counting the same so we were rating from 0 to 10 and that means for example for impact we were saying okay how high is the impact from 0 to 10 0 means there is no impact at all 10 means there is a very high impact so you can see everyone is allowed to put the numbers inside of it and the thing was here I saw that Anne-Sophie and Martin they gave both two points so they said oh my god if our conversion rate drops it's a very very sorry my hair it's a very high impact but normally giving a 10 it was one of our first tests so we still weren't that used to give numbers here normally we never had this high numbers because you know having a 10 impact means it's a very worse test or a very good test in the next say your confidence so there we also used our god feeling so we were saying what is my god feeling saying is it saying more or less so you can see also the whole team thought okay I think the conversion rate will drop for sure so we were all in the same page here and then the east and that's also an important thing because often we think okay with what could we start this is important just have a look how easy it is so to add one more form field it's not that hard so it's also a very easy test so out of this you're getting the priority and if we are now going back so you see different tests but we saw okay we need to start with this test because it's having the best number for now and then you put it into life and in the life part so if you run a test especially an important test with conversion rates and so on you should care that you are not going to run another test what's testing the conversion rate so a social test for example a LinkedIn test is okay but you know tests can influence each other so take care of this and yeah we started the experiment we waited 12 weeks and we did the A B testing so that means the visitors are coming and they are getting so one part is coming to contact form one and A and one to contact form B so with the monthly and the option A was 7% so the conversion rate was 7% as we expected so we thought it's 7% and it was and now the option B I have now the question there we have the one more form field what do you think do you think the marketing team was right the conversion rate was worse or you think it was the same or it was better so now I'm going to ask again for your signs who thinks the conversion rate was worse like the marketing team said okay we have some signs but not that many okay who thinks it was the same hands up okay it's nearly the same like the first one and who thinks it was even better hands up okay okay here in front two people decided another thing so the interesting thing about it was the conversion rate was even better and I couldn't believe my eyes because really it was for me no way and also for the team still the winner was option B and that's also this example why I brought this example to you so often we read about something and while I was testing together with the team we saw hey often the things are different because the target group is different you know because your website it's so many different factors why things are sometimes different so that's why I think you should test or why retest it a lot yeah and finally we are coming back to our pitch card to draw the conclusion so it's also important to write down the conclusions after you are running the test to have them summarized so we are putting it in closed and there you have a lot of and you have always the conclusion with the pitch card here and yeah so you have later access to this tool decide how you want to structure them better in the future you can use the date also you can add things and yeah as you wish and yeah we were writing down the outcome so there was no significant difference between the two contact forms and that meant we can implement this new contact form to our website and the learnings for us as a team it was yeah different than we thought and it's also nice if you are in different markets you could test first for one market so you are having less risk so we tested it first for the german speaking market and then we tested it for the english speaking market so I recommend you to do this as well if you can and some side effects of the workflow it's the team spirit because ideas are getting collected of everyone not the head of marketing is saying you do this and you do that you take as a team a decision together and you are seen in the team and everyone is allowed to make something and often we lose our ideas we say hey let's do that but we never start with it so if you write them down and you collect the ideas and everyone every idea gets seen and also in my team came up with our idea and with a pitch card and we did this we learned all the time together and now I brought you also some examples how we improved the conversion rate with some tests and first of course the contact form there you can do a lot of different things so if you have a contact form and you can for example reduce and add a new form field so you can have also less you can have an expendable form field so if you type something in it's go so it can also be bad for your conversion rate and then also you can use a testimonial sorry Alex he's now sitting here I just took him as an example it's not his quote I gave it for him and we improved also in the previous company I worked for here our conversion rate just a little bit 2% you can also change your call to action so for example instead of contact us you can say book a free consultation and try a little bit with this these are some simple tests and you can have some big change here and now I brought you also the best test we did with the most increasing conversion rate and that was so we were building a landing page for a keyword so we were reaching where we are getting a lot of new visitors through which keywords and we were building specifically for this keyword a landing page so you put in the headline for example the main keyword you're having you're putting some benefits inside of it very simple it was not that big page with a lot of information just short and snappy then we had also the contact form also very short and then we had again sorry we had what our clients say and just something the people can trust and we improved our conversion rate 18% for some keywords but not for all, so please don't think ok I use this test and Yola said our conversion rate will increase 18% no because also you need to test to try it out en yes the learnings out of these remember every target group is different know your numbers that's also something very important if you want to test significantly and don't be afraid to fail tests so I said fail because there is no failing if you test because every test you do is a win and it's a learning so every completed test is a succeed success and we celebrated it even if the numbers weren't better or even if they were worse we were so happy that we did this test and it helped us often to make decisions and yeah now what should you do now so first you should download the tool if you want and you have it for free to measure anything so don't be afraid that I'm collecting data there and research different possible tests so you can look at a competitor or at websites you really like and check it out what do they have what do they do then evaluate the test so even if you're a freelancer and you're not having a team you can evaluate it for yourself with the ICE model the test and yeah congratulations you listened to my presentation thank you very very much yeah thank you so much here you can download the workflow in this little here I'm also confused because of this nice group just download it you can reach out to me whenever you want with your questions and you can write me now some questions and I also wanted to say thank you so much to all volunteers here I'm so impressed really it's the sound check behind the scene the volunteers so thank you so so much to you making this possible it's amazing it's an amazing job they do they put a lot of work and thank you Fiola but you're not ready yet because maybe some people have questions yes we have two mics one there so if you have a question please line up at one of the mics and we also have an audience that is maybe online and watching this live stream we would like to ask everybody to give feedback about this talk on the website of wordcamp 2023 there's a feedback form you can give feedback to every talk you have been we appreciate your feedback to improve wordcamp every time we have it ok I see a first question over there hi Fiola thank you so much for your talk it was really really interesting about A-B test which I want to forward to you so you can convince me about no just kidding no just try to understand how much A-B test could be effective for everyone so for example first question is A-B test can be done also for small website I have a blog that have like 2.5k user for each year is it ok to do like A-B test for this or it could be just 2 small group of people second question is so I would start answering the first question so that's a very good question and so I just can say to have really significant proof it's great to A-B test but there are different steps so for example A-B test you can imagine like I don't know so the first thing is you can do asking experts collecting their data then in the next step you can also measure really high in this pyramid but do you think it would be work no so for being significant I really recommend to have the data and to use this A-B testing tool but there we had a very high number of confidence so 95% so you can even drive test with lower ones and for example also for my master thesis I had a target group for the expert in research it but for being significant for the website I recommend you to have this high numbers ok we root but could you do the next question maybe after the next person because in line behind no it was really a fast question it's just a I hope I answered your question I was really like spreading out can the next person in line ask the next question and you can always write me contact me if you want sorry he kind of actually asked my question but I wanted to know how you get into the math of the statistically significant number so if you have a smaller sample size how are you doing the math to know what is significant so if you are having a smaller target group I recommend you just to research and then you can calculate it there are different formals you can use a b-testing tool I showed to you is a really valid tool so it's really high numbers but if you are having smaller numbers it's also good to try first to get traffic on your website and you can do this differently for example SEO SEA and so on and then you can test better but I know many websites they need to run a test for years to get significant data I recommend you also to research it and sometimes you see a tendency if you are a b-tested with a smaller group but for... even to notice what kind of extra field we add to the form or not so if it's a field that the visitor would like to be asked to input or if it's something that really don't add any value so for me a contact form should be important for you so if you say that's important for me that's important to measure it better to structure something so it should be for you but of course you can also if you want to make them feeling good your clients you can also try something else I hope I think you didn't understand my question I was just asking what kind of input field if it's important to notice what kind of input field we put or remove from a contact form if it's a necessary information that we need to get from the visitor or if it's not something necessary that we need to get from the visitor so I think the contact form what kind of information I cannot say it depends always on the things you're working for I was asking if it needs to test different kind of ok now I got it so it depends on you if you're happy with your conversion rate no you don't need to change it but if you want to improve it you could for example remove some fields that's normally the market saying hey if you're removing fields you're making it shorter normally bringing you more conversions so it depends it depends on what you're selling yes it depends on what you're selling so you can research here also so it depends always for example in logistics they have the normal conversion rate around 4-6% so you can research this what's the normal conversion rate in your market and depends on this you can say ok my conversion rate we could test this I hope that answered also your question I see also on the other side we have somebody at the microphone ah thank you for your presentation first and the question is what was the difference between the conversion rate from country to country that's the interesting thing you mean about the 70-18% where we improved it for Germany it was increased in Germany it was increased so that was a test for united states but my this team told me afterwards hey Viola the test was really the conversion rate was not that good but for another keyword it was good but that's the answer so it's also good to try to test the different markets always need to do an AB test also for those different fields thank you thank you very much thank you first it was interesting presentation and it's always interesting to analyze these conversion rates like a topic of research my question is have you considered it doing in more scientific way so like maybe doing logistic regression categorical variables so maybe you can like set a null hypothesis and refuted the probability level of how to refute that hypothesis in more scientific way not only ab split testing like another level because always ab split testing from my experience because I worked in this statistic and research field it's sometimes can lead to eronius results regression it's more scientific and right way to do this have you considered doing in that way thank you because we had this amount of group as you saw we had a lot of visitors it was like the tool you can check it out later the ab testing tool it's really looking that you are having significant proof but as you say you can always test even better but you know if you are ab testing it shouldn't be too much workload to just run this test I think because with this ab testing we made very good experience in my past and this kind of numbers so we saw the difference after this test and they were not changing the ab testing tool I showed you you can also measure afterwards all the numbers so yeah that's my answer to this thank you very much we just have time for two more questions please my question is really fast you are again nice to see you again nice to meet you always great content my question was this imagine for a second you are doing an ab test you end your ab test you get your answer from the ab test you do the edits to the site, to the service to the app or whatever to impact to get the update to have the version of the one that the app wins and you notice that is not doing, is not performing like it was expected what you will do at that time I will wait the weeks I said before so even if you see ok if the test is really bad you know one time we said ok let's stop a lead from a lead to a client you can use different steps here and then you can measure here also the numbers and that's also so important to have a look at the lead quality kind of you to come over all here and have a listen to Anna Anna is going to tell you something about how to ask for web design feedback so if that's what you want to hear you are in the right track I hope you all played the game card and that you all got the first question en maybe already went to the community board boot to get a new card in the case you didn't get the first question I'm going to help you out a little bit for the game card the first question of today is yeah ok the first question of today is is WordPress older than Facebook and Twitter true or false so if after the talk you go to the community boot you can tell them the answer you get an extra card and had this game helps you to mingle with people get to know people WordPress is about getting away from our computers and get to meet people in person and life and get to know new people what's more for today let me have a look too many papers want to do now I get lost there it is as you see volunteers are wearing blue shirt so if you have any questions and you see a volunteer just ask them and they will try to help you and that's also for lost items if you find somebody bring it to the info boot so people can get their belongings back and at 1 p.m. there is lunch served for people that didn't know it yet I think I have enough announcements so I think it's now time for our speaker Anya please welcome give her a big applause how to ask for website feedback Anya Sirhano thank you hello everyone welcome Europe this is amazing well before introducing myself let me tell you a personal story I want to talk to you about the birthday problem also known as the birthday paradox the birthday paradox states that in a group of 23 people there is a 50.7% probability dat 2 of them share the same birthday for a group of 57 or more people the probability of 2 of them sharing the same birthday is greater than 99.666% almost 100% in other words in a crowded city bus it is very likely that there are at least 2 people who share the same birthday the probability is almost 100% this is awesome isn't it however this probability drops to 0.059 if we choose one of those people by selecting one person we would need at least 253 people to have a probability greater than 0.5% of someone sharing the same birthday in my life I have chosen one person she used Drupal with respect according to the code of conduct but she also uses WordPress she is volunteering at this workhouse as a media partner her name is Helen and today is her birthday and she is here so happy birthday to you ok so thank you I am a digital business designer with over 15 years of experience in design in the beginning I started with print and graphic design I specialized in typography and branding and then I learned website development I have worked with WordPress for almost 7 years as a freelancer I have been contributing to the WordPress community since 2017 I have worked on the design team core plugins WordPressTV, Polyglos en Community I contribute to the community team by running the Torre-Lodones Meetup and Workham Torre-Lodones is a beautiful little village near Madrid in Spain and you are of course also all invited to the next workham in March next year I am also a prouder of piensasoloutions there is a little hosting provider specialized in WordPress with a free plan I also run a podcast if you want to learn Spanish and if you like WordPress you can listen to where I talk about marketing, web design and digital business with my partner Pablo Moratinos by the way this podcast is a workham media partner and we also run an online academy in Spanish and please you can also follow me on twitter what is asking for feedback feedback is a communication tool where you share your design and get criticism from others to see if expectations align and to improve and advance the project it would be ideal for all the states holders involved in the project to give feedback but it's important that only those people who have authority over the project give feedback we ask for feedback from other designers to to get other professional perspectives perspectives detecting some problems or areas where we need to improve and can also help us to validate our desired decisions we ask for feedback from developers to involve them in the design phase we ask for feedback from clients to validate the design and we ask for feedback from the users to check if the design works for them so we ask for feedback from all these people maar in this talk I'm going to focus on asking for feedback from clients because they pay for their work ok why is it important to ask for feedback well because we may not have all the information about the project it's necessary to have an external perspective to improve the project and make sure we are on the right track if we ask for feedback we can improve the final design we can meet the clients expectations and we can stay within the project technical and financial scope when to ask for feedback well ask for feedback constantly don't move too far ahead without requesting feedback the further you go without asking for feedback the more time and money you could waste if you don't ask for feedback throughout the process you may spend weeks working on a design idea that is ultimately rejected and discover too late that it wasn't viable asking for feedback is essential to effectively move forward with the project and ensure its success not doing so can result in a significant loss of time and effort and in some cases it may even damage your reputation therefore is always better to save the story and to not forget to ask for feedback at all stages of the project so are we all on the same page just want to check that we are all in agreement about what feedback is ask for feedback and when and who to ask for feedback from ok so why aren't we as designers continuously asking for feedback I think it is because we may not be asking for I think it is because we lack confidence we suffer from imposter syndrome and don't want our designs to be negatively criticizes of maybe because we think asking for feedback will delay the project and we don't have time or because we don't know how to do it or don't have the necessary tools or maybe because we don't want to be ask for changes we don't want to work more or deviate from the original idea so how can we ask for feedback effectively let's take a look at some tips as I said before I'm going to focus on how to ask for feedback from the client but some recommendations apply to asking for feedback from any stakeholder on the project one tip tip number one ask for both real time and asynchronous feedback as a designer is crucial to explain and justify each design decision and user flow to the client first time they see it we never just send the design and wait for their feedback that approach doesn't work because we need to sell our design to the client and give them a real time experience that conveys our emotions and passion so the first time someone sees a design it's better to show it in real time sharing your screen displaying and explaining the design during a video call or even in person afterwards they can view it and use it more lazily and provide asynchronous feedback using tools like Slack, Discord or Trello it is important to use collaboration tools use the tool that works best for each state but there are many try them out and choose the one that best fits your way of working for design Figma or Pempot Pempot if you don't know it's an open source tool for collaborate in real time designing and with the developers also for review we can use webdicio or iru for tax manager Trello, Asana and for communication there are many also email is good Zoom or Microsoft Teams or Google Meet and you all know Slack and Discord ok build trust and respect don't take it personally make them feel comfortable to give feedback without hesitation if you have a good relationship with your client the project will turn out better building a good relationship with clients can improve the outcome of a project for ask specific questions the responsibility of communication is ours ask the professionals not the clients ask the right questions don't ask what they think because we need specific feedback and if we ask this we will get open-ended responses responses so don't ask if they like it because you don't want them to just say no and because it's not about liking it's about fitting business, objectives and client needs we need to explain well how we made each design decision and have the client tell us if those decisions are aligned business, objectives provide context explain the context the context and the purpose behind each decision it's important to provide enough context when asking for feedback so people understand the purpose of the design and can give more relevant comments always appreciate feedback we improve the project and that is good for you always receive it with a grateful attitude and this goes for most things in life leverage has different perspectives pays attention to different things and may notice things that you haven't seen this is the moment to find errors in elements some problems have different solutions there is not a single valid solution we can give the client a choice between two or different versions and later we can do avie testing to find out which solutions converts better also there are clients who want to make decisions and participates very actively in the design this way we give them the possibility to have an opinion on some aspect of the design and not on others patient not as a mission for approval can help build trust and encourage honest and constructive feedback you don't want the client to correct your design don't present the project as you were in class presenting your work to a teacher if you treat them like a teacher they will act like one and if the client has had bad experience with designers who maybe were not very good and had to do a lot of correcting they will remember that and repeat this behavior with you give them confidence so they know they don't have to start designing themselves describe the problem not the solution focus the feedback on the business not on the design explain the intentions and business objectives pursued in each page or section don't explain what you have done explain why you have done it consider the feedback but don't always follow it right away although it's important to consider all feedback received as a designer you're the one who makes the final decision about the design it's important to discuss with the client the reasons behind their request and work together to find a solution that needs their needs and goals we need to make sure the client understands the reasons behind each decision even after learning the reasons for the reasons for our decisions if the client wants to execute a different solution even if we consider it wrong we should do what the client asks because they are the ones paying for the project understand your client and anticipate their needs we need to know our client's needs very well to be able to anticipate the possible changes they may ask for there are changes or requests that most clients tend to take them into account both when designing and when asking for feedback and those anticipate so that they don't ask ask for those changes I have three examples of common client requests what do you think one of the most common requests from clients is I really love that because it's what I think when a client asks for that change we have to ask why bigger probably because they feel like the design doesn't express their brand the client isn't telling you the problem they are giving you a solution that they think will fix it based on their limited design knowledge and terminology the client may not know how to say the design doesn't express my brand they know how to say make the logo bigger because they lack design knowledge but as designers we know that there are other ways to express a brand besides making the logo bigger we know that we know that the brand is reflected in the design through colors, typography layout, images illustrations and other graphic elements such as icons that's why both when we design and when we ask for feedback we must consider that the design reflects the client's brand not just through the logo but through all these elements if we explain to the client all of the resources we have used to express their brand when we present the design it's most likely they won't ask us to make the logo bigger we have to combine the client that we understand their need and that we have met it so on the left what the client ask four and on the right what the client is really needed example two clients often ask to add more items to the main menu of a website as they believe as they believe it it can make the page easier to navigate however adding more items to the main menu is not always a good idea as it can make the menu too confusing the more items the main menu has the harder it is for the user to click on one of them as we know that the client usually wants to add more items them of the importance of keeping a simple main menu to ensure usability to prevent the client from feeling that the user will not access important information we will explain for example in addition to the main menu we will have calls to action on the page and for example a secondary navigation on the future on the future if the client understands the reasons for keeping the main menu simple they probably won't ask us to add more items so on the left and three clients may ask to add more content or visual elements to the design such as icons or graphics to make the page more appealing and easier to understand sometimes we can incorporate more content and rearrange the layout without any problem to meet the client's needs and agree that this will improve the user's experience but other times adding more visual element or more content to the design can be worse for the usability or user experience of the page if we anticipate this and explain to the client why we use those elements and why we chose that length of content the client probably won't feel the need to add more elements or content to the design so on the left what the client asks for and on the right what is probably happening in the design the internet is full of memes about clients requesting changes clients tend to ask for the same changes all over the world all the days so if you already know what's going to happen anticipate it en on the right does everything thank you he he he he thank you and it's time for your questions you have go deeper thank you thank you Anna there must be a lot of questions so we have two mics lined up one mic over there and one mic over there so you can ask your question and I would like to ask everybody to just ask one question per time so everybody gets a chance and I talked to Anna and she said also after this session she will be available outside this track to talk more to you if you have more in depth questions at least we don't have to ask anymore if people ask you how to make the local bigger at least we now know what to do instead of laughing about the customer we are actually doing something wrong and we have to do something about it thank you for that I see there the first person for questions I have a quick question I find myself now giving a lot of feedback so I would love to ask from the perspective of the client and you're being a designer what's the best way of receiving feedback so for instance I usually do the feedback sandwich where I might start with a little bit of positive then maybe give you a little bit of the negative and then maybe end up with a little bit of positive does that work of what's your preferred method of receiving feedback thank you for your question for the client perspective I can recommend you to focus on the design goals business goals not on the design focus on the problems you have and you know because you know your business you know your client the final client and not focus the feedback design of the solutions colors, typography layout is the designer's job if you focus your feedback on your business I think it's easier to the designer to give you a solution and understand what you need to get with your website is ok for you ok, thank you ok, thank you very much we have a next person for our question hello, great presentation I wanted to ask regarding the asynchronous and the real time feedback what do you do when from the real time and you go to asynchronous the client has changed his mind so you're asking me about if he gives you one feedback in the real time and then you get a message so I think I would try to get an appointment to to get the real time again and talk to the client why no, I don't know if he always gets the best option when the client talks to you in person that's why I want to ask when you get different feedback on the asynchronous it's never happened to me I always try to to make didactical work and explain a lot the design decisions because I made design decisions when I made design even if you choose a film or a third party you make design decisions and you need to make why do you make that decisions so I always explain you are saying that maybe tomorrow the client can change their mind so okay we can discuss again also because it's not one solution we as designers maybe have a lot of ego and the design is our son and don't want to make changes but if we work with a business perspective we don't mind to change and we don't mind to make two or three versions and test because the final word is clients the final client, the user so we need to test the website we don't have the last we don't have the truth I don't know if yeah does any woman as a woman we maybe have it's more difficult to go to a micro and ask questions but I would like to answer if you have any question or if you want to go deeper thank you awesome, thank you please go ahead the design together she was great as a client she approved the design we talked about the user persona it works perfectly like it works now she was on holidays with her friends and two friends don't like the website they are not the users at all it's an educational website for math teachers in the US and they are not so I don't know what to do I don't want to change it I've been there she's happy but not anymore yeah it's hard their friends is always asking for carousels in the homes home page things like that yeah it's hard it's the worst performance in the sliders it goes blue they want more slides color obviously in that case we need to repeat the reasons not to put a slide on the home page but even if a green that if the client is asking you to the slider is who paying for the work so it's frustrated and maybe it's not your client and yeah you finish the work and say goodbye and look for another client another type of client that be confident with you doing the work I do appreciate her as a client and I think that the issue is really her ego so I feel like her friends telling her that they don't like the design somebody telling you your baby is ugly yeah I think you need always to talk about business objectives and tell the client if you justify the text for example the text is not reading well so it's your decision but if you do that this is that you are going to get because I am as a designer I have experience I studied a lot and we know the user experience is that so according to all of these books I read this is the best thing we can do but let's try let's do an A B test and let's see and maybe there is a good idea ok, I'll try that thank you so maybe I can add a little bit to it I myself also an agency owner and I always tell customers the website is not for you but it's for your customers so also in this case with the girlfriends are they the demographic are they the potential customers if they are not then it doesn't matter they don't like the website I always try to talk about that at least that's from my experience ok I see also online there are no questions if there are no questions anymore I want to thank and very much for learning is more about giving feedback and as I already said make loco make loco bigger is really something coming home with me that it's actually our fault that they are asking this so that's really something we have to work on when you're on the design team thank you very much from wordcamp we have a small present for you ok thank you and we ok, thank you it's done track 2 how you can give feedback kind of talks so go to the website there's a feedback form every talk you go to you can give feedback and it's quite nice it helps the organizers to select good speakers for every new wordcamp just if you're getting hungry we have to wait a little bit till 1 p.m. at 1 p.m. it's lunchtime and that's served at level 0 and minus 1 and of course don't forget to visit our sponsors because our sponsors make this all possible if there are no sponsors there is no wordcamp because for the ticket price that you are paying it's impossible to organize this kind of event so please also go and visit them because they make this all possible we have a short break now and at 12 p.m. we continue with Histro Panjareff he is doing a talk about building high performance headless work systems main genesis and solutions if you are interested in that talk I hope to see you again did you already go to some nice tracks or workshops and are you playing the game the game is there to interact with people and get to know more people because that's what wordcamp is about we get from our computer away and start meeting people connecting with people and so very important in the end of this talk I have the second question so if you are playing the game I have the second question and if you play that you can go to the community boat with your answer and hopefully you get another card okay my name is Paul Kouwen I'm from the Netherlands I'm your MC for today we had a session also enjoying this and learning getting new experiences today we have our speaker Histro Panjareff I think I met him first time at wordcamp Netherlands since then I met him at many wordcamps in the US and he is a very active community member in wordpress working for the company Sidegrounds and hey he is already here so you are just getting behind me I was just dropping by oh yeah okay you are just dropping by he is building a skilled airplane as a hobby yes you are and that gives a big problem I heard because now the house is getting too small I may become homeless if my wife stops me out that's that and I heard from your team that even you used this building of skilled airplanes we did that in the team building we crashed a couple of planes it was very nice next to knowing a lot about headless wordpress systems he also knows about skilled airplanes if you have questions about headless wordpress ask him but also about skilled airplanes so Histro the talk is yours go ahead and enjoy thank you for the presentation thank you all for coming to my talk as Paul introduced me ok here is it gone I am Christy Banjarov I am a wordpress innovation director at Sidegrounds and I have been working here for 15 years and for the past years we have been developing more and more things with headless wordpress systems so today I want to talk to you about headless wordpress different ideas to consider and I will hopefully help you out decide whether going a headless way is for you and probably give you an idea about something that you can use to improve the way you do things to improve your businesses in your flows so to begin with I think one of the most important things when we talk about pretty much everything in general is that you should evaluate whether this is for you for example headless wordpress what is headless wordpress basically you have a wordpress core system that supplies data via an api to a different application it may be a react a single page app or some other system and it's a way of doing things doing systems platforms that gives you a lot of flexibility but adds to the complexity of your system of your platform you need to spend more development work to it so it's important to ask the right questions and to figure out whether this is the way you should do things and the first thing I ask when I start working on such platforms is that is this a standalone project or you need to integrate it with something else something existent there is a lot of chatter on twitter on slack is not a one solution for everything yes we can build very fast systems with going headless you can use all sort of technologies but you have we can have a super fast regular standalone wordpress website you just need to have a proper team proper hosting, proper caching a good developer and you can achieve the same thing the first question is do you really want to invest that development time going headless and doing those things and sometimes the answer is no and that's perfectly fine wordpress is great out of the box and if you don't need to integrate it with your own existing stuff or with a different system that you're working on you don't necessarily need to do it so you need to have this usually wordpress headless is very applicable when you have an existing use case or an existing system for example this is a side ground client area and we have wordpress powering our entire knowledge base of answers like tutorials articles and we show this in a contextual manner our client area is a react application it has tons of business logic in it all the renewals, all that stuff that's already there we can't rewrite that in wordpress and it doesn't make any business sense for us to do that but on the other hand I just can't make a wordpress website with all the support articles there and make it look like the client area site tools which is another application built in react which manages our entire hosting system but I need to show that data to our clients so we have a headless wordpress powering all that basically the react app here hits a wordpress API and says hey I'm on that page we have a custom plugin on which the content is requested and gets the client language because we have Italian, Spanish, French, Deutsch and serves the data through the API so for us it makes a lot of sense to do that on top of everything we can cache this in react we can use front page caching and this is very fast way to serve data from wordpress and you can integrate it seamlessly into your existing system without doing a lot of work so for us this works very well and on top of it if you have a centralized place where you host your app that you integrate with wordpress you can cache very well that system and you don't need to have some very powerful server to host wordpress to power that those two pages are getting millions of hits weekly I'm sure it's somewhere in the tens of millions per month but it's hosted to a super cheap cloud server that's just isolated it's like 50 bucks a month for something to cost and another important question when we talk about this do you need to use any third party integrations that provide you functionality out of the box because for example this was a very simple use case it's a wordpress multi site actually in different languages you get the data you render it but if you have something more complex that you rely on like a learn dash or a member press for courses on some sort of customized ticketing system and you get a certain functionality that is out of the box ready for you coming from a plugin that you have purchased that you rely on you need to take into account that you can't just use that functionality out of the box at least you have to style it again to make it work for your application so I'm not advocating against going headless but you need to take these things into consideration and this also sums up to the question whether this will pay off for example if you're doing a single thing maybe it's not worth spending a lot of development time and money at the end of the day to build a very complex react application backends et cetera but for example how many of you are doing sites for clients see some hands that's a lot of people and how many of you are embarrassed to give your projects ready with the default WordPress backend ok that's quite a few less hands but at least the feedback that we're getting from most of the people we're hosting is that they get a bit confused over where is backend and many big agencies for example invest into their own admin stuff so this is another way of another very good use case of headless WordPress if you're launching more websites to clients it's worth investing the time in building your own admin panel and it will be much easier to react app and give it to the client with their branding with only the menus they want to see than styling and WordPress admin panel which is I don't know how many of you have done this but it's not an easy thing to do and once you consider that hopefully headless WordPress is for you and there are a lot of benefits from it and performance WordPress can be very fast if you cache it properly if you host it properly if you optimize it properly so I started with that you don't need to go headless to have a fast website but react apps are very well performing you can host them on a CDN you can't have a lot of your functionality so here are some alternative ideas if you have decided to go that way that may give you some suggestions about what else can you do because the standard way is like you have an app you do an HTTP request to the WordPress API you get some data and then you render it but the thing is that you don't even need to use the WordPress API everything depends on your use case for example if you have symphony framework of something you can just include the entire WordPress in it and then in your symphony code you can use every WordPress function every filter, everything you want as if you're working on WordPress and then you can get that data and use it for your own needs when going WordPress when going headless it's important to properly analyse your needs and do things depending on them and not just for the sake of doing something and this is a very fast way of doing it probably is not the most orthodox way of doing it but it's very fast because you're saving a lot of HTTP requests if you already have let's say middleware software or something like that that connects to a frontend you don't need to add another set of requests to go back and forth which inevitably adds to the loading time of your pages another thing that is not the standard way of doing things that we've been playing a lot of with is using doctrine or another object relational mapping system to basically map WordPress database to the ORM en then use the ORM to fetch data from this way if you need to get a query to the database you can get it from doctrine for example because it has included object caching it's really fast and the beauty of it is that you don't call you don't fire up the entire WordPress framework when you want to get a piece of data and avoiding to load the WordPress framework saves a lot of precious milliseconds and especially if you're doing something that is more traffic heavy this is a good idea that you may consider using custom handles so filters and actions is something that you should know exist and it's very useful when you get for example some error coming from an API it returns the error message or the success message in a certain way feel free, don't be afraid to interrupt that and have your own message displayed in the way you do in this way you may save another millisecond for depending on the actual message itself and you will get it in the proper format and since we talked about react apps those sort of JavaScript frameworks use front-end caching as much as you can it's your best friend you're offloading your caching on your clients computers which is the fastest place to get data from and with headless WordPress or other frameworks that's much easier than going the classic way another benefit of headless WordPress systems apps is that they can be made much more secure than a stand-alone WordPress I'm not saying that WordPress core is not secure it's a very mature project it's been for 20 years now we rarely see any providers that come from the core but you all know that plugins are out there they're not developed the same way that the core is developed and often we have vulnerabilities so going headless allow you to easily isolate WordPress completely from the public you can have it in a separate hostname it limits its access only to your application no matter what it is what it's written on and this way you'll be safe from all those attacks that target WordPress systems that target certain plugins no matter which one is it and you still get the benefit of using that functionality through the API now one downside of doing this we do it it's great both for speed and for security because you're cutting off all the bot traffic for example but another something that's important to consider is that you may need to rewrite your URLs when when isolating WordPress because it will live on a separate hostname that's just an example of how to do it it's not a big thing but you need to have it in mind that WordPress doesn't know the actual URL it's working on another idea is to replace the WordPress login system again that is something that depends on your particular use case big fan of job authentication I don't know why it's spelled JOT it's JWT but it's JOT for some reason but job tokens are very scalable big fan of it link your plugin at the end of the presentation the beauty of it is that you can scale it very much you don't need to have a large session storage for all the user sessions to store them tokens are super fast but there are two ways of doing this now if you want to know if you need the information about the particular users you may need to map the users coming from your application to the ones from your WordPress database if you don't need that information if your business logic user specific logic is somewhere else you don't need to do it you can make one admin account one admin user that talks through the API to the application otherwise you need to do user ID mapping for sure again on the same topic a bit you can replace WordPress access controller or integrate it with something external micro service for this again in case of our client area we don't need to know we don't have any complex ACLs for our clients we only want to know which is their language but for example if you're building let's say a custom admin panel and you provide it to your client you may need to consider whether you are going to use the WordPress roles and capabilities or you have to map again something external next I want to talk a bit about plugins and integrations because plugins are a big part of WordPress and nowadays I don't know a website on the only with core people sometimes are afraid to go headless because they are like I really need this plugin but it doesn't have APIs you can register custom APIs it's very easy if you haven't explored this way the WordPress API is one of the best documented APIs out there the guys in girls that have done this have done tremendous work it's very well documented and you can even if you rely on a plugin that doesn't have API endpoints you can make it yourselves and you can make it provide the data in the format you need another thing to consider is that especially when you're isolating WordPress from the world you may need to sort of a middleware or gateway app to to handle external request to handle webhooks for example if you're connecting let's say an online store to PayPal or to Stripe or some shipping provider whatever when you send them an order for a payment they need to call you back and say hey that order was paid successful payment failed etc and if your WordPress is working from hidden hostname behind a firewall that has access only to your app you can't just hit the webhook that's provided by WooCommerce so it's not a difficult thing to do but it's something that you need to develop and organize yourself just so you proxy those requests and another thing is that you can modify plugin endpoints and responses to better fit your needs nowadays most of the well-developed plugins have APIs have endpoints it's okay if the plugin does not return in the way you need it it's very easy to modify plugin responses in a way similar to how child teams work so don't be afraid of doing that and modify it as much as you can to best fit your needs and that's the beauty of going headless WordPress you can use WordPress not in any particular way and not necessarily the way we have used to we are used to use WordPress and I hope that I have inspired some of you to try to build their next project in a headless way and improve the way you work with your clients and the way you build apps, systems and websites thank you thank you very much I think you still have time left I have some time left for questions shall we do a Q&A session we have some mics over there on that side on that side so if anybody has a question you can line up I was a bit fast so we can have more time for lunch oh okay that's great but the problem is the lunch only start at 1 p.m. so if you go there before that time there's no lunch so we have to entertain the people a little bit I think I'm a bit disappointed but that doesn't matter we have a hungry hungry crowd that's why we have to do our best to don't have an angry crowd I hope we have a question are there some people I know there's a microphone over there could you line up at the microphone because then it's easier for us maybe we also have an online feed that our people are now watching us online and they can ask a question in online feed and if everything works then my mobile will get a message and I will ask that question also to his throw so let's go ahead the first question please hi there, thank you very much for the talk I have a question because you've mentioned that your admin area handles the setup and you've mentioned also the multilingual multilingual setup as well what's your take on that how do you handle this what's your solution is that on ok so there are different ways you can go multilingual unfortunately we don't have anything in core that's standardized and covered by the core api but that may be good or not but still you have to figure it out for your use case what we do have is we have English, German French, Spanish and it's all and we have 5 languages and the content is the same in the majority of articles but some are not the same for example we have specific specific content for people in Italy Spain that care about European stuff others in the United States we show them proper billing information depending on where people are on top of it we have different people who work in the content team who manage those and for us it's very easy to have basically a wordpress multisite in which we have subsite in Spanish in Italian in every different language and it's basically it's just a small middleware symphony app that gets the request from the React app and it proxies the request for the article to the proper language subsite and for us this works pretty well because I can give the Italian content team access only to the Italian website to do stuff it has downsides we've spent a lot of development not a lot but we've spent development we're doing for example when we add a new language we recently added French what we did is we migrated the English content in French and then we had the team of translators the French content team translate that so they don't have to open different tabs copy paste stuff around we made it easier we've been playing automated translation which is very easy to you can use AI some people have to drink water somebody says on twitter every time someone mentions AI you have to drink water but we use external microservices to translate and it's very easy to move data from here and there so but we have different URLs which is why multisite works great in that case I mean my question was also related to a plugin solution that's why I asked about that one but you've sold it via multisite I don't need to use a plugin for that because I don't have a front facing interface users switch between languages this is my react react application the client area site tools other interfaces that logic is there the switching the simpler you organize it the simpler is to maintain it I have another one then because I have been playing with headless lately a lot and the biggest problem that I see right now at least because lack of experience with building more and more applications like that or more websites shops whatever there is a huge overhead or there is a huge difference during the development time between going headless and doing this the classic way I would say how would you comment that of what would you recommend of course there is this basic question that you have stated on the very beginning do you actually need to go headless in the first place right that's a decision that only you can make and I believe it's more of a business decision rather than a development decision if you're comfortable working with APIs if you can build your stuff yourself or you have a team of people you can calculate how much that will cost and if it's financially worth it go for it if you can provide a better experience for your customers from now on go for it build your own branded admin panel for the websites you're doing most probably your clients if you're an agency for example won't need to use like 60% of the menus we see on the left side of it and then they won't see the annoying advertisement but every single free plug in that now and then tries to jump over each other and show you even more and more and very important stuff and so I believe that's worth it and if you see like big agencies like human made for example this is what they're doing they're building their own framework headless framework so when they provide they have big customers they charge a lot of money so I believe that if you can invest if you can spend that development time depending on where you're doing yourself or hiring people it doesn't matter but if you can make that investment it's worth it because your product the product that you're selling will look, will feel more professional and you will be able to charge your clients more thanks very much we are all here to learn more we hesitate to ask questions but I see we have another gentleman over there you talk a bit about JWT authentication WordPress has application passwords built in is there any kind of benefits to using JWT over application passwords and what do you kind of see those being again, as everything headless it depends on the particular use case like for me it's I'm building a number of products that are powered by WordPress and if you already have some sort of a login system it's much easier when you have an existing login to issue a JWT token and then authorize it at WordPress and JWT tokens are very scalable you don't need to store sessions hopefully your projects will reach millions of visitors daily or weekly and JWT tokens are very fast especially when you get it issued from something that already exists I'm not saying that if you're building a standalone WordPress you need to go and replace the entire login authentication system altogether that would be meaningless and we will waste a lot of time but in case of sideground I already have my clients logged in to the client area I just issue another token and they're authorized and they can get the information they need I had a second one as well which is just you talked a lot about obviously the REST API here have you used GraphQL at all and do you see any benefits with that no I haven't because on on my projects we don't have a need for it there is there is a very good blog post on the WP Engine blog you can google it and despite the fact there are competitors they have done a very good work in that blog post and it's actually about Gutenberg and how the couple of ways that you can make Gutenberg render HTML and you should take a look at that it's a very very well written piece of content to give you pros and cons about that thank you very much welcome so on the custom back end which suggested that it's a good idea to make it is possible for us to load the Gutenberg so that it or I think that should be the main reason why we will be using Atlas WordPress admin we'll be able to include somehow that into our custom react application yeah you can do that Gutenberg is written in a way that actually the idea as far as I'm aware is that other applications use Gutenberg not just WordPress so it's it's pretty easy to to use it and implement it into your into your projects but because that just the page building part right everything else is there too users, settings all that stuff, dashboards what about custom plugin blocks for example if you load Gutenberg once then you can benefit from all the custom plugins that are written for it it's not limiting you if they you need to accommodate if they have some interface outside Gutenberg for example but that depends on the plugin and whether you want to show it at all because like you may want to have you may want to have let's say the Yoast plugin working for your SEO content but then you don't want to show their settings because you're configuring all the settings for the titles and keywords and stuff like that you're doing it for your client you just don't render that interface and give them a better user experience since you're still using you don't have to maintain an SEO plugin I hope that answers your question thank you I see a next gentleman lining up I was really interested in what you said about symphony in doctrine could you please explain it more about the use case well the use case of doctrine is when you have a big wordpress database for us when you have a very big wordpress database that you need to query basically you map that wordpress database to doctrine like clone it and synchronize it and then you fetch the data in doctrine which comes it's a it's a PHP library which comes with object caching and everything and it's very easy very well written you don't have to write queries it's not big of a learning curve I urge you to take a look at it it's a great piece of tech and what you're doing is you're not you're not hitting the wordpress database which has a lot of other things you're building an index only of what you actually need to query and query it in a very fast way as for the symphony our use case is for a product that's not launched yet so I can't really speak in details about it but basically we're building a product that sends emails which is written in symphony but we need wordpress for content for permanent storage and for other things and we have we have a react app for the interfaces which talks to the middleware to the symphony app in case if you want to add wordpress to this existing infrastructure you would double the amount of HTTP requests if you have your app making one request to the symphony and then the symphony making another request to wordpress and you get all that back and forth and this adds up a lot because every time you do that you're losing milliseconds and it's not performing well it's a bit of it's a bit of not canonical thing to do but if you just include wordpress it works I've tested it, we have really used cases of it and you can use all the functions, all the data directly in your existing symphony app for example and then have only one call that you can't avoid between the interface thank you ok, thank you very much ok, I think we are almost coming to the end of this talk and you will all see, Risto has a lot of knowledge about wordpress and skilled airplanes I didn't talk about airplanes at all maybe that's the next talk on wordcamp for you to talk about that and we do some team building about it before we always saw you at every wordcamp a little bit you becoming a family man and I think as a family man it's also important that you learn new skills like cooking, so we have here something with a recipe for you thank you very much you're welcome thanks everybody Risto Panjarov ok so I know everybody is excited because we almost have the second question for the game cards but internet helping me, everything is reloading ok, we also have some announcements before we go to lunch had a lunch start at 1 p.m. and it's still 2 p.m. how we kindly ask you don't take lunch into track rooms or workshop rooms because how we want to keep them tidy so let's have a look at what is there there are a lot of things to see as all the lunch is at level minus 1 and also at level plus 1 in the main area there is a next WP Connect session at the balcony that you can go to and for people who like to relax a little bit at 3 p.m. there is a Tai Chi session so I think for the moment you all have been waiting for to work with your game cards the second question for your game card is in how many languages is WordPress translated I think that's a very interesting question and for the people who didn't get the first question the first question was is WordPress older than Facebook and Twitter true or false is in the community boot get an extra card connect to people get to connect to people in word camp because that's what word camp is all about I thank you all for me this was the last session as MC in this afternoon it will be Emma Jung and there will be new talks starting at 2 p.m. sharply thanks everybody bye bye crowd my name is Emma I'll be your MC today on track 2 I'm just going to start off with a few general announcements and then I'll get to the good stuff in just a couple of minutes just a reminder in the middle of the expo area there is the swag table information desk a lot of volunteers lost and found everything is there that's where you pick your swag bag up if you have any questions just head over there if you can't find somebody in a blue shirt we also have just a reminder that there is going to be a wellness track right after this it's closer to the workshop area and there's going to be tai chi I don't know how to do it but it's at 3 so if you need to if you feel like doing that it's a good place to go afterwards and the last thing is there's about 15 minutes between everything so use that time to go get drinks there's drinks scattered around all around the conference areas and just eat as much as you can while it's there so this is a 30 minute talk we'll have 15 minutes afterwards for Q&A so there are two microphones on both sides of the aisles you can walk up after the presentation if you have any follow up questions or if you don't want to walk up there or just raise your hand we'll run over and give you a microphone so I will be a very brief intro to our first presenter for the afternoon this is Chris Lubkert can we get a round of applause for him hello everyone so I'm here to talk about raising capital raising funds for a wordpress business specifically I'll share a little bit about myself my name is Chris Lubkert as Emma mentioned I live in Denver, Colorado in de USA go skiing and biking and things like that and I conveniently wore the same shirt as is in my photo so you know it's really me and I'm the co-founder of Extendify which is a software solution that helps hosts around the world to improve their wordpress experience and at Extendify we raised capital for our business a few different times now over the past a little while and so I have that experience being on the founder side of it raising funds also previously I was at Automatic which is the company behind wordpress.com and at Automatic we managed various acquisitions and also investments that we made on behalf of the company so I've kind of been on both sides of the table both in and outside of wordpress because previous to Automatic I was at another software company we raised 25 million dollars of growth capital at some point and supported that way back early in my career as well so I feel like raising capital is often times this mysterious process this mysterious concept so I wanted to shed some light on what it is, what it entails and give some framework for thinking about whether or not it's right for your business so that's what we're talking about today what is raising capital should you raise capital because the short answer is no, not for everyone so it's an important question to consider for yourself and then if it does make sense we'll talk about how to go about doing that and the steps that you should take so what is raising capital and capital is kind of a fancy word for money essentially it's just money no matter how you get it getting capital for your business is just about raising money you can do that I'll go through a couple of different ways we can think about the different options that exist before we talk about should you do it but capital if you need funds for your business you can do that in two basic ways it can be debt capital that you pay back you can get it from a bank you can get it from an individual they can give you a loan you pay it back with interest that's one way you can raise capital as equity and do this in exchange for an ownership stake in your business and that's where we'll really focus today I'll spend most of my time talking about equity often times when people talk about raising capital they're talking about equity capital specifically so bringing on an investor in their business in exchange for giving away a portion of the ownership of their business so we'll focus on that today but I think it is important to be aware that depending on your needs you can do that as well through a variety of different ways and then another concept which people often talk about is majority versus minority and this is a fairly straightforward concept but essentially if you're selling if someone's investing a majority stake that means they own more than half of the business so for all the math majors out there that means you own less than half of the business and if it's a minority stake that means the investor owns less than half of the business it could be 49%, it could be 1%, it could be anything in between or even less I guess in theory in a minority stake that means you still own the majority of the business in theory you could get multiple minority investments and you could end up with less than half yourself but traditionally that means that you still own the business you still have at least some portion some version of control of the business and what happens is we get some ownership in it and so a majority investment can oftentimes feel more like closer to an acquisition than an investment because somebody else owns the business they don't control over the business you still have some ownership in the business and so you can still share in the upside so as it continues to succeed and grow you could reap the benefits of that so it's not exactly like a full acquisition but we'll focus today more on the minority investment because that's often as people refer to when they talk about this and the last we're going through some terminology here but I think it's important the words aren't necessarily important but the concepts are important to think about when it comes to raising capital but there's this concept of primary versus secondary capital and what that means essentially is primary is when the business gets the money and so we've raised $100 in exchange for some portion of equity that $100 if it's primary capital it goes in the business bank account it's used to for the business in some way or another in theory it should be used to help increase the value of that business but it doesn't go to your personal bank account it's not you selling your own equity your own shares in the business and secondary capital is when you would sell or anyone would sell shares they already own and this is a little bit less common I would say secondary capital often as people are talking about raising capital it's because they want funds to do something for their business which would be primary capital essentially using the money to help increase the value of the business but sometimes there are people who will decide that they want to maintain some ownership of their business but they want some sort of proceeds to go do something with some funds or de-risk their future so there are sometimes opportunities typically secondary capital is more for established businesses ones that don't need the money but the owner is just looking to some shareholders looking to sell a portion of their stake so I think generally when I talk about raising capital I'll talk about primary capital I won't specify it but typically it's about using funds for your business help you grow, help you achieve certain goals that you're looking to do and you can raise capital from a variety different places the three most common ones that we think about are angel investors which are individuals these are either individuals on their own or as part of a small collective of people who choose to invest in a particular company there are investment firms as well so these can be anything from some of the traditional venture capital funds out of Silicon Valley all around the world that have teams of people that manage other people's money make lots of different investments or the last one to think about our strategic investors as well think about my role at automatic when we would make an investment that would be considered a strategic investor it's another company investing in a business I think from my perspective I think automatic active in our space there are a few others in the WordPress space and there are also others outside of WordPress that could be relevant depending on your business so companies like Stripe or PayPal have made strategic investments in other companies these are three different categories of companies that you can pursue when thinking about raising capital who could be potential investors and at Extendify we've essentially raised capital from all three kind of a blend of all of these so I kind of have experience and think about each of these different groups so there's a big question about should you raise capital for your business and I think that was the kind of what I thought about this topic it was it was a question that I feel like I'm asked quite often given my background experience a lot of times people will come and say I'm thinking about raising capital how should I think about that decision of whether or not there's this very basic question at the beginning and it's important to think about because it's not the answer to every problem it's not right for every business it comes with what for some business could be very important benefits but it's also comes with some implications that you need to be aware of and make sure it's the right fit for what you're trying to do so I'll talk first about what investors can help you do there are three different things obviously there's the capital part of it where you're given funds and so you can use that funds to do different things investors can also give you guidance or hold you accountable if that's something you need as well and they can also bring credibility to you, your business and help you in various ways there so I'll dig in a little bit deeper on each of these so the what can you use the money for essentially this is going to be one of the first questions that any investor if you are seeking to raise capital will ask you why are you asking for this money what are you going to do with it how is it going to help your business to grow and so there are three broad buckets that you could use capital for one is to invest in product maybe there's a new product that you want to go build there's something that you want to prototype for and want to invest in growing it out you can invest in R&D essentially a product development the second broad category is growth when I say growth I really mean what I'm really talking about is marketing or sales or initiatives there that you could do to gain more customers and help to grow the business that way and this is something both of these are ones where it can be very helpful to have some initial proof points I would say just going and trying to raise capital for a product you have started zero development or zero research on can be quite challenging same with growth I think a lot of times companies think well if only I had a sales person or if only I had a marketer then everything would be great then my business would continue to grow and it can be quite challenging if you've never even experimented with some of these initiatives to get people to believe that it's going to work out so even if you feel like you need capital to invest in growth and marketing or a sales person or something like that then doing a few steps early on to demonstrate that there will be some success with that can be very very helpful and the last thing is the last broad category is M&A which is mergers and acquisitions so you could decide you wanted to use capital to acquire another business and I think it's something a lot of times people don't think about they don't think that it's a possibility for them they don't think that they're big enough to acquire another business or they don't have the funds to do it and M&A is a whole separate talk and a whole other topic to really think through how to do that well and how to make sure that it's good for the business but it is something that many times you can raise capital to do whether it's debt or equity so even if your business is profitable it's growing, you feel like you don't need funds it could be a reason at some point in the future if you did decide to pursue some sort of acquisition that was going to be strategic and important for your business and really helpful you could use capital for that as well and the right investors can be very very helpful actually so I think we found this with Extendify we are a wordpress business obviously we're kind of based on wordpress so we brought some people with deep experience in the wordpress ecosystem like Yoast and Marieke from Emilia Capital with their booth right outside they obviously have invested in Extendify they obviously have a tremendous amount of experience growing one of the largest product companies in the space and they've got a guidance support has been very helpful we also sell for us we sell into the hosting market and we brought on some investors who have both expertise and connections in that space as well and has been very helpful for us so as I think about Extendify we have obviously the capital the money has been important itself but probably even more impactful has been bringing the right types of investors that have been really helpful for our business I don't think we'd be where we are today without a lot of their support so and then the last piece that I mentioned before is credibility this has been an impact for us at Extendify as well I mentioned selling to the hosting market like many of the aside from the ten hosts that come to work camps like many of them aren't very deep into the wordpress ecosystem in the community and so we're unknown to us we didn't know them, they didn't know us and so our first conversations with people having some stamp of approval by the credibility that it comes with other people saying that they are willing to put money behind your business behind your idea, behind what you're doing has been helpful as well just kind of like gives people an opportunity to puts people a positive predisposition to talk to you so should you raise capital I think there are a few questions you should ask yourself in order to think through whether or not it's right for your business or not one is do you need the money if you don't need the money then maybe you could get advisers you could try to solve some of your solve for some of your kind of gaps that you're looking to fill around credibility or support in other ways I think this is a very important question I mentioned this earlier what would you go do with those funds as well and it's not enough just to say marketing I would like to invest in marketing I think going a level deeper and really thinking about what is it going to do for your business how is it going to make it more valuable because there is a real trade off you're giving away a portion of the ownership of your business to someone else and so that funding, that transaction should make the whole thing more valuable than what you would do just on your own and it can have that effect if you own 80% of a business that's 3 times as large as it would have been otherwise that's certainly better than owning from a financial standpoint so the second is do you need the support and I think this also goes into what types of investors you would look for as well but is it are there people that you could bring on board that would be helpful to your business that would fill in your own knowledge or experience in some way or another that could be valuable the next one the third question is about what type of business you really want to run and this is more of a looking deep inside yourself as opposed to looking at your business and kind of more objective it's more soul searching really are you interested in having a business that supports your lifestyle that you run for the next 20 years of working on interesting things and you're just perfectly content with the path that you're on in that case you probably shouldn't raise capital because the investors whatever investor you bring on is likely to have a different expectation for that business or are you interested in continuing to grow and for some people if you're a single individual that might mean managing a team product owner developer building up the product to now spending most of your time managing a team is that something you really want to do does that get you excited is that something that will fulfill you essentially so it's kind of thinking about the type of business you are looking after it will both make sure that raising capital is the right decision for you and it will also help you to find the right types of investors as well that kind of match what you're trying to do and then the last question I think is important to ask yourself is if you're ready for the responsibility because it is a responsibility there's a lot of trust that goes into somebody giving you whether it's a small or a large amount of money it doesn't really matter you are now a custodian of their investment your responsibility is not just to the business you had previously but you have a responsibility to deliver on what you said you were going to do and take care of the investment that someone has chosen to make in you and deliver on that trust they are believing in you that you and the team that you have are able to build something great deliver on what you set out to do so these are questions to really think about whether or not you should raise capital we talked about some of the benefits but I think there are also it's absolutely not the right decision for every person out there and it's important to really think about if it's right for you and now is the right time for you as well assuming you do think it makes sense we'll talk briefly here about how to raise capital I think this is something that is also a mysterious process most of what you hear about some sort of announcement that says hey we've raised some capital and you don't understand all of the effort that goes into and all the work steps that have gone into getting to that point and it's interesting I feel like this is on people's minds a lot more now in the wordpress ecosystem because over the past two, three years there's been an increase in investment opportunities so now it's like a real possibility for many people previously in the first 15, 16, 17 years of wordpress' history it was mainly just a few hosting providers that had external capital almost every other business was one that was bootstrapped and grown over time and many have been quite successful and so that was the tried and true model in wordpress and I think it's still as possible today to grow a successful business using that model but now more than ever I think there's an opportunity if it's ripe for your business to decide to raise capital and so there are a few key steps I'll talk about here the first one is to identify the right type of investor and I talked a little bit about this I touched a little bit about this earlier but we talked about angel investors investment funds, strategic investors so there are types in kind of that way like who they are or who one is going to be or multiple ones is going to be most helpful for your business is going to help you achieve whatever goals you have but there's also an important thing to think about both what stage you're in and by stage I mean where your company is are you just getting started do you have a profitable growing business today do you have a multi-million dollar business that just needs some other type of funding so thinking about the right stage is important because if you are just starting out you've been in business for a year you have a product you have a handful of customers but you're looking to get beyond this very early stage if you go reach out to people who are companies who focus more on later stage growth capital, they're investing tens of millions of dollars in businesses that already have meaningful revenue lots of history you could talk to 100 of them and none of them is going to be a fit they're not going to be the right fit for where you are in your stage of business and equally important to stage is thinking about what your ambitions are because there are some companies traditional Silicon Valley investment venture capital funds who all they care about are can you be a multi-billion dollar company they would rather have a 98% chance die turn out to be this unicorn 98% chance that it completely fails then have something that's a less risky bet but with less upside so this kind of goes back to the soul searching part of it a little bit what type of business are you striving for what are your goals and ambitions will also help you align with the right types of investors because there are plenty of investors out there who would be excited about making five kind of five times return on their money meaning if they invest $100 they get $500 back that would be a good outcome for them and they hope that every one of their investments succeeds and returns some sort of capital but if you go talk to Andres and Horowitz or Sequoia Capital or some of these traditional venture capital funds they would be completely non-interested in a business like that so really thinking about where you want to take the business en help you to find the right types of investors to kind of their ambition from an investment standpoint is aligned with what you're trying to do and then you have to build a pitch and this isn't, I think there's an exercise around building a slide deck and that's not specifically what I'm talking about here I mean what's your story like why do you what has brought you to where you are today where do you hope to achieve your business of what we had so far we talked about those proof points whether it's marketing or other uses of the capital but how have you what success have you been able to demonstrate today and where do you want to take the business and why is it a big opportunity why is it an opportunity that somebody should be excited about investing now and I think equally important to this is the person behind it you, your team, the people behind it I should say because that is when you talk to when I've talked to like various investors it is almost always the number one criteria it's the person right they want to see a big opportunity they want to see some traction but without a doubt they have to believe that you and the team are able to kind of actually achieve and execute on this business someone just the other day was talking about hey I really think this is a good opportunity but I'm not actually sure if this team is the right team to go after it to be successful and so you are selling yourself just as much as you are selling your business and the opportunity in the market you're going after and lastly it's about making connections so I think people you hear this a lot that it's largely about there's always a important element of making connections and networking but getting out there talking to people finding introductions meeting different people telling your story this is why it's important to have that pitch that's why I've put pitch as the number two before the connections is really thinking through what that story is can help you to tell that story find new people who within that resonates and you have to make those connections because again it comes back to trust before people have to trust that you're going to be and they have to believe in you as a person and you as a collective team as well in your ability to succeed I listed these three steps it's not easy and it's not quick it's another important consideration thinking about whether you should raise capital is the time and distraction it takes it can take months and months and literally hundreds of conversations for different businesses there is a lot to it but at a very high level these are the steps that I would recommend taking if it is a path you choose to explore with that I will be happy to take any questions whether they're broad questions or specific to someone's experience thanks for having me thanks you so much Chris like you said there is opportunity for some Q&A so there are two microphones on both aisles so if you have any questions please head over to it oh if there is a hand up yeah yeah if you can please yes I will hide over here sorry it's a bit asking a question it's a bit of a show itself anyway you refer to the kind of person or business that could go to a level that is a multibillion one yes are there some basic trades and either the company or the person that runs or the team that runs the company have to abide in order to achieve that level are there some basic trades I'm not talking of course I would say it's a good question because most companies never reach anywhere close to that that's why they're called unicorns these are companies that have been massively successful and exceed 99.9% of their outcomes out there so I think it's there's a whole industry of venture capital around trying to identify these companies and look for those trades like you said the company standpoint the number one thing as you think about how big the company can go is how big the market is we're fortunate in wordpress in this broad ecosystem because wordpress powers 40 some odd percent of the web depending on what you look at it's a huge opportunity there's a huge market there but you need to think about your specific opportunity there's only 500 million dollars and obviously it's really hard for you to grow meaningfully beyond that unless you're creating a whole new category and evangelizing something the first thing that people look at when thinking about the opportunity and the chances of becoming this multi-billion dollar company is the market and this may be one kind of clarification on that it could be you could get there in different steps an offering that is maybe at one level but then you could have a path to potentially expanding that offering to then go after an even larger market so besides the market is one of the elements and then when it comes to the person it's the ambition frankly it's not for everyone that's not what everyone likes to do it might be easy to sit here and think of could snap my fingers and have a billion dollar company of course maybe lots of people would say they want that want to take and the risk that's involved with kind of striving for that level I think is it comes down to kind of the ambition of what that person is looking to do and so I think reflecting yourself and trying to think about if that's the life you want to have for yourself, not the outcome but all the work it takes to get there would be the second thing I think about ok, thank you very much thank you, I think we've got a few more over there hi, I'm Tom would you say that Europeans are much more modest in their ambitions and I'm asking that because back in the day we raised a seed round of 100K or so and then I would read on TechCrunch that our American counterparts would raise like a 2.5mm pre seed round right, so there's some kind of disconnector and difference in I don't know culture or our expectations so what's your comment on that yeah, I think traditionally that's been true, historically there's been a difference between kind of geographies it's been a combination of maybe the pitch or the story, kind of the ambition part of it, it's also access to capital right, so there was a lot more funds coming into some of the large investment areas within the United States for money available essentially so people were willing to make bigger investments and you talk about the difference between geography, I think the same has also been a true thing about wordpress actually what is often has been a large round for a wordpress company would be considered a very tiny one for a software company out in the non-wordpress ecosystem and I don't actually necessarily think that's a bad thing I don't think that the size of the round is something that is a bragging point it's what you do with it and what you're able to achieve in many ways you could say raising a smaller amount of capital and still succeeding is better better for you, the investors etc I don't know that one's necessarily better than the other but there has been that difference I think at a very anecdotal level I think it's changing as more investors are willing to make investments outside of specific geographic regions so many U.S. investors are able to make investments outside of the United States these days so I think that's changing a little bit but I also don't think it's like the primary metric if you can raise $100,000 that can fuel your next stage of growth and set you up for success you should do that you shouldn't raise $2.5 million if you don't need it hello thank you for the presentation I have a question I really have zero information about investors and this stuff the question is could you please share some tips places where to find U.S. investors for the European company yeah, so the first thing you can do this is a U.S. investor but you can go to the Emilia Capital booth I hear by the way they're giving out 10 euro notes as swag so definitely need to go check it out it's just a rumor don't find me if that's not true but I think it is always a challenge if you're reaching out to people cold with no introduction they don't know you're sending an email sometimes it works out sometimes you can send the perfect email someone happens to read it they choose to talk to you and it works out magically but it's very very hard to make that work really so the best way is to try to make connections to get there and you may not have deep connections to U.S. investors or any investors maybe right so that's where it comes down to like telling your story and making any connection like meeting people at a word camp who then may be excited about what you're doing and maybe they're not an investor but maybe they know someone who would also maybe be excited about what you're doing even if it takes multiple chains multiple kind of linked steps to get there that's by far the most effective way I can't think of a single investor that we've brought on it's Extendify or even in my past experience where we didn't have some sort of connection so yeah it's not the it's certainly a challenge it's not easy to do that but sometimes all it takes is finding one person who's excited about what you're doing who can then connect you to one other person so and I would say we've had my co-founder Arthur and I probably hundreds in the hundreds of conversations not with specific investors but telling our story and so the majority of them don't work out they don't turn into anything and so I wouldn't get discouraged thinking oh I found this person but they never ended up connecting me to someone so you just have to kind of keep putting in that effort to networking and making those connections cool thanks yeah, good luck thank you for all the information I wanted to ask if there is some good way to estimate for example if there is an investor for your company, if it's an angel investor let's say how much percentage would you think it's a good one to give to the investor or in the case of a strategic investor how do you estimate how much is fair enough that's a very very good question and it comes with a standard answer of like it depends right there's not like a generic but it's something that is the reason it's a question it's a very good question is because often times it's not this information isn't very public people talk about maybe they raise some capital but the details of it aren't shared publicly so you don't have these examples of what's common, what makes sense for different types of businesses but the two things that it really depends on is one, how much capital you're kind of bringing in and two, like how kind of the belief of how valuable the business is right both today and where it can go in the future because the very simple equation is right if someone puts in $100,000 and they believe the business is worth a million dollars then they should own 10% of that business you kind of think about it as that basic math in some ways the value is how good you can sell it and maybe even how much interest there is if you have multiple different options that's always better than having one person or fund or firm or anything that you can go after I would say broadly though to give you a sense for an early stage, like a first investor you probably could expect whether it's an individual or a collect group of different investors anywhere from like 5 to maybe upwards of like 30, 25, 30% 25, 30 would probably be pretty high 5 would probably be on the lower side of things so something in that range would be a common amount, but again it all comes down to like how well you can sell yourself in your company kind of essentially, right thank you for your thoughts is there one more? if you had a million dollars and you had to invest that in WordPress I would invest in Extendify I would invest in Extendify but assuming that that wasn't what you were wondering about I mean, it is that is the opportunity that I'm excited about the most is kind of helping the experience, especially the initial experience and the ongoing experience with WordPress I think I would invest it in a company that has a clear distribution strategy so it goes beyond just having a good product but is there some unique way to get distribution and kind of growth for the business so today I'm quite, like the path we're taking is selling in kind of going through the hosting channel which I think is interesting and under undertapped today so if there are, I think there are a handful of solutions in both the security space performance space that are also doing that and have found good success so I think it would be a company like that Patch Deck, Object Cash Pro companies that have taken that approach and I think have a bright future so yeah alright, thank you very much everyone let's give it up one more time first thank you so much ok, so while everybody is trying to run away I will just try to make some quick announcements again so in your swag bags if you guys were also maybe a little bit confused about what those postcards were about it is a word camp card game and it says for me to remind the rules but I feel like it's whose line is it anyways and there are no rules so there are some kind of things that you can do, you're supposed to mingle network, try to trade your cards get all of the cards as collectibles specifically for this word camp Europe 2023 but you do have to do something to get the next postcard so you will have to go to the community booth and answer this question so the second question for today is in how many languages is wordpress translated into so if you go check out the community booth talk to some of the volunteers and you provide them that answer you will get another wordpress postcard and then, yeah and you can also ask them what the first one was from the day from earlier today so, alright, thank you guys we have another panel starting at 3, so see you guys then what are you guys doing? oh thank you, thank you for that, yeah you can talk okay, so I will make this as quickly as possible because we have an awesome panel for you guys so we want to leave as much time for them so just a few quick announcements just remember at the middle of the oh, I'm Emma by the way, I'm the MC I'm just skipping right over that yeah, if you have any questions, ask me or anybody else in a blue shirt the easiest way to find them is at the center of the expo, there is that place where you guys got your swag bags there's also the lost and found there and info desk everything, all questions I don't know, even philosophical questions you could go for it there sure, why not yeah, so I will just make this brief and introduce our host and he will take it from there with the panel, welcome to the stage Jonathan and I'm happy to announce our panelists we have Rosalind Lavery from WooCommerce we have Miriam Schwab from Elementor and James Giraud from TeamWP this is a really cool space we've got some volume to it, this is going to be fantastic we're here today to talk about partnerships I want to give a little bit of context for this WordPress as we know it's a big decentralized ecosystem there's a lot of players, coming to a word camp like this is a great way to get a sense of just like how big our ecosystem is and this is still just a small part of it and one of the best ways that we find to grow in this ecosystem is through partnerships and in putting this together I wanted to give you guys a chance to hear from people who have a lot of experience in partnerships and we have a couple of things we want to accomplish we want to give you a better sense of what's possible like open you to new ideas about partnerships give you a chance to hear from each of them with some guidance on what to look for in a good partnership what are some of the opportunities and challenges and then ultimately what we're hoping to do is give you some takeaways that inspire you to go out and work on partnerships of your own so let's let's go ahead and get started so Rosalind let's just get a little bit of context for your background you're not a stranger to WordPress you've been in this space for a long time can you just give folks a little bit of context of where you started and what you do now hi everyone so I started I had to go check this I started working with WordPress in 2009 and spent a number of years a few years building WordPress sites it was quite exciting I was in South Africa at the time and it was very exciting at the time because there were a lot of people asking for how do we make this give us money so that was quite fun and then I worked at some payment companies in BD and partnership roles for a few years and now I am part of the payment partnership team at WordPress and looking at our payment partnerships as well as starting to consider our payment program more broadly within the company one thing I'm curious about is have you noticed anything the way we do partnerships in WordPress and I think WooCommerce is a great example it's a much more mature in general program compared to what a lot of folks are doing but you also have experience in the world outside like the payment space etc when you how well developed do you feel like the partnership stuff is in the WordPress space today in WordPress in general I think to me it's almost intrinsically part of it because we're an ecosystem like nothing works individually nothing works on its own it all is about how we work together and I think the whole nature of WordPress in itself is a bit of a partnership I think the whole ecosystem is kind of designed perfectly for partnerships whether we are that developed in figuring out how we formalize that a little bit more I think is potentially where there is growth still to be seen but I think it is part of our ethos it's like we're well set up for it and the growth part is a lot of what I've been noticing it's where it makes sense to people maybe they just haven't been curious enough or it's intimidating it's like where do I start but there's a general readiness in the space for it Miriam so you are also no stranger to WordPress we've seen and experienced a lot for those who don't know can you give us a little bit of your background and what you're doing now so I started working with WordPress about 15, 16 years ago when I founded WordPress Development Agency based in Israel we worked with leading Israeli tech companies in large organizations building custom implementations for them on WordPress through the years I came to be familiar with all of the benefits and some of the disadvantages working with WordPress and performance scaling security and tried to look for solutions for that and in the end came to the conclusion that publishing WordPress sites in a static format would solve all of that and I founded a company called Stratik worked on that for quite a few years and it was acquired a year ago by Elementor so now I'm at Elementor and I have a relatively new position there as head of WordPress relations in my agency and at Stratik and at Elementor I've had different types of experience in interactions around partnerships and one of the things I love too is you've also seen a gamut having both been on the hosting side of things Elementor is a massive plugin in the space with its own really ecosystem around it as well so you've had a very rich diverse range of experiences on that front depending on where you are at within our ecosystem WordPress partnerships might look a little differently to you whether you know there's many agencies here who are working on partnerships as well or if you're a product company or a hosting company or a company like Elementor where there's a plugin and there's hosting and there's Stratik now and like you said Elementor is very interesting because it has a very large ecosystem around it I can't remember the number of plugins I think there might be something like a thousand extensions they're just focused on that just for Elementor which is crazy and some of those extensions and plugins are generating serious revenue so it's like a many ecosystem and I think it's worth saying too and well just to plant the seed broadly that partnerships is a very encompassing term that can mean a lot of different things that's part of what you're alluding to there it's like the way that Elementor would do it might be different than what a hosting company would do versus a small agency like partnerships is relevant and just the seed I want to plant with you broadly is don't just assume what it means for some people a partnership is oh we're going to have an affiliate arrangement and generally versus all the way to a very deep integration and one of the examples is paperwork being signed or not that's one of the turning points where at least in July I find it's okay now it's more serious I think what you were saying about WordPress like the nature of our ecosystem being one that kind of just develops partnerships in and of itself so I think Elementor is a good example of that and actually I was just talking to someone who used to extend plugins and was working with Elementor and he was so thrilled with Elementor's documentation as a developer so from the beginning if you're building a product and you build it so that others can build on top of it and around it then you're already creating a form of partnerships by actually just almost not doing anything you're facilitating that so James you've had quite the background in WordPress as well and you've had as a special special way of seeing the partnership side of the ecosystem grow please tell us a little bit about where when WordPress came into the radar for you what that looked like and what you're doing today I have been in the WordPress space almost as long as Miriam actually about 14-15 years started out running my own little agency did some product work for page lines theme back in the day for those of you who may remember one of the first page builders building themes and plugins there actually as their director of operations and doing community management before making the leap to Envato where I was for a while as the author engagement lead that was kind of my main role working with all 60,000 of the independent creators in the Envato ecosystem including many WordPress developers we talked about this this is interesting because of the timing partnerships as a concept hadn't really been formalized so it was author engagement yeah, author engagement I mean if you think about it's sort of like a mash up of partnerships and community engagement because so much of what we do working at scale with so many independent creators is community, just like in WordPress and so you're navigating a lot of the challenges and opportunities that come along with that I also worked at Gravity Forms which is a plugin which many people may know in the space and most recently was at Stellar WP and what are you doing now oh, what am I doing now in the last 18, 20 weeks have been going full steam into Team WP which is a team and culture platform for WordPress companies James, one of the things I loved about the work you did with Envato early on is you're very much getting into and this is general about partnerships it's work that really affects people's livelihoods it goes well, it makes it fantastic when it doesn't a strong partnership can make all the difference in a business and it's one of the things we can sometimes just say oh it's business but partnerships is also very much about the relationships and how well people fit together there's a cultural aspect to it as well so you guys we have a lot of perspective that we can draw from here what I want to start with is talk a bit about partnerships as a concept and the first question I'll start with you Rosalind is when you think about partnerships for those who so first I agree it's a general way that we kind of do things in WordPress but now for purposes of this discussion I'm talking about more formal especially on the commercial and the business side of things we're growing together in a partnership so that's the context for it from your perspective what are some of the benefits and tradeoffs that folks should be aware of when they're thinking about partnerships I think that's it's always so broad and this is kind of because it depends how you've designed your partnerships or kind of what you're wanting to get out of it I always see partnerships as being a balance to me I sort of like I don't really put affiliates into a partnership concept in my mind because to me that's often a lot more one way can you just touch on that for a moment because I think that's an important concept a lot of times I've heard multiple people oh I have affiliates what's that the one way versus two way and the way that I see it is that the definition of partnership means that there has to be benefit going both directions and kind of similar benefit going back and forth between both sides so affiliates is a lot more a lot of the time is kind of based I see it as being a little bit more of a one way benefit in a way that is then compensated and that's a bit of a transaction that is there's something going one way and we're paying for it in the other direction but it's almost more like a sale and less like I am trading with you and I am I'm giving something and it's coming back but together we're growing more than what we would if we were individually selling those things to different people or something it's a bit harder to but it's a bit of the two kind of concept one of the clear benefits if it's two ways you're growing together, your interests are aligned what's a trade off what's a downside of that level you're both working closely together I think the tricky thing that you have to be aware of when you are building partnerships is how you manage the competition behind that because naturally what ends up happening as you start building partnerships becomes a question of what you're doing is you making something more together than you would individually but now it means that you're growing differently to how you are to the rest of the ecosystem and particularly think when you're in a space of an ecosystem you're now starting to elevate particular people or particular partnerships in that space and how do you make sure that you're still growing the broader ecosystem as part of that and how do you balance that competition that happens between the different partners that you have and keep that balance in a way that you don't end up in my mind as well you can get exclusive partnerships they're not the ones that I tend to prefer because I think they often remove people out of the ecosystem more than they actually encourage them this is a key point, this is something for folks who are new to it I've noticed this a lot where they'll gravitate towards exclusive and it makes sense at first blush why someone would ask for that but in general it's like, at least in my experience it is more of a short term it's maybe a short term win but you're missing out in the long run I associate that to the concept of growing the pie you want to together be growing the pie as well as each others business and the growing the pie piece is very difficult to do in an exclusive arrangement because invariably the world changes systems, what you need out of it you almost become a bit too comfortable in an exclusive environment because it's a little bit like what you would expect you're going to get the worst coffee at an airport because you've got no choice and I think I put exclusivity into a bit of a similar thing I think there are times when it can work but I think it's a tricky piece of it and a lot of the time for me it's more about how you find that balance and how you build partnerships in a way that shows and creates value that is beneficial to both sides of that partnership as well as the users or merchants or whoever that you're actually doing that partnership for there's always a third party and I think taking that third party into account you're generally partnering to build value between two companies but for the benefit of a broader community so there's always that third element that you have to take into account that's a key point because sometimes people talk about partnerships but if you lose focus on the mutual customer then it's like oh we have a partnership but it doesn't really go anywhere Miriam, so from your perspective a similar question, like you have a lot of experience in partnerships you've seen it from multiple lenses now the hosting side and the plugin side of things and what are some of the benefits and tradeoffs especially that stand out to you well like you mentioned the benefit really is 1 plus 1 equals more than 2 and I think that's one of the wonderful things about being in business in general and WordPress specifically which is that instead of everyone just doing their own thing and staying in their own lane if we each bring our value to each other's customers then everyone wins and including the customer because like for example with Elementor Elementor's market shares is relatively large and so what happens is a lot of other products in the ecosystem we'll see that a large percentage of their users are using Elementor so how can we make sure that these users are getting the best possible experience we can all pretend that like you're doing your thing and we're doing your thing and there's no overlap or we can look at it and say okay our mutual users are gaining value from you, value from us now how can we collaborate or at the very least communicate around that reality and make sure that we're bringing the best possible experience Yes, I like that James, you've had this like one of the reasons why you focus on the culture side of things now is that you've been a part of that multiple steps in the different organizations that you've been in both being acquired there's all these cultural things that often don't get talked about so much that have an impact I'm curious from a partnerships perspective what are some of the benefits that you've noticed when it comes to the culture of a company when you're doing company A has a certain way of doing things commercially they agree that we're going to work well together it's going to be a two way maybe they're very different cultures I think one of the interesting things about this space is anybody can start anybody can create a company anyone can create a product and because of that you get the opportunity to see different perspectives on ways of working and how you approach problem solving how you approach the the user story or the customer experience and so one of the great opportunities of partnerships is the opportunity to be exposed to different ways of working and so a great example actually I can tell is the story of Envato and Elementor so very early on I say early on was a few years ago now not so early but Elementor had been working toward this thing called template kits this idea of a library of templates that you can do and obviously Envato has this huge community of authors that are designers and creating demos and doing all of that that kind of thing and one of the things that was really neat for me being in that story was watching the way that the Elementor crew would craft an agenda for our meetings together and being really clear about the outcomes of the meetings and the discipline around what we were going to talk about and watching that culture come through I don't know if that's an Israeli thing or if it was just there's a Hebrew word for that it's Tachlis I heard someone laugh so I heard the word so for me I was in an Australian company and it's a little bit more casual we feel each other out a lot more so there's that sort of cultural dynamic as well in getting into these conversations and being able oh I like that I like that way of doing things cause we get right to the point we get into it so that's from a cultural point of view that's kind of funded to be exposed are there any trade-offs that stand out I think as far as partnerships go the trade-off is that they take longer and so if you are going in expecting things to happen in partnerships you have to remember that the partnership is always secondary to the primary the primary thing that's happening I want to touch on it from a slightly different perspective so with WordPress at least for me one of the big benefits is that you have all this people from very different backgrounds and perspectives and context coming together wordcams to me are a beautiful example of that so in partnerships I think it's quite natural because of our ecosystem for people to say oh we should do business together in a logical conclusion yet they're coming from a very different context or a different culture so from my perspective I see the benefits of that because we serve a global audience I think the more intermixed you can be the better are there any trade-offs that stand out to you from a culture perspective where it's like company A is very much this way and B that way I think being clear on what the value of partnership is for a lot of people it's revenue ROI what is this going to lead me to and partnerships are a long game and so if you get into it for a short term thing sometimes that can work and sometimes there are short term goals that you can assign to it but there really are about the long term value that you're going to get out of it so if you have misalignment around what the ROI is going to be that's something that you really have to get clarity on right away I think that's a good transition to the next Sir Roslyn, from your perspective what are some of the things that you look for it's almost like what are some of the positive indicators of a partnership so you just mentioned the values alignment or you want similar things but from your perspective what do you look for I think the starting point often is just trade customers because of what I was speaking about ultimately you're really designing a partnership to create benefit for both the companies but mostly for the end users who are actually going to benefit from that I think at the same time that's not enough and just having shared customers doesn't necessarily mean that there's a way to actually create value beyond just having shared customers so I think for me it's a lot of the time it's understanding shared goals as well between companies we've got to share customers I think a lot of the time I've worked mostly in product partnerships which is quite a specific field within partnerships and a lot of the time it is about finding shared incentives that mean that you build a better product together which ultimately benefits the end customer at the end of the day so I think that is where things can really spearhead the we making more than two of those one is there opportunity available to be able to create deeper integration that we wouldn't be able to invest the resources in unless there was a way that we were going to accelerate revenue growth by doing this and it is a long term goal there is a lot to that so I think the kind of product integration layers are a key part of that I think there's also looking for how a partnership would benefit how you communicate the ecosystem to your customers so a lot of what we do at WeCommerce as well is using feedback of products that customers are already using and how do we elevate those and how do we position those in a way that customers are finding them better so I think it's a bit of a layering approach and you have to find that first key thing and then you kind of growth by finding I think often the first things for me are shared customers and then the product and then you start looking at the additional layers of how you can grow within the company. One of the things I found useful because so I agree wholeheartedly shared customers this sort of shared problem set this thing that you're doing for them and then I find that those who do well tend to focus on like some first wins like okay how do we get started like cause it's easy to get lost in the detail sometimes or really focus on the commercials which are important but like how do we actually prove that we're creating value together for the end customers. Miriam I'm curious from your perspective what are some of the things and so you've had multiple vantage points over the years of what you've looked for but what in general what do you look for in a partnership or anything that you add or things you think of differently. So you were just mentioning about easy first wins is something that I very much believe in setting up a full-fledged partnership can sometimes be quite complicated like both sides can understand and be aware that there's a lot of opportunity there and that they're shared customers and just like they can bring more value etc but sometimes just getting things moving can be complicated and it can even be an issue of internal resources building a partnership takes a lot of time often around different aspects of it like the planning strategy and the bureaucracy so sorry I roll my eyes what's wrong with bureaucracy where you can have a mutual win so you're looking for a couple of things first shared customers I think that's going to I've seen people like oh we want to do a partner with someone so like well you don't really have much in common they're focused on the small business they're focused on enterprise you're almost I've talked to folks who like said oh yeah we tried a partnership and you ask a couple of questions like well that was very different audiences so finding shared customers is a good starting point you may have a great long term idea about how closely you can integrate but starting with something to get the ball rolling James so from your perspective especially with what you've seen over the years how do you measure the success of a partnership oh give me the data question great I think so to start if you're going for quick wins that's probably the first place to get your first data set right so if you don't have any data on a partnership and you're not sure how much investment you want to pour into the partnership those quick wins those easy sort of things that don't involve a lot of bureaucracy or overhead or team alignment can be a really good way to sort of prove the value or prove the business case for why you might want to take the next step for it I'm a big believer in hypothesis driven design and development we start from a hypothesis we think that by doing this partnership together we are going to see maybe an X percent number of visits come to that or a number of conversions you don't have to set it big but just see if you can prove your hypothesis and then go from there okay we proved it what's next so that's a great way to start getting data and then move beyond that into the bigger ROI which I think is around the effort scaling okay right so you know from my experience one of the things that often happens is we're already doing our thing we've already got our campaigns going our marketing, our activities, our products and we've got these problems that we're trying to solve for our customers and when somebody comes alongside us and says hey we can solve that problem or an ongoing problem faster and you can and still enhance that that helps sell my product anyway so it actually increases as rosin was saying that ecosystem view just by having other players, other partners in sharing what we're doing together and serving that customer together increases the value for both and then that relationship can get stronger and stronger over time as you start to see those synergies I use the word come together it's a great word Roslyn from your perspective so WooCommerce has a mature partnership program lots of experience there's a strong background in partnerships a lot of folks are going to focus on how to get started we've talked a bit about that what are some of the things from your experience that stand out in terms of because a good partnership is going to be long term go for a long time what do you think about beyond the initial start maybe after the first year what are some of the things the way you think about long term I think that often has to come down to seeing things from both perspectives a lot of the time how I approach growth conversations and a lot of the time it's just about let's have a discussion and this is where the relationship side of partnerships comes in is understanding what I was speaking about before understanding what our shared goals are everything is evolving in the economy all the time being able to re-evaluate have our goals changed have our customers changed which things have changed from the basis of what we started from and then how do we look at those again I think a bit of an analogy but I do some handstand training you're constantly tweaking you have to find your foundation and a lot of the time that foundation is pretty solid and remains consistent the whole way through the partnership the basic fundamentals where you're generating revenue what the actual foundation of that partnership agreement is is pretty consistent that's around finding all shared customers making sure that you have like aligned incentives and then beyond that the way that I approached this if you if you are trying to understand what you would want to do next with the partnership seeing it from the other person's perspective and going what would be a win for them and then looking at it from the other side and going ok if that's the win for them and understanding what that is I could do you on my side that are not a huge cost or things that I'm doing already that would benefit that goal but you kind of have to put the other person's hat on to go because they don't know what you have to offer you don't know what they have to offer but you sort of have to play both sides to be able to figure out how you find growth within that I think this is especially relevant in road map discussions where you have a current state you have something that's working and I like that you this is part of why having that strong foundation of the line interest matters because if it's loose and you're focusing on one audience and they're focusing on another then odds are you're going to become even more separated whereas if you have that same shared interest so Miriam what about from your perspective what when you think of past that initial stage of a partnership so you have the quick wins if you think about long term success that you look at as indicators that this is going to work well for the long term well it really is about making sure that each side feels like they're winning not just feels sometimes it is about feeling like in everything but it's actually winning and it is important to keep your partner in mind all the time and make sure you understand what it is that they want to achieve and also really to focus on what it is that you want to achieve and be clear about that and then keeping an eye on it is it working for us is it not what can we improve or is it really just not meant to be and you know parting ways hopefully as friends which it should be as friends because it was like an attempt to make each other more successful and if it didn't work it's just it's not necessarily anyone's fault I want to touch on that for a moment because I think a lot of folks at least want to learn how to do this you set something up but people tend to not ask questions it's like oh we created a partnership especially if you're public about it but in your experience Miriam when something is not working why how do you think about that so actually in some cases I said that it's not necessarily anyone's fault sometimes what happens is expectations aren't aligned and the expected efforts from both sides is not just communicated properly and so they'll set out on a journey together with expectations that each will do X but actually that's not what they each understand so communication is really important something else that can be tricky is if one of the players is a much stronger company than the other and I mean stronger, maybe just like more experience, larger, more resources is not having one and what can sometimes happen there is not what you would expect because they're larger they can put more resources towards it but because they're larger they might be working on many have their fingers in many pies fingers in many something is it pies everyone wants to have fingers in pies it's all about pies so blueberry anyways so a large organization might not put in the effort that the smaller organization thought that they could or would because they're big just because someone's big doesn't mean that's how it's going to be and so it's really important that if you're the smaller player to really make sure that you are demanding in some way that both parties are putting in some kind of equal effort having said that sorry just one more thing working with a larger entity that's putting in less effort still has a ton of value for a smaller company because they've aligned themselves with the brand of the larger company but at least in that way the expectations are aligned I'm aligning myself with you now my brand is seen with your bigger brand and just that on its own practically gives me value so anyways communication and expectation James, I want to talk a bit more about this like when things aren't working and I like to focus on the positive but I think if you by asking good questions and by anticipating like how you deal with that so in your experience at Envato you were sometimes in the position of having to like communicate disappointments sometimes so what are some of the ways that anything besides some perhaps scar tissue anything that stands out from that experience of like when things aren't working like how do you deal with it how should people think about it I think the first thing in anything is just remember you're talking to humans you're not talking to machines and so there are feelings involved no matter we can say it's just business but it is just people and that to me I think is the number one thing to remember and you know Rosalind said relationships Mirama said relationships it's all relationships our community is too small to let failures in these experiences get in the way of good healthy relationships so sorry I'll get that rant out of the way but failure I wouldn't say failure I would say like learning opportunities is maybe a better term to describe that let me put a specific example especially as a larger company well you look at like a policy change you look at like okay we need to make an adjustment maybe you started out you have like 10 partnerships and then you take a step back WooCommerce is an element in a larger company you look at this we need to make a change and that change it could have a negative effect on a smaller partner we deal with that a lot at Envato and one of the things you just have to do is first of all be direct about it don't beat around the bush one of the challenges we had at Envato is your communications are often scaled so when we would make a policy decision we weren't impacting one and two we were impacting tens of thousands and so and not just tens of thousands but those might be the individual authors but there's the employees of those author teams there's their families and so it's very easy for a motion to get involved in that so you need to be direct you need to be clear about what the change is you need to be clear about the why but you also have to keep your eye on the north star what are you working toward policy change is the overall health and growth of the entire ecosystem or the entire experience or the customer experience you as the the primary of that partnership I guess have to just own that and be okay with the flag and you're going to deal with it we deal with it in wordpress all the time our livelihood comes out of this and when our pull request doesn't get accepted in a new version release that's really going to impact our business we get emotional so it's very similar Rosalind, from your perspective let's take an example of a product company if they're new to partnerships and I think especially for folks here there is probably already this general sense of the value of collaboration and working together on things but let's say they want to say okay we want to grow we want to find our way to align interests where would you suggest someone start how should they think about it where should they focus their initial efforts if they're brand new it's very hard to get that specific I sort of feel like a lot of the time it's just about being curious about the initial conversation and acknowledging that not everything needs to be a yes I think part of what I've experienced a little bit with people into a partnership discussion is a little bit of that we have shared customers it must work there must be something there I think partnerships when they work are quite obvious they don't require a huge amount of digging you shouldn't need to try that hard if you're having to set up new things and set up new structures and try that hard you probably just have not found the right one and I think you want to start for something small you probably want to start with companies of a similar size and you want to start in a space where you are already winning and I think this is also part of what I've seen go wrong is partnerships are not a good way for you to enter a market this is an important point and it is because in order for you to benefit each other you both need to be bringing a certain value within that same concept at the same time so you can't be the launch partner for something that's more of an affiliate style thing where actually what you're looking for is inbound people coming towards you to start a new section so I think it's something that you're already winning in that somebody else is already winning in to the similar degree of what she's working with I think that's a great point let's take small products move some small plugins what I'm hearing you say is that they might start by saying let's work with others of similar size of similar compliments and be able to introduce each other to each other's customers we can work together that way and gain some experience and increase the degree to which they're winning yes and sort of if I'm winning we're both doing really well in the European market and you're tackling point of sale and the other person is tackling payments or something you're working within the same product line but you're both winning within each of those areas and you can support each other to make a better product for the customer and I think getting too complicated and trying to dig too deep to find exactly how you're going to find new customers is too hard to start I want to make that anchor that point too it's like it needs to be a two way thing so sometimes it's like folks will rightly see partnerships as a great growth opportunity because it is you have to make sure that you've done some initial work that you've done the work that you are winning to an appropriate degree where you're proving that you have value versus just seeing someone with an audience already and saying hey can I tap into that you have to do work as part of that partnership and I think that's the point it's a two way street on both sides you have to bring value but you also have to actually do work it can't be a one way street Miriam, what about you for someone who's new where do you recommend they think where should they focus I guess one way to start is to analyze their own data and just their own interactions with their customers or clients and understand what other products they're using so yeah look at that support is a great way to do that what shows up most often those types of questions and interactions and just start to look at that if it's a product that can bring more value to your customers current setup with you that's a great win potentially something that you're not doing in my experience when it's something that doesn't overlap at all with what we are doing whatever we is and then it's also much more comfortable in the WordPress space there is the ability and the opportunity to partner with competing companies and it happens all the time it's just more complicated and it demands a certain level of expertise to make it work in a way that everyone is comfortable with it while retaining their own brands protections and this and that customers it's a whole thing so if you can start with something that has no overlap in any way then I think that also can be an easier way to get started James, what about from your perspective for someone brand new, where should they start start by getting to know people I think is good building relationships and adding value without expecting anything in return when you're James, what if I have to make money don't start with money don't start with money if you're fresh don't do that because that's not what you need actually let me step back from that we all need money I get that we all want revenue but when you're getting started the most important thing that you can get is audience and credibility and in WordPress relationships are the way to grow audience and credibility so finding those people that are complementary to you that are maybe at the same size as you or in the same kind of like vein as you is good to learn from them figure out what the problem space is like and then finding ways to to be able to solve the problem together is good I like what Miriam said about not being doing the same thing first you might go to their party but it's probably not a good idea to do something necessarily with them that might be a little bit rough to start but there are complementary things that you can do that can support it so that's where I would start excellent and from my perspective what I would just add one of the themes that stands out just the importance of continuing to be curious one thing and listening to you guys that stands out to me I like your point about it's being simple and I've talked to quite a few folks where there are partnership opportunities that are actually really obvious and they're looking in harder places and I like the idea of seeing what your customers are already doing because if your customers can often tell you and then all that you're really doing is starting a relationship you say oh this plugin shows up a lot with my customers how about we go talk to them and then at that point we can find ways that we can integrate to provide more value in that context last but not least from my perspective I just want to encourage you guys to try things be curious start with small things between now and the next word camp and you can tell us what things you've worked on thank you each for your time appreciate it very much enjoy the rest of our word camp before you guys race off I think if anybody has just a quick question we can squeeze in one or two there's microphones on both sides I will stall by saying thank you if anyone wants to jump up to that mic if not if we have time we can take a couple questions we can take one or two questions do you guys have anything I don't know I think we are at the time if you guys have questions afterwards you can try to catch these fine folks there's one we'll take one who is word commerce currently partnered with we have lots of partners if you go look at our marketplace a lot of those people we partner in various categories payments, marketing shipping, tax the core the core products that don't that are not part of core the core product of word commerce I guess acknowledge and realise we can't solve all the problems the core product solves the basics of what you need in order to run a store but there are huge nuances needed, country specific solutions so a lot of those solutions are partners in various different forms but yeah our marketplace all of the products available in there is a good source to understand where we look for partners it would be in that and one of the benefits of being at word camp there is a great word commerce booth so you can go and check it out cool, thank you guys let's give one more round of applause for our wonderful panel thank you and while you guys are all walking out it's okay feel free to but if you want to stay for another awesome panel we will keep this party going but I will just make some announcements we are all staying there is another WP Connect session at four so in like 12 minutes on the Trianti balcony so the topic is actually going to be the fight for the future one so how someone can be a sponsored contributor and how a company can donate to an employee to work on that word press project so if you're interested go to that balcony if not stay for the next panel so thank you for that how are you guys doing thank you that always makes me feel good I can't say anything wrong now we have an awesome panel waiting for you guys to talk about some really interesting things the panel is called women and non-binary folk of word press so the panel brings together a diverse group of people for a very honest discussion about underrepresented folk in involvement in word press and this open source project so the panelists will discuss their achievements some struggles and then give advice to those that are starting out and any questions that you guys have afterwards we do have two microphones one in each aisle so we will do the panel for about 30 minutes fill out the room if there's lots of questions please stand up and ask to them and then they can continue with their discussion so can I get a round of applause for Francesca we already had a lot of fun if you can tell thank you so much for being here with us today so just a little bit of an intro Work and Europe is a big event that brings together people from all over the world underrepresentation and discrimination in tech have been an issue for a long time and the word press community has always tried to bridge these gaps with different initiatives having a group of women and non-binary folks on stage in Athens is one of the many ways we have as a community to showcase our diversity so please give it up for Anne McCarthy Product Wrangler at Automatic a big whoo whoo for Chaya Osterbroek so CEO of Ghost and Entrepreneur massive round of applause for Jessica Lischik Frontend Developer at Extendify cheers lots of cheers for Ryan Redfeld Web Accessibility Expert for Level Level and a trainer at Ali Collective finally I want to see the pom poms in the air for Felma Loutete Happiness Engineer at Automatic so pom pom yes Chaya asked me to do the introductions she says that I do great introductions I'm available for birthday Bar Mitzvast and anything else and give a huge shout out to Francesca for hosting the panel thank you I forgot to introduce myself the dance was enough to introduce myself to Jessica so we prepared a few questions and we have talked in the last week so we'll start with one topic that we all felt was quite important for our career about mentorship so I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of mentoring people, coaching them and sponsoring them is one of the first actions you can do for underrepresented people in every group and they proved to be quite effective for professional growth so have you had many mentors in your career and what role did they play and have you been a mentor to others who wants to go first yes I had a mentor when I was an analyst I studied chemistry in the laboratory and what I learned from him is there are no stupid questions and you have to keep asking until you actually know what you want to know so if you're afraid to speak out because you don't understand anything please say I don't understand it tell me it and keep asking and that was very useful in my career I'm mentoring now Katelyn, I don't know if she's here Katelyn is the new accessibility expert at level level and she's very bright then we're showing vital for our next panel who else want to say something about mentorship yes I had a mentor at the start of my career and his advice was to become a mentor and I thought that was the best advice he could give me because then I could look at it from a different perspective and hopefully I'm a mentor to many of of course the Yoast people our new folk people and I think that at this it's not a table right but in this half round I think we are all mentors to each other yes the wordpress community was through mentorship and sponsorship and I think a key part of it was the right amount of stress so I learned something in wordpress and he teach me something else and it kind of just progressed from there and now I feel like a lot of my mentorship is at a different scale I've done one on one mentorship but now it's about creating pathways for people to feel comfortable in reporting get hub issues and giving feedback on what's being worked on at wordpress core Jessica, Thelma, something to add my experience when I started working with wordpress the people that helped me I don't think they would even consider themselves as mentors but when I look back I see all the things that they did and how they helped me get into the space and get comfortable and start working on things which eventually led to a number of things so that was my experience I can actually share this experience I never had a mentor that I defined as a mentor instead I had many people helping me out in some way, kind of mentoring me but I never had someone I called a mentor and that's a follow up question would you be ready to be officially a mentor for someone like being I'm going to be your mentor and reach out to people and say hey I can help you do you feel at a point in your career were you I've never tried it actually to be a mentor to have that mindset but I think I will give it a try yeah that never hurts to try I do want to call it a mentorship program that's being worked on by Hari I don't know if he's here but that question is that there's actually a program being started to help provide mentorship more formally in the WordPress project it would be amazing if you're looking at a panel of mentors for me at least early in my career to see someone like me as a part of the initial group of that so I encourage all of us to maybe be a part of that effort shall I move on to the next question do we want to add something to this topic no let's go next so ah being part of an underrepresented group have you struggled in your job or the WordPress community someone wants to go first go someone else should go first yeah I mean to be candid I think I'm perceived a certain way between my age perceived gender just yeah needing to be friendly at all times needing to be approachable at all times needing to read paragraphs and paragraphs of text and it's yes that is part of my job but it is interesting whenever I'm talking to other coworkers how they don't get those interactions and yeah there are times whenever I think it's been difficult to navigate and emojis don't cover up everything so yeah I've definitely had some moments where I've had to say like this is where the project's headed this is what we're doing and then I've noticed the reaction is a bit different and it's something I'm mindful of like there are times whenever I'll ask a mill colleague to share a message rather than myself because I know it will be perceived differently and we were talking also about the age and I know that we'll have more to say about the topic but when we were preparing for this you really brought up the age issue yeah whenever I got started in the repris project I was very young I was 21 when I joined automatic and my first word camp got bossed around a little bit which was in 2014 a lot has changed since then I didn't really know how to advocate for myself so I definitely have experienced that and I know we were talking about Rion I don't know if you want to share something I felt left out as a woman but I feel left out as someone who is not young anymore I'm a baby boomer so within the WordPress community I'm very very old I entered the WordPress community in my 50s so I already was a bit older but if you have like an experience in web development in like 20 years you've seen everything and then new developers come up I had this new idea and said yeah yeah yeah and then convincing them that being there done that got a t-shirt it doesn't work and that's quite a sometimes I think that is a friction between young eager people who really want to learn and address stuff and then seeing this is not going anywhere so that's a bit what I'm struggling with that when you're older you're not taking seriously at that point and I don't know the solution for that but I think maybe it's just fact of life I don't know well shout out to our blog grumpy old women codes Rian and I have a blog grumpy old women grumpy old women codes we we can be grumpy together yes en it's just me and Rian reading it basically but when we have to vent about something we go there anyone else yeah I think I had I worked in several industries and if I compare the WordPress ecosystem with for example corporate companies now our example is that I worked at a huge insurance company really corporate orientated of course and there I had to struggle a bit more of course I belong to the minorities of the minorities so that was in that time that was really difficult but when I entered the WordPress ecosystem that was a warm bath I really want to point it out because I felt that it was really inclusive everyone was basically adopting my background and there was not an issue so that's also a positive story to share here tell me just the community just after school so the first industry that I experienced was WordPress related I didn't know much about that but I experienced a lot of imposter syndrome when I started out so someone who is from a very small country in Zimbabwe the community is not that big WordPress was more European and American centralized so you're getting to this big world and the culture is different but people are welcoming so it did at the end I did manage to go around this because of the people some of the people that I met after a couple of times but at first it was very difficult to put myself out there and say I want to do that because I didn't know how that would be perceived that was the biggest struggle that I had Jessica do you want to add something did you have any struggle of course do I have struggles so it's I think it's I would be surprised if there would be anyone with like zero struggles who is not male so yep someone had to say it thank you for saying it this also reminds me that I said that I would do a round robbing asking you your pronouns and where you're from and I totally forgot about it because I was very very concentrated on the choreography do you want to take a moment to ask everyone for their pronouns and where they're from because maybe okay sorry let's go alright we're in Washington right now in the U.S. and she, they the Netherlands, Nijmegen she, her Germany, she, her the Netherlands I'm a female baby boomer like I mentioned before I'm from Zimbabwe she, hey she, her Italy, she, her okay yes Torino, Italy but also Norwich, England I wanted to stay a bit more on the struggles but I also didn't want to sound like poor us we just, you know it has been so hard we didn't achieve anything because that's not true despite all this difficulties and many more that we probably haven't mentioned we also had some pretty impressive achievements so who wants to go first ah now it's the alphabetical we've been debating this we were supposed to answer every question alphabetically and I was like well let's not but this one is on you yeah I was thinking about this I think for me it's recent but the outreach program I'm really proud of I know it's been imperfect but a lot of it is like a testament to people taking a risk and being willing to engage in an experiment and a first for the community and I know it wasn't always met like I started it privately at first and people were like what are you doing and I was like oh that was bad okay we're going to do this so I feel like I've learned along the way and I hope it creates other outreach program efforts in the future yes yes I was thinking our hosting tonight are you going to be there and I think it started out small a couple of years ago and it was I believe done by a codable we partnered up and now we have this amazing waiting list so if you aren't there tonight that's sad for you but be there next year yes I would say 2 of my biggest achievements so far have been being part of the 5.6 release as a default theme wrangler woep woep en also being the lead organizer for wordcamp osnabrück in 2019 which was a 250 person wordcamp happening in germany and I'm going to repeat both of these achievements again this year oh wow you hear it here first my achievements is I think together with accessibility we got accessibility on the map in WordPress my 15 minutes of fame when I quit the accessibility team because I didn't agree with the way it was going so I'm famous for quitting my job this is kind of a difficult one but I think if I look at the things that I've done I would say my biggest achievement was being part of the woman lead release 5.6 are you going to be part of 6.4 I haven't dragged you into it you can come willingly we are a friendly bunch so this question about the achievement and we were discussing this just before we came on stage and it's a hard one I don't know why underrepresented groups groups of people have such a hard time boosting their achievements and I see this over and over and I've seen this over and over in my life and I'm exactly like that you know I'm like no you led the 3 releases of WordPress yeah but you know it's a group of people it's a well old machine we do it as a group oh you're a director at your company yes but we are four directors it's not just me I see this happening quite a lot in underrepresented groups I don't know if you have this feeling also with your friends colleagues if you see there is this famous article by HBR Harvard business review which is at this point like 20 years old that says that women and in general minorities apply for a job only if they take 100% of the checkboxes and white men will be like do I fit two of them sure I'm gonna send my CV and then that's how you don't get a lot of women in executive roles because we don't apply for them unless we feel that we are the most the best most qualified person to apply for that job so if anyone in the audience also is downplaying their success find yourself a cheerleader that when you're like oh no I didn't do anything they will tell you no but you did that and do you remember that time you did that and do you remember that time you did that and then you say oh yes I did and that's healthy it's not being showing off claiming what it's yours already so that's important moving on to another topic where is our timekeeper how much time do we have we're good ok no because we prepared for this panel and we were like it's gonna take us four hours to talk about everything we want to talk about so you know I want to make sure that we have the time to go over everything so this is a very hot topic I would say in terms of that it's very current we know that representation on stage is essential to showcase diverse voices do you think that underrepresented groups of people like women, non-binary folks and minorities are reluctant to speak at events I'll say personally I would not be on the stage of speaking at word camp if it wasn't for covid weirdly because it actually made me way more comfortable to be able to record a talk and give it so I gave a keynote talk at word camp and I would never do that otherwise and I think having a lot of that is because of I think just the perception and the fear and what questions am I going to get asked because a lot of times I was talking about the site editor very early on and it's hard to share nuance 10 second en honestly having a recorded format in getting some practice underneath me I think has allowed me to feel comfortable even doing this which is something I feel like I should be able to talk about without fear so it is like I do think that is still in people's heads for sure I also think it relates to what you said women want to be perfect and then perform and you don't have to you just you have to say ok I am the expert here I am going to tell you and you don't have to see the audience as hostile the audience wants you to do well and this sounds very zen like but feel the warmth of the audience because the audience wants you to do well and wants you to listen to you so don't be afraid if your talk isn't perfect my English isn't perfect and sometimes I mess up talks and people still get the message so don't strive for perfect just do it and practice it and you will very very nervous at the beginning and I am still very nervous but when you start and you prepare very well it will just go right so try it and don't want to be perfect en get passionate about a message you want to get through a focus on the message you want to tell, you want to learn the audience something and they come to listen to you because they want to learn so I think really you do yourself short what you know if you keep that for yourself you share what you know and that will get you further in life so I have this amazing team around me and also I sometimes struggle should I apply for something should I be on stage but my awesome team pointed out and I think that's a really awesome advice like do it with anxiety just do it, try that and then let's see what happens and then it is you live you survive probably I will say there is a cost like my mental health I literally will not sleep the night before even when I record the presentation having to watch myself I thought my heart was just going to jump out so I think there is a cost to it and I think we can all be supportive audiences and I agree with you I wish I could get that out of my head but yeah there is a very real my anxiety will stay for days I get that maybe if I can add a personal story to this when I had my first talk at a word camp my topic was introversion so it was not a technical talk because I was too afraid of giving a technical talk of being like getting like questions I could not answer for whatever reason so I gave myself the permission to give a talk where I could about a topic where I could feel confident where I had personal experience en as you just said where I had a message because it was helpful for me to understand myself after I learned that I am an introvert so and this is how it got me started and like going past that anxiety to actually share my message and then from there slowly get into the more advanced talks I think what I would say would just echo what everyone has said here and maybe I'll share a bit of my experience why myself I don't try to speak at events I have the worst stage fright in the world I never used to do any presentation in school I'll be like I'll do everything else as long as you go in front because I don't want to be part of that and also organizing word camps and volunteering I can do that but I can't be a speaker it's not something that I can do so that's why I wouldn't want to give a talk but I think sometimes we are the biggest cheerleaders and if we manage to have that in our community people will be more comfortable to be doing that even if they are going to butcher it people won't say anything bad or anything like that because they want me to learn so if we have a space where people feel comfortable to learn and grow while they are doing everything then maybe that could help no, you don't have to start at word camp Europe but also you can start at your local meet up or for your colleagues and don't start small and then practice and practice and then you end up on the stage somewhere in Europe I also want to say that you said yes without hesitation to this panel you said yes without hesitation to this panel sorry I was so excited to I saw the heading and what we were talking about but then I forgot so you have a message so go for the message not for your anxiety it's a great story Thelma because you really said yes without hesitation and I was like ok you realize we're going to do this on a stage but I'm I'm really thankful that you decided to overcome this and I know that it's very expensive for your mental health and this is also something that so I feel the need to volunteer for everything and say yes to everything because I'm like I'm a woman I'm a bit older I was technical I'm not so technical anymore I'm an executive so I feel this urgent responsibility to be on stage for a younger generation on one hand or for older women that feel that it's late for them to start something I have a talk for workhams that I never it never gets peaked in the 50s at one point I'll manage to give this talk but there is a cost attached to it I came on stage dancing and being a fool my heart was pounding because it doesn't matter if I get on a stage with ten people in front of me or a thousand people there is that moment before you go on stage I was like why am I doing this I do also want to just call out I joined the project much after I think a lot of people on the stage and just say thank you for paving the way and also I am younger than you and I really appreciate that you are paving the way for older people because I will one day hopefully be that so thank you and may I say what we are saying doesn't apply to women alone I think a lot of men have the same issues I'm afraid to go I'm afraid to talk so this is like a human thing yes I think yes yes please I think and that's basically the reason why we're here is that it's still this old HBR article that actually kind of set the tone for a lot of things if a man has a stage fright and then he applies for an event he has more chances to be picked than us so the problem the initial problem issue might be the same but I think that women and minorities in general underrepresented groups of people don't always get to overcome that fear because they don't always get called on stage so that's a big issue I think so we are at time I'll take another 5 minutes just to finish do we have any questions there are some questions just to gauge the audience because if you don't have any questions there are a few questions so how can we encourage and achieve more diversity on stage Chaya do you want to go I saw you reaching for the mic so I was wondering if she's going to start oh yes because we're going to get her sympathically I think that I've been thinking a long time about this question of course I don't know if it's of course I got asked a lot of times to be on a stage and we covered this topic already but what is actually the purpose of being on stage from a minority group are we just now being role models is that what is expected of us I'm just wondering about that that's a question I remember one of the speakers said we'll know when we've achieved success when you can have a mediocre lesbian in leadership but I think about that a lot because I think there is that's part of the pressure I feel I've got to be perfect because I want other people to see we can do this rather than just speaking in general in terms of other pathways one of the things I appreciate is across the project the more we can elevate that so maybe you're really good at reviewing documentation maybe you're not just writing it maybe you're reviewing it and you're excellent spotting sorts of stuff I need someone who does that for me I can bust out a lot of content but need a reviewer everyone on stage has done it in their own way the more ways we can have people be successful the more resilient the project is the longer it will last in the future the more people we can have contributing the more we can get the next generation the generation above involved my mom has a macro de generation which is partly losing her central vision so I think a lot about accessibility from that standpoint and I would love to have her doing testing with that we're all going to be there at some point we're all temporarily abled so I think there's a lot of interesting things there in terms of thinking about the resilience of an open source project where we just need more people from different backgrounds to be successful you wanted to say something about how to encourage and have more women more diversity in general on stage yeah now you called me but I have notes that's why I asked you because you told me that you had notes about it I was just following so concentrated your discussion and then my memory just cleared away here we are yeah so maybe so there are initiatives out there who encourage women and non-binaries to get on stage and do that I think they are quite successful I think there's a lot of things going on there but maybe we also need a discussion about the ugly things the things of me forgetting what I wanted to say the things of me not breathing enough and just talking talking and then not breathing being able to talk because I cannot get air like these things it happened to me and it does not look very professional and I think many people maybe paralyzed by these things they cannot they fear this would happen to them and not do it because they are scared of what could potentially happen and maybe we need some more discussions of this because I've never heard anyone talking about these stuff yeah that's true I I think that in the diverse speaker program that the wordpress.org if you go to wordpress.org I want to say learn or training Google is your friend there's a diverse speaker program and there is actually a section that addresses a little bit also the onstage presence which is very difficult to achieve and yeah that's something that I think it's in a lot of people's mind and again we go back to the fact that underrepresented people feel that we always have to be perfect before we do something and I think it was John did you tell I think one time you told me sorry to put you on the spot but you told me that there was this you went to a php conference when there was this great developer that basically spent 20 minutes introducing himself and this was like a php guru people came from all over the world to listen to him and learn stuff and the guy just spent 20 minutes randomly so but the thing is that he gets away with it because he's a white man php guru and when women do that we don't get away as easily with that that's the sad reality can I quickly add to another way that I think we could help is to have folks who are from more represented backgrounds to give out their seats and to pay attention to that stuff it shouldn't just be on us it really is not fun to be that person or to get the last minute ask when I'm like you should have asked you can ask and then I'm gonna point the attention to my friend Aaron Jorbin here on the first row you said I'm not gonna MC events anymore because I always get asked and I think it's time people that look different than I am should do it so give it up for Aaron Jorbin as well who is a true ally ok last thing like quick round of what advice would you give to people starting out underrepresented people starting out in the workers community of tech yes yes I did I was trying how many things can I fit into one thing like ok but I would say just do you yeah ok yeah find something you're passionate about and you want to tell about and prepare the hell out of it so practice practice practice practice like a talk like a zillion times I know my slides by heart and I go stand and do my talk because I own the material and if you do that it will all be ok it depends on like how everyone how everyone's personality is so either connect with people directly like go up to them tell them hey I love what you do or find another topic like you can talk to about the person I'm not the person the way I did it was by volunteering or like having a job to do and this way I got to know more and more people over time which grew into my network that I have today and this is another way you can do it I would say go do the thing no one wants to do and be great at it honestly like build subject matter expertise on the stuff that people are avoiding until it's cool and honestly for a while that was DEI work no one wanted to touch it and so you can kind of build some expertise and kind of grow from there and you can also make a lot of mistakes cause no one is looking can I add one more thing you can I think we all should accept the empowerment that you receive yes so I think that we are all empowered by people coming up to you and everyone is probably pointing out you have a great story to share but what we do we downsize that so if we are open to accept that we probably will live that thank you for reminding us that because that's also another thing that we discussed that we're terrible at taking compliments that was like an agreement more or less yeah I would say do it and do it within the boundaries that you set for yourself for your health because sometimes also kind of persevering and trying to do something when everyone tells you that you cannot do it it sucks because you should be able to do anything but your health you know I think should come first like I always say that I want to retire as the CEO of Microsoft I think that's a pretty hellish job so I don't think I really want to do it but I say to myself to pump myself up and say the sky is the limit I think you're right that there is something to be said for being a slow burn rather than a quick flame and that the slow burn is often what leads to a longer impact well thank you so much for being here today thank you for saying yes to this conversation to this panel it is the first time that there is a panel like this at Work and Pure Rock there were other work camps in the US I think there was one at Work and Police last week but basically let's keep having this conversation they might be a bit uncomfortable sometimes but we really need them right so please round of applause for the team I will not say lovely because that's also another thing oh you're lovely well I'm a questions we have time for maybe one or two so if you run fast you can beat them I told you we had four hours of content you didn't do it go for it first of all thank you all so much for overcoming the fear and getting on stage these are really important conversations to be having we had a number of initiatives out there to get more women and non-binary folks speaking but what else could we all be doing to make the WordPress community a whole more safer welcoming and inclusive space do you want to take this? I've been thinking about this I think there's going to be said for having resource groups similar to companies so having things, there's a group called black press for example you could have more of these kinds of groups where necessary conversation can happen amongst the group but then also that can be brought out and advocated for on a larger scale and similar to make teams you could have some level of authorities not the right word but there would be a way to be listened to or a pathway that is recognized in the project that I think could be really interesting of course then you can run into which we were talking about earlier exceptionality you don't want a black peer person having to pick between which group they're going to join for the day and so I think there's a lot of work to be done but in my mind that's a place to start and to potentially experiment with I know that there is some talk about creating well there was yesterday table diversity equity inclusion yesterday or today there was a blog post in one of the make blogs so I think things are moving you can go first if you want ok I'm going to read this because I'm nervous but I don't actually have a question I just want to say thank you for putting yourself out there and being vulnerable I also think we should probably acknowledge the men that are here today I think there's a lot of men that we work with in the community that are incredibly supportive of non-binary and sorry I'm nervous I'm not saying my words properly but the underrepresented groups there's a lot of men in our community that support those groups and I just want to say thank you for being here and for listening and whether you are battling to breathe or forgetting your words or not feeling like you should be up there I hope I speak for everyone to say that we as your audience are here to learn we are here to listen and we are not here to judge so please keep being up there so we can be here and learn from you thank you so yes thank you very much it was great listening to you and I had today also my first talk you did awesome my first big talk I had a lightning talk before in Portugal and when I had my lightning talk they told me Viola we are so sorry no one can ask you questions and my first thought was oh my god yay I don't get to answer questions I was so happy so what I would suggest is also to say let's choose the person who is going to speak because when I talk to some friends of mine and I think they would be great speakers but they say Viola could prepare but if they are coming bad questions and yesterday some friends of mine they helped me to prepare some upcoming questions but if you are on the stage I was so nervous I think we should let people choose if they want to let the questions on stage or afterwards because I think then we can decide on our own and on the stage you are feeling sometimes not secure I like that thank you I totally agree because I am not a native English speaker and sometimes I get a question in soft irish and I totally don't understand what question is and that will get very very embarrassing so and then I say come afterwards to me and then I will answer it but having to choose I think that's an excellent idea yes, thanks Alma is about to kick us off Alma is about to kick us off stage I think first of all you guys are fabulous second of all there is one other thing that we can do as a community to ensure that this stage looks more like us and that is when you know someone is fabulous but they are not up there tell them encourage them say get up there let's just keep that applause going for a lovely panel I wanted to do a conga line alright thank you guys tomorrow we have one more about women in tech right after this one if you are interested in that just don't forget to come back tomorrow talk start at 9 8.20 is when they start letting people in it's first come first serve it's just in the wellness track and then also we'll do a hike today after everything is finished so if you're interested in that also meet at the wellness track it's at 6 p.m. and everybody will leave at 6.20 and that's about it so next one starts in about 10 minutes thanks guys 2 track 2 so our final presentation for the evening we have Amy Kamala can I get a round of applause for her close off this evening with an awesome talk about women in tech so I will save the announcements for afterwards and I will give the floor to you thank you hi everybody hello it's so lovely to see your faces thank you so much for coming thank you to the organizers of WordCamp Europe for having me and for hosting this amazing event I'm so happy to be here I'd like to also thank all of my mentors and supporters all of my friends and family my current and previous employers for supporting me and my career I'm Amy Kamala you may have seen my name kicking around the wordpress space a little bit I've been involved for about 5 years I'm one of the contributors to the open source project and I've also been involved in WordCamps and meetups over the years I'm also a hosting rep for the make.wordpress.org organization I'm from Los Angeles California where I was born and raised I'm a full stack developer and I've had my hands in technology, design all sorts of parts of the industry and I also have a master degree in fine arts from UCLA I've worked for 3 different web hosts a couple different agencies and I currently work as a developer for LA County the organization I've been in leadership positions I've worked with leadership teams I've helped establish and implement design standards build out infrastructure launch products implement policies and practices develop new products I've worked in project management and business development most importantly I'm a single mom and I'm a domestic violence survivor and I've managed to build a career while also raising two children by myself the recommendations that I'm bringing to you today are data based so they're not speculation en they're also born of my first hand experience as a woman working in the tech industry some of you may wonder why it matters that I'm a single mom and a domestic violence survivor why is it relevant why is it important to business why is motherhood relevant and why is domestic violence relevant so much that I'm giving personal details to a bunch of strangers I'd like to answer that with some statistics all of the stats that I'm providing today are from official sources like the World Bank the United States Census Bureau and accredited publications so according to the World Bank there are over 3 billion women in the world which makes up about 50% of the human population so half of humans are women according to the World Bank 53% of women ages 15 to 64 participated in the workforce in 2021 which means that there are more than 1.5 billion women workers in the world so when we talk about women we're talking about half the workforce 1.5 billion workers including the employees in your own organization so that means that 1.5 more than 1.5 billion workers face challenges that inherently come with being a woman those challenges include the physical ramifications of childbirth caretaking families domestic violence like I mentioned sexual assault long term childrearing that women are statistically speaking primarily responsible for lower pay less opportunities fewer promotions microaggressions en just good old fashioned discrimination so when you say that you support women in tech I want to encourage you as members of your org and your community to really examine if you support women by hiring women which is a really great start or if you go the extra mile to support your portion of those 1.5 billion women workers in ways that are really needed specifically for women implementing these policies here helps with employee retention and reduces the cost of employee loss and employee acquisition these policies make workers feel supported and motivates them to invest more in the company as well as stick around for longer so back to me I'd like to tell you a little bit of my own story as a real world example of how simple internal policies can benefit a business in real terms and by real terms I mean increased revenue I started my career in 2015 making $30,000 a year as a tech support agent I was and I am still the sole caretaker of my children so that means that my priorities are a little bit different than that of most men not only am I responsible for my job and supporting my family but I'm also responsible for the day to day care of my family so that makes my job that much more important and that translates into having a necessity and a drive to do well at work in my first year as a tech support agent my then two year old started to cry every time I left for work nothing that I tried stopped this she was crying for hours while I was gone it was very stressful so I added my bosses for help and my bosses at the time were men mostly and they wanted to help but they came up short by the time this happened I had already been in the position for a while and I had gone above and beyond in their words so they didn't actually want me to have problems and I was planning to quit because my daughter obviously is a priority and so they didn't want me to quit so the one female boss that I had decided to give me her support and she approved a remote contract for me so that meant that I could still do my job and I didn't have to leave my daughter crying while I did it fast forward three years I was still working at the same company I was working remotely and they had also issued me a few more women supportive policies like training, like remote work and also scheduling flexibility so scheduling flexibility means they would give me a longer lunch they would let me make up the hours later so I could go pick up my children drop off my children take time off to take them to the doctor and so forth so these policies really helped me to do a good job in the workplace at that point I had been promoted multiple times and by 2018 I had helped form a new WordPress support team en I was helping develop a new product for the company I was in an unofficial leadership position and I was working with the VP of product and the CEO to build out that new product in the first year the product generated a decent amount of revenue before it was even released to the public and before it was fully developed the company has since released that product and they are benefiting financially long term from my hard work so because of those 3 supportive policies which were fairly easy for the company to give me the ability to work remotely training and flexible scheduling one single woman worker changed the face of that company expanded their offerings and earned them extra revenue that's just one woman worker imagine what 1.5 billion women workers could do amazing women workers can't change the face of your company en earn extra revenue if you don't hire women in the first place if you don't promote them if you don't train them and you don't retain them according to the United States Census Bureau an average of 31% of employees at major tech companies like Google, Amazon Facebook are women so that's less than a third and that's actually better than the rest of the tech industry according to the World Bank only 28% of STEM that science technology engineering and mathematical positions are held by women worldwide so that's for the whole earth it's even worse in the United States outside of those larger companies only about 23% of STEM positions are held by women in Europe only 19% of IT jobs are held by women and only 25% of company leadership worldwide and this is in all industries are held by women and that stat is even worse for women of color women who are racial minorities only about 5% of leadership positions are held by women who are racial minorities so while the first computer programmers were women there's no doubt that now STEM fields are dominated by white men so if your company does have policies that support women I'd like to commend you and I hope that you reap the benefits of those policies according to womentech.org 38% of companies want to invest in the hiring and retention of women workers so this talk is geared towards them those companies that actively want to invest in women in tech so what can companies do to adjust internal policies it starts with interviews diversity hiring practices train your recruiters to pull women applicants out of the stack for interviews data shows that there are fewer women applicants in tech fields which translates to fewer interviews and ultimately fewer hirings so if a woman applicant is in the pile have a policy to interview her secondly choose to hire those women applicants if a woman is qualified have a policy to hire her if a woman is under qualified have a policy to hire her and train her let her learn on the job employees are an investment and you can have a business model of hiring entry level and giving people bumps and promotions internally which ultimately saves hiring costs you can also save on onboarding bonuses employee retention because giving promotions and training makes people feel more secure and more invested in so hire qualified women and also hire under qualified women and let them learn on the job additionally training employees up and promoting internally not only saves the company recruitment and onboarding costs but it does support employee retention it creates a company culture where people feel valued and invested in which makes them more likely to work hard and stick around for longer it also gives the company positive PR and marketing talking points and a lot of companies already market that they support women in tech those are some real world ways that you can actually do that it's important to promote women and minorities into leadership roles it brings alternate perspectives to the table that gives you insights into the market which is an advantage and it continues to save the company money on hiring costs such as onboarding bonuses these policies can be used in marketing strategies and generates positive public discourse and it also can assist companies in legal proceedings if they ever come under scrutiny back to my story in 2019 I ended up leaving that company out of frustration because I was doing all of this valuable work and I was living under the poverty line for my area according to the Pew Research Center in the United States women's pay hasn't increased in two decades according to whitehouse.gov women in the United States are paid 84 cents to every dollar that a man earns so I would be making $82,000 per year while my male counterpart in the exact same role makes $100,000 in the world space that's even worse with women making 77 cents to every dollar that a man makes so there's definitely a pay gap that pay gap is even more in the tech industry and it's even more when you get into technologies specific fields in my real life case I was making $48,000 while my white female developer colleagues were making $120,000 or more up to $160,000 so that's why I ended up being kind of frustrated and I left that position it's a recipe for women and minority workers to resent their employers it racks up liabilities and additional costs for the company in lack of productivity in complaints and also workers could get mad and quit so the policies I just mentioned of hiring, training and promoting women and minorities alongside equal pay can save the company money in the long run and it also saves in legal scrutiny productivity and employee retention now once a woman is your employee there's a whole other slew of issues that she has to face including childbirth and motherhood including assault en domestic violence so I'm hoping to give employers a path forward in investing in their female employers employees in the way that they really need specifically for women according to the national partnership for women and families more than 65 million women in the united states provide unpaid care for their families and the majority do that while also holding down a job so out of those caretakers 25 million women are caretakers of their own children so mothers 25 million mothers in the workforce in the united states and this means that women are doing double time taking care of their families and working employers can invest in their female employees by supporting their caretaker roles outside of the workplace which ultimately enables them to do a better job within the workplace and it creates a sense of dedication towards the employer if an employer takes care of the real life needs of the employee that employee will grow a sense of loyalty and commitment to the employer which aids longevity and dedication and ultimately reduces the cost of employment long term if an employer makes life more difficult by being rigid and not accommodating the needs of their employees the employee is going to end up presenting their employer be less dedicated, more stressed and ultimately seek out a different job costing the company in lack of productivity hiring expenses and training to replace them ways that an employer can invest in their employees and build that sense of dedication are through leave programs assistance programs, flexible scheduling and remote contracts or hybrid contracts to make it easier for people to live their lives and handle their responsibilities if an employer enables parents to step away from the workplace as needed to take care of their children pick ups, drop offs go to the doctor and so forth tending to their families needs work alternate schedules make up time later that encourages those employees in return to invest in the company and stay for longer to be more dedicated more committed more engaged in projects and it overall creates a culture of stability and support having your needs met also reduces stress en increases health which makes people more capable more productive and better workers so motherhood is a bit of an elephant in the room when it comes to hiring women and the reason is because of maternity leave employers see that as a burden on their costs and their staffing but women biologically are responsible for carrying and birthing children which is kind of important I'm sure most people would agree because that assures the continuation of the human species investing in family health assures retention and reduces recruitment and hiring costs and the cost of training and this is especially true for women in technical roles who've already spent months to years ramping up in a developer position and learning the specific tech stack a developer that knows off the top of their head what block of code does what where, why and how save an organization days to weeks of downtime countless hours of troubleshooting tons of stress and help reduce liability so if you have some of these women on your staff they're a valuable asset and I'd like to encourage you to support them according to the US Census Bureau 18 to 48% of women leave the workforce within the first year of childbirth I can attest to how incredibly exhausting and challenging it is to raise children and maintain a job let alone a career but the good news is that companies can alleviate that and retain their valued employees and one of the main reasons for this phenomenon is because of lack of maternity leave admittedly the EU is way better about maternity leave and family leave in general than the United States so this data focuses on the United States in the US workers are not entitled to unpaid family leave like at all across the board they're entitled to 12 weeks of unpaid leave and you can imagine 12 weeks of unpaid leave can leave a family in quite a difficult financial position so because of this lack of paid family leave women are often forced to choose between being a mother and working ultimately which is more satisfying busting your butt 9 to 5 to earn money for CEOs or taking care of your own children child care costs about as much as women typically earn so that's not hiring the full-time nanny isn't in the realm realistic realm of possibility for most women this tends to affect single moms more than anyone if you have a single mom on your staff offer her a remote or hybrid contract and flexible scheduling so she can take care of her kids without going crazy and multitasking and running herself into the ground offer her child care offer her child care and medical benefits if you don't already she'll start to love her job love her employer be grateful and turn around and invest in her work and contributions not offering these puts her in a position of stress and difficulty and ultimately she'll end up sick and hating life and leaving or if she doesn't leave she won't be able to apply herself as well ideally families would have up to 2 years of paid family leave the United States and many countries just aren't there yet 12 weeks paid leave is the absolute bare minimum with paid leave not required in the US the bar isn't just low, it's underground with unpaid leave being forced back into the office workers have undue stress placed on them both physically and financially which causes them to seek out other options no or poor employee benefits guarantees that an employee will burn out regardless of their gender and circumstance in contrast providing benefits assures employee retention long term dedication and hard work and a healthy happy employee will bring more value to your org ok so now we're in the more difficult zone talking about assault and domestic violence nobody really likes to talk about these things but it is a reality for women and others according to the US CDC one third of women and that means one third of women workers face domestic violence at some point in their life so that means that one third of women workers either have are currently or will face domestic violence that means that about 500 million workers have do or will face domestic violence an employer can help alleviate this by offering many of the same benefits that I've already mentioned flexible scheduling paid leave legal and mental health benefits would also help greatly in these situations implement policies that will enable somebody to get out of a situation quickly and minimize damage to the company offer accommodation programs that provide legal assistance programs that provide mental health assistance flexibility support and compassion train managers to understand abusive cycles as well as laws around domestic violence and how to offer support to employees that are going through this as I mentioned earlier I was a domestic violence victim myself and my employer directly enabled me to get out of the situation they gave me accommodations letting me take time off to file police reports or a restraining order they helped me land an apartment with employment verification and my boss still gave me good performance reviews because that situation was not my fault and I was still doing a good job if I had lost my job during that time I would have been even more disenfranchised and in even more danger and I would not be here today but because I was supported in the workplace I was able to get out of the situation and contribute to the company long term policies and training can literally save lives Years later I was a manager myself and one of my team members was being abused by her spouse my higher ups told me that her job was at risk they were going to fire her because he was interrupting meetings and causing a disruption in the workplace so I had experienced this from my own past so obviously I felt quite a bit of compassion en I wanted to support her and my first line of action was to give her accommodations for minimizing disruptions in the workplace since that was the main issue by the employer so for example during remote work I told her keep your microphone and your camera on mute a lot of organizations insist on being on camera and being unmuted in this situation it's better to be muted I told her that time off is pre approved and that she could make up for lost hours later outside of her work schedule provided that her deliverables made it on time and that she communicated most importantly I told her that she has support and that she can depend on me to have her back so she's not alone in this terrifying situation I told her repeatedly that she needs to leave him which she did need to do and eventually she did leave him her happiness and her productivity increased not only that but the employer retained a good developer who was familiar with their tech stack so make your company a culture of support of flexibility of understanding and of care be lenient for human situations be kind about mistakes discourage competitive attitudes and harsh judgments most importantly make sure that your managers are trained in how to handle these type of situations where domestic violence is a factor this applies to sexual harassment as well according to Zipia sexual harassment costs businesses an upward of $3 billion in lost productivity legal expenses and other costs more than half of women have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace up to 81% in some industries I can't claim to have the answer to stop that in its tracks but company culture can go a really long way in prevention to start a company can assure that there are consequences for offenders only 30% of women believe that their employers handle harassment complaints properly while 50% have actually experienced damage to their own careers when they make a harassment complaint companies can implement strict consequences for offenses like firing for serious offenders softer consequences for more mild offenses like reflecting the behavior in performance reviews withholding raises withholding promotions training courses for the offender performance improvement plans reassignment for the perpetrator and other consequences one of my old coworkers at a tech job had intimate photos of her passed around by a group of male co-workers the victim was given a remote contract so she didn't have to face the men who had harassed her but that was a bit of a punishment because that meant she couldn't go into the workplace work in the office or feel safe or comfortable in her workplace no consequences meant these guys thought it was okay and they kept harassing women I was harassed in that workplace I told my bosses and nothing happened implementing real consequences for abusive behavior is the first step to preventing it from happening either one of us could have sued that company and caused a real loss of funds and I actually found out later that another woman did sue if you let people get away with crimes in your company it puts you in legal jeopardy it creates a culture of abuse and reduces productivity it's imperative that companies insist on consequences for poor behavior 98% of companies already have a formal harassment policy but that does nothing if they don't enforce it company culture starts from the top and trickles down leaders can minimize harassment by insisting on strict standards and strict consequences don't make excuses for your guys insist on consequences speaking of workplace culture excuse me and on a bit of a lighter note another issue is microaggression I'm sure you all have heard of mansplaining right another story here when I was in tech support as a live chat agent there was an outright refusal on the part of the customers to listen to technical advice from women techs so every single woman in the chat eventually changed their chat name from their actual name to their initials so that the customers didn't know that they were women customers listened to the same agents when they thought they just assumed that it was a man but not when they thought that it was a woman a woman tech network survey found that microaggressions are incredibly common in the workplace with 64% of women surveyed having experienced being spoken over during meetings 19% have felt pigeonholed by stereotypes and 11% have been asked to supply the food in meetings again this starts and ends with company culture companies can train managers to directly ask women questions and shut down interruptions don't allow interruptions make a dedicated space for women to be able to speak and be heard companies can also hire a diverse set of employees to minimize othering and intentionally highlight differences as an advantage companies can create an atmosphere of support en condemn competitive language en behaviors a lot of why this continues is because males are primarily in leadership positions and they just kind of don't notice it and because it's not a legal liability HR companies don't really do anything about it HR departments don't really do anything about it the thing is it still creates a culture of combativeness, of discouragement and it prevents women employees from feeling safe, comfortable and excelling in their roles all employees are an investment and it's vital that we treat them that way with a safe workplace culture equal opportunity equal pay and an equal voice I'm fully confident that if your organization implements some or all of these policies productivity and revenue will increase I've given you some real life examples of this and it's no secret we're having a supportive and caring workplace culture fosters success thank you so much for listening today and thank you to WordCamp Europe for hosting that's amazing, awesome thank you so much and now we actually have some time for Q&A so we have two mics set up in both aisles if you have a question please walk up to the microphone and we have about ten minutes we'll let you know if we run out of time but please just line up and then we have one ready hello first of all, thank you for that talk that's the type of talks we need at the WordCamp Europe I have so many questions I don't know which single one to ask maybe the most important one you've given so many advices on how managers can be trained to be aware of all those issues of any materials like online courses like first steps they can take to be aware of those things some things you can recommend maybe from your point of view Tori Amis has a non-profit organization to support women who are abuse victims called RAIN RAINN and that has a lot of resources and information about abusive cycles and there are quite a few resources online and different organizations although I don't know a specific training program off the top of my head ok, thanks thank you too hi, thank you for the talk we are looking at increasing the diversity of gender in our companies and are running into a problem at the applicant level already so I'm looking at the problem at possibly job ads level what have you seen what have you seen work for job ads if you want to hire females or any other non-male option should you design for it differently literally like colours, text copywriting to get that attention of the pool what have you seen work I love your thinking initially having recruiters actively seek out women and minority groups to interview would be a great step in hiring a diverse set of employees there are fewer women applicants but generally speaking if a recruiter contacts you and offers an opportunity most people are inclined to at least explore it and do a couple of interviews so I would have recruiters actively seek out minority groups what if you don't use recruiters and do your own recruiting if you don't use recruiters you can have specific language like a lot of companies market we support women in tech if you put that in your hiring descriptions in your job descriptions and exemplify that you are actively looking for diversity hires that might make people feel more inclined to apply and it also could make it easier for them to find the roles ok maybe you talk after thank you too hi best of thank you for sharing your story I feel like it's people like you who do share the difficult times you've been through that help us all understand and help other people be aware of it I think if they didn't communicate that they were having that problem and felt safe doing it people couldn't help I think more people need to share their story so other people feel confident thank you for doing that thank you too I wanted to ask about general advice on what other employees can do I feel like anyone who is in the room right now are probably inclined to be the type of people to help and step up that's why they're here but there's still an issue I think you gave an example of how the lady who was being bullied in the workplace actually gets punished by having to work remotely when instead the people passing around should have got reprimanded this is something that still happens you mentioned about employers not liking I've seen that I've directly had conversations with male employers who are like I'm not hiring chicks because they're going to take a day off every month because their period pain hurts and that sort of attitude they get and this is still around and I still think that women especially in tech like you said it's mal dominated finance all that sort of stuff are definitely looked down on regardless of whatever legislations are in place about diversity like this it's still not being done so what can we do to address the greater issue that these problems still lie in the workplace and they're still not being addressed properly because all the examples you've given are fantastic but they are only going to be implemented by people who actually care and give a shit and that's the thing and there are still so many employers out there who don't how do we address that en highlight that this is not ok and something needs to be done I don't know if you've heard the phrase that people can vote with their money before investing money in a company individuals on the floor can check out the leadership team see if there are any women and minorities on their leadership team and if not then choose to invest in a company that does have women and minorities on their leadership teams and I would think that in mass then that would show companies that buyers and users in the market care about these things and so they would then adjust their policies I guess it's not just women and leadership everything how do we make it more vocal I guess that's obviously a great idea that people would support those but how do we everyone in the room do our little bit to bring them more awareness I guess is what I'm trying to ask is is there anything we can do to bring more awareness to these issues talking about it talking about it in your own organization speaking to your managers expressing your concerns if you have any also it's important to praise things that companies are doing right so if your employer is doing something right you make sure to highlight that for them otherwise people get a little bit defensive but from within an organization of leadership or even submitting concerns like during surveys and other opportunities that employers tend to give concerns and desires could be expressed unmet needs could be expressed hopefully they give people a chance to do it anonymously so you don't become a target and so from within the company that you work at being vocal about it and outside of the company being vocal about it people can email any company and it lands on the HR department or another department social media is another way you can add a company that you feel is either doing a great job with diversity and commend them or ask them I noticed that you don't have any women on your leadership team are you guys doing anything to address that in the public arena and get your friends to retweet it en so forth even on LinkedIn so that kind of puts them on the spot and makes them address it be forced to address it publicly thank you thank you too hello thank you for your presentation thank you for your vulnerability and sharing your story it's obviously not easy to get on stage to begin with but to get on stage and share what you've shared really appreciate it you mentioned a lot about maternity leave and the importance of that and you highlighted that it is different in the US than it is here in the EU I wonder your thoughts about parental leave as opposed to just maternity leave giving then supportive fathers because there are luckily some the chance to also be a part of that parenting early on in my opinion the policies should be the same for both fathers and mothers up to two years of paid leave or companies could give three or four months four or five months of paid family leave and then up to two years of remote and hybrid contracts so that those parents are available to their families during work hours and companies are kind of scared that that would mean that they're not at their desk and they're not doing their work but most of the time when an employee is supported and given the opportunity to take care of their needs they work harder they're more likely to be focused and invested one other question that's okay it's on a different topic so you mentioned the need for managers to be supportive if there is domestic violence or sexual assault situation happening how can a manager balance the desire to be supportive with the desire to honor that person's need for privacy in that moment right so if somebody has come to a manager and they're struggling with something anything in the first place they are essentially asking for support so of course managers should keep this confidential they shouldn't go telling people and so forth and it should not be reflected in the employee's documentation like their performance reviews keep it separate I'm sure there would need to be HR documentation about it but that has to be absolutely confidential and so it's important to train managers to honor the privacy of their employees thank you yeah quick maybe I hope it's quick actually I think so thank you so much I'll be honest with you I just joined at the question moment I'm so sorry about that you're doing a very good job thank you my question is a bit complicated I hope to be really really fast so starting from the part so I'm a I'm a disabled person ok let's say that I used to think about what we mean for diversity when I this is a not really a question I want to start with open a light an idea to think about it I really think that inclusion is important my point is are we don't going to be with too much inclusion are you not going to be exclusion I mean a moment when I several times I see people says ok let's hire people that are for diversity in that case I honestly think if you have been hired because you are diverse sometimes it could be possible as a diverse person I feel like a little bad about me because it's like I have been hired not because of my knowledge of my know how but for my what I am and I think this is a thing that we should discuss as a community not only work community as a work community because I think it's really a point it's really a point because inclusion is important but you can't include someone if you just hire someone just for a woman she doesn't know anything about the topic in this case cause an issue for the person myself and also for the company and the customers what do you think about that a lot of that starts with language companies should not hire just because somebody is a minority you do want to hire somebody regardless of their personal specifics but language goes a long way so instead of using for example the term diversity hire which I know can sometimes be used as an insult oh you're just a diversity hire you don't know what you're talking about which I think is what you're saying maybe not someone that says to you that but maybe as a diverse person I can think about that oh I was only hired because of this oh you know maybe I'm super expert but I say wow maybe instead of me at this time there could be someone else maybe it could be a better fit for the company for some reasons and instead I was here just because I have this ticket right so employers can adjust their language and minimize those feelings by making it clear that we're hiring you because we think you're a good match for the company we want you to be here you are a valued and respected member if you don't know something that's inevitable even the most senior developers need to look up stack overflow and research so it's I've seen developers with master degrees in computer science googling stuff numerous times the feeling of like I might not have the most knowledge for this position and somebody else employers can help reduce that by making asking questions and not knowing all the answers and doing research part of the role and that should be for any developer regardless of who they are or what they are that should be part of the role research is one of the ways so employers can use their language instead of saying like I said earlier we're looking for diversity hires changing that to something like we like to have a wide variety of employees to bring more insights to our organization helps people with their feelings of being another of maybe being not the right person or being hired because of being a minority so it really falls on the employer to use language that is supportive alrighty thank you very much can we get a last round of applause for Amy Kamala thank you so much something we all really needed to hear thank you that finalizes our first day at word camp Europe 2023 so I'll just say some applause I hope you guys have all enjoyed the day and the food and the snacks, eat more I always see them very filled with cookies either we're not eating enough or they're really good at their job but yeah so again we will have more presentations tomorrow all of the tracks start at nine there are panels WP connect is also resuming tomorrow so if you're interested in those listen for those announcements again if you're interested in yoga before the sessions start it's first come first serve but it's on the wellness track at 820 and it will start at 830 they'll start letting people in a little bit earlier and tonight if you're looking for some wellness I guess there is a hike leaving in about 30 minutes so at 620 you can go to the sponsor hall and join in on a word camp hike? I guess I don't know how intense it's going to be there's a lot of hills here so it's up to you and yeah just thank you to all of you guys for joining and for being such a supportive audience and yeah I will see you guys all tomorrow applause