#194 – Devin Walker on Leading Jetpack: Challenges, Vision, and the Future

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, leading Jetpack, the past, the challenges, the vision, and the future.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Devin Walker. Devin’s journey in the WordPress ecosystem spans many years, with experience in development, design, marketing, and customer support. He is best known as the co-founder of GiveWP, which he built and scaled before it was acquired. During his time there, he touched a variety of prominent WordPress brands, including iThemes, Kadence, LearnDash, and The Events Calendar.

Today Devon is starting a new role leading the Jetpack suite of services at Automattic. It’s a position with hefty responsibilities as Jetpack powers millions of WordPress sites, and integrates deeply across

I talk with Devon about why he took on this challenge. The divisiveness and complexity surrounding Jetpack, and his vision for refocusing the plugin and simplifying its user experience.

We start by hearing about Devon’s extensive WordPress background, and the choices he weighed up when deciding to join Automattic.

The conversation quickly moves to the scope of Jetpack, its evolution, the struggle to be a jack of all trades master of none, and the recent efforts to bring greater focus and polish to key features like forms and SEO

Devin gets into the organizational changes at Automattic. How Jetpack’s development teams now collaborate more fluidly with other product teams, such as WooCommerce, and the balancing act of shipping improvements to a 4 million strong user base without breaking things.

AI emerges as a massive new frontier, and Devin shares behind the scenes insights into Jetpack’s current, and future, aI capabilities, giving us a glimpse at content creation, block building, and how AI might reshape user and developer expectations in WordPress.

Throughout we hear about Devin’s approach to product marketing, and the need for more of it, the importance of listening to user feedback, and his plans for a more coherent and compelling Jetpack experience.

If you’re a WordPress user wondering where Jetpack is headed, what’s working, or how AI fits into the future of site building, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you can find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Devin Walker.

I am joined on the podcast by Devin Walker. Hello, Devin.

[00:03:34] Devin Walker: Hello.

[00:03:35] Nathan Wrigley: Very nice to have you with us. Devin has a shiny new job. Up until a few weeks ago, Devin was not an Automattician, or at least I don’t think you were maybe at any point in your past. But you are now an Automattition, and you are doing what?

[00:03:47] Devin Walker: My official title is Artistic Director of Jetpack, but basically product owner, or head of Jetpack. Whatever you want to call it.

[00:03:55] Nathan Wrigley: So when it comes to Jetpack, the buck stops with you. I guess that’s a pretty important role in the WordPress space over at Automattic. And if anybody hasn’t heard of you, I suppose it would be important to just lay the groundwork, who you are, what you’ve done in the past.

I know you’ve got a long and storied history, but just maybe a one minute little short bio telling us who you are and what you’ve done.

[00:04:14] Devin Walker: Yeah, sure. I’ve been using WordPress for all sorts of things, development, design, blogging for 16 years now. Really made my name known, I guess you would say, with Matt Cromwell. We co-founded GiveWP together, and we grew it for seven years, from late 2014, all the way through 2021, which then we were acquired by Liquid Web and was there for a little more than four years, and touched a lot of brands from there, from the iThemes rebrand to SolidWP, to Kadence, to LearnDash, Events Calendar, and of course GiveWP as well.

And left there in early August of this year, 2025. I also built WP Rollback throughout the years, that has quite a few active installs. So yeah, that’s a bit about me. Developer, design background, definitely well-rounded with marketing and supporting customer success.

[00:05:05] Nathan Wrigley: So you’ve had a lot of experience working with WordPress products, which I guess is what you are doing over at Automattic, because let’s just call it head of Jetpack, just to make it easy. It’s a curious title, by the way. Artistic Director is kind of a really.

[00:05:17] Devin Walker: You know Automattic loves that title.

[00:05:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, they love that, don’t they? But head of Jetpack, and obviously you’ve got a long and storied history kind of growing products and making sure that they succeed and customer support and all of that kind of thing.

And I feel like Jetpack, no matter what time you dropped in on Jetpack in the last, let’s say decade, I feel that half of the community felt like it needed a lot of love.

And I’m just wondering when you were interviewing for this position or when this position was offered to you, I don’t know how that process went, but what the kind of broad brush strokes are in what you’re hoping to do over there?

We’ll get into the weeds very much, but roughly speaking, what’s the scope of the new job? What is it that you are hoping to do in the next three, six months, years, something like that?

[00:05:57] Devin Walker: Yeah, so when I left Liquid Web, I wrote a long, well, not long, but wrote a blog post about closing that chapter of my career and really being open to what’s coming next for me. I knew that I wanted to stay in WordPress and I was having fun building on just my own products at the time, and having full control of everything, the whole lifecycle of a product.

And I did some work with Matt in the past on some of his nonprofit sites with Give and the VIP team and the concierge at Automattic. And so Matt called me up one day, you know, we stayed loosely in contact over the years, and said, we have some interesting opportunities here at Automattic, and one of them that I think you’d be great at is Jetpack. And in my mind I’m like, Jetpack, this is a doozy.

But, you know, he said, give it some thought, work on your own pace and give me a call back whenever. And so I thought about it for a week and, maybe two weeks, talked to my wife about it. And really it comes down to, I was either going to start my own business again, and try to grind again and strike lightning twice, like GiveWP, and see if I could grow something and eventually sell it in five to seven years, which takes a lot of hard effort, sacrifice, money. A lot of your own money, and almost no guarantee. And the WordPress marketplace has changed so much that it’s not immediate impact right away, and you’re really out on your own.

It worked well once, but I was in my early thirties, just turning 30, and now I’m 40. So life’s changed quite a bit for me. And Jetpack, it is a very divisive product, we can get more into that in the future, but really it came down to having that impact. Being at Automattic, a company that I’ve respected since I came into WordPress, and always wanted to go behind the scenes and work as an Automattician, so going full circle from where my career began to the opportunity and the challenge.

If I succeed at this, it can really open some other doors at Automattic. I’m head of this product, which touches almost everything on Automattic as far as the WordPress business goes. I just thought about it long and hard, talked to Matt about it, and made sure I would have the levers for success also. And that’s what made me choose to say yes and come aboard.

[00:08:08] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of curious because if you just discount all of the stuff you just said about, you know, wanting to fight and build your own product up, I can well imagine how grinding that can be, and there’s no guarantee of success. It could be a real failure.

But stepping into a huge product, I’m going to put my neck out on the line a little bit here and say, I actually can’t think of a product or a plugin, let’s go with that, in the WordPress space that tries to cover as many bases. Covered by any organisation, whether that’s a third party development team or what have you, I can’t think of one named product that tries to cover as many bases.

And the fact that it’s divisive and I’m sure you’ll get into this, but there’s lots of room for improvement, I’m sure you’ll agree. You are walking into something exactly as you say, where there is a chance of great success here. If you pull this off, and you pull the right levers, and in six months time, a year’s time, two years time, the arc is going in the right direction, there’ll be measurable success. So really interesting.

So what was the bit, when you had that, oh, moment, what was the bit about Jetpack which made you think long and hard about it over two weeks, as opposed to immediately saying, yeah, I’ll do it? There must have bits about the project, Jetpack as a plugin, whatever it may be. What were the bits that concerned you?

[00:09:18] Devin Walker: Well, I’ve used it over the years on and off. I wouldn’t call myself a power user at all, but I come from the community, 15 years of being in the community. I’ve gone to, I don’t even know how many WordCamps and always kept tabs on it, especially when, I don’t know when it was. I think it was pre 2020, when they did like a bit of marketing push that Jetpack does donations now, accept donations with Jetpack. And it was through Jetpack forms. I didn’t know that at the time, so I installed Jetpack. I was like, where’s donations? You’ve got to find your way through this tangled web. Oh, it’s part of forms. Okay, let’s go into forms. Oh, it’s like a template now and you have to, the connect flow was terrible. The whole flow was not a great experience.

And the donation form itself, I was like, oh, we have a pretty serious competitor now with Give, we’ve got to like step our game up. But then I left that, I was like, okay, don’t worry about it guys, we’ll be fine now, nobody’s going to use this. That’s where that, oh, moment comes from where like, jack of all trades, master of none type of thing.

[00:10:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think probably encapsulates it perfectly. It’s kind of jack of all trades and master of none. So I’m just going to rattle off some of the things that I know it does. I’m probably missing quite a lot here. So for example, you know, it does stats, think something like Google Analytics, it will offer that for you. Backups. It will do protection. It will do speed and optimisation things on your website. Social sharing. It will do forms. There’s VideoPress thrown in there as well. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that I’ve missed out there, but it really is encapsulating a lot.

And the jack of all trades, master of none, bit kind of fits because when Jetpack came out, I’m imagining it was a really, it was probably at the forefront of many of those things. The things that it did, it probably did as well as everybody else. But now, 10, 15, whatever years later, there’s now been real amazing products delivered by third party developers that have become the standard of forms, of backups, of speed and optimisation services and what have you. And so Jetpack now has to kind of compare itself to the very, very best. And I think that’s hard. You know, for one plugin to try and be the best at everything. Nigh on impossible, I would imagine.

[00:11:16] Devin Walker: You’re right. Like, we can’t compete. I’ve been preaching focus for the last, since 2016 when our mentors said, what the heck are you doing all these other plugins? Sell them off or sunset them and only focus on Give. And that’s when our business started taking off. Now, what I’m trying to do is bring focus back into Jetpack.

We do some things very well, and we need to make sure that, I’m not going to say we’re going to compete on the level of a Gravity Forms for our form solution. It’s going to come very close. And for 98% of the users out there that need forms on their website, I think it’ll fulfill that need.

For that special 2% that need like calculation fields, they need super customised form capabilities, then it might not get to that level. But we really want Jetpack to be your go-to solution so that you can have these products work well together as well.

It’s very generous too, the free version. You get a free CDN, you get VideoPress for free, and bringing people in the door and showing them that. Some folks are seeing the light of that, of what it can actually do and do pretty well. But for instance, like SEO. Yeah, Jetpack does SEO, but it’s the most rudimentary, basic version. I want to make that a bit better there. But also things that it doesn’t do well. Either get rid of those, if they’re just going to sit on a shelf and grow with age, what’s the point of it?

So yeah, a lot of realignment with that and understanding that teams that are fully focused on one specific part of what Jetpack does, it’s really hard for us to compete with that.

[00:12:46] Nathan Wrigley: Do you envisage a future for Jetpack now that you are at the helm, if you like ? And I don’t know how the structure of the people that are working on Jetpack works. In other words, do you have a forms dedicated crew where you’ve got, I don’t know, a bunch of people who just work on forms? You’ve got a bunch of people working on VideoPress and VaultPress and all of these different bits and pieces. Or is it, you work with Jetpack and you kind of move from team to team? I’m just curious as to what it looks like inside of Automattic and the different bits that make up Jetpack.

[00:13:14] Devin Walker: Yeah, so this is really an interesting time at Automattic, where they’re going from that functional organisation where it’s product focus. Where Jetpack did, a year ago, have a dedicated development team, designer team, and the person that was in my role before, it was just like a classic company structure in a way, within Automattic.

Now it’s shifting to more of a matrix organisation where there’s one architecture team. They handle .com, they handle Jetpack, they handle a bunch of other products like WooCommerce within that. And the designers as a product are outside of that.

And so what that means is we, as the product team, we have a shared roadmap where, if you ever use .com, a lot of what brings that special sauce to it, what makes it unique outside of the self installed WordPress is Jetpack. So for instance, forms is getting a massive upgrade. And the 15.2 that just came out, it has quite a big upgrade. 15.3, we’re going to have even more. So there’s a dedicated team right now that’s, some of the best engineers, I’ve been really blown away with the level of engineering at Automattic, are working on bringing forms up. And I’m leading that initiative, putting myself into that place where I can then shape forms in the future.

But that does mean that some other elements of Jetpack aren’t getting taken care of right now. AI’s going to become a big thing. We have to pick and choose based on our resources, what are the most important things for our shared initiative? But what that means is they work better together. I think you’re going to see in the future a lot more benefit of running WooCommerce and Jetpack together.

Now, we’re not going to force you to log into wordpress.com to use WooCommerce, but to get some of that benefit, you will need to OAuth in to using Jetpack. And that is a requirement, because a lot of the Jetpack, what you get for free and the secret sauce is based on our cloud servers. You basically are starting to use our infrastructure for free. And Automattic is huge on privacy. And so I don’t quite understand that whole conflict of folks that don’t like that. There’s just some people out there that will never really like Automattic and they will not OAuth in or double sign in to use Jetpack, you know what I mean?

[00:15:29] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of curious. So if I’m parsing it right, it sounds like what you were saying was that in a recent restructuring of Automattic and over the last 18 months or so, I think there’s been a lot of that. It sounds like Jetpack is more of an amorphous thing. It’s not like these particular people are dedicated to Jetpack Forms and these ones are for VaultPress or whatever it may be. It’s more liquid than that. We’re going to do a dedicated sprint on Forms, for example. It sounds like that’s getting an update. So probably has had people on the seats having a look at that.

And then once that’s put away and tidied up, then move to something else. But also, I guess an interesting thing that you mentioned there is that because it’s in this wider organisation of which WooCommerce, it’s pretty big, that you can also communicate with those folks. So there may be some overlap between what Forms can do in Jetpack and something that you might wish to do with WooCommerce, those kind of things.

So have I got that right? It’s not like dedicated people doing dedicated products within Jetpack, it’s much more liquid and amorphous than that.

[00:16:23] Devin Walker: Absolutely. Rather than having silos we have one large organisation that works better together. And our vision is really that all the WordPress products should be very similar to Apple and how when you’re using iOS or MacOS, there’s a lot of similar fields and they work well together and they tag team off of each other.

And prior to this reorg, that wasn’t happening so much. And we experienced this at Stellar as well. They purchased a bunch of plugins, brought them all in, the vision was for them to all work well together. We went from functional organisation to this matrix type of organisation. And so this isn’t my first rodeo doing it, I know it can work. But it does take a concerted effort, and it’s still ongoing right now. It hasn’t been 18 months, it’s been like six months. And we’re still trying to figure things out. So me stepping in at this time, I’m really trying to figure it out.

I have a blog post called, or a P2 post called Connecting the Dots, where I’m just trying to find which experts and which products on Jetpack they know better. I’ve been having so many one-on-ones just to try to get to know these folks, understand their history with Jetpack and put it in this kind of glossary of what I have here, and keep that updated as my time progresses here.

[00:17:35] Nathan Wrigley: It is kind of hard to get a grip on what Jetpack is. Because it’s trying to do all these different things, I think it is quite hard for people to understand what they’re installing. So they install Jetpack, okay, I’ve heard that Jetpack’s a thing, I’ll go and install it. There’s loads of free stuff available. And then all of a sudden there’s bits which do work, there are bits which you can extend and upgrade and, you know, you might have to log in with .com to make that bit combine with this bit.

And then there are bits where, you know, it feels like the classic themes work well in some areas, and then if you’ve got a block-based theme, other things don’t work quite so well. I’m thinking like social sharing and things like that. And it’s bit of a, mess is the wrong word, but it’s incredibly confusing, I think, to a novice user. And so I’m, I’m going to put words into your mouth, I’m guessing this is one of the challenges that you are going to try and tackle to take that confusion away. Because, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter how many times I log into Jetpack, there’s always a bit of a surprise. Oh, okay, it works that way. That’s curious. I wasn’t expecting it to do that. And I’ve been doing this for absolutely ages, and I’m still surprised by the way things work.

[00:18:33] Devin Walker: You’re not alone. So one of the things that Matt’s been saying since I’ve come on board is we don’t really need to build much more new things. We need to focus and improve what’s already there, especially in Jetpack and .com. And simplifying it and making it make more sense to the end users. And Jetpack is a prime candidate for a really fresh look at how that can happen.

We’ve been doing exercises as the product team for a framework called Jobs to Be Done. You put yourself in the shoes of that customer and you experience it through fresh eyes, based on what they are looking to get out of it.

For instance, the classic, I guess, analogy is, folks don’t, they don’t want a quarter inch drill bit, they want a quarter inch hole, and that’s just the tool they use to get that quarter inch.

And it’s the same thing with Jetpack or any other software product, and it’s a reforming in thinking. It’s only my fifth week here, but it’s been really a refreshing way to think about how we build product, and how I can then work with the designers to then smooth out those wrinkles of which there are many.

[00:19:40] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting that you say that, because pretty much everything that Jetpack has, well, there’s one notable exception, which is of course AI, which we’ll come to in a minute. But more or less everything that’s in Jetpack has been available in some form or other for a decade or more. You know, forms is, it’s not a new thing. There’s some interesting ideas that people have come up with that maybe we’d want to integrate, but backups, it’s not a new thing.

So the idea of not having new, well, features is probably the wrong word, but not having a new product and just finessing what you’ve already got, I think that would be music to any subscriber to Jetpack. One of the paid plans that you got, I think they would absolutely love that. Just finesse what you’ve already got. We’ve already got this thing, we know what we’ve got, we know how it works, but finesse it, give us a few more features here and there in the bit, like for example, forms or what have you. That seems like music to my ears.

But I’ve said it. The cat is out the bag in this episode now, AI. AI is smuggled into Jetpack in the most, it’s kind of hidden. It’s almost entirely hidden, and yet incredibly profound. I don’t know if, dear listener, you’ve experienced Jetpack and it’s AI features, but if you switch it on and you just go, I don’t know, make a blog post or something like that, when you go to publish, it will just helpfully write your excerpt and your featured image, it will create that for you on the fly. It all happens in the background. It’s really incredible. How did that get under the radar? And is that going to be a big feature?

[00:21:02] Devin Walker: That is going to be a huge feature. I just came back from New York with our AI engineering team led by James LaPage, who’s one of the brightest, young stars, I want to say, in WordPress. And he’s one of the reasons that I’m so excited for what AI can become with Jetpack, and where it’s going to go from here. It’s really great that you are already like what’s there? But that’s just scratching the surface from what we’re going to be doing in the near future.

We’ve got quite a large team working on this. This is a 50 plus engineering team. It’s a huge focus of Automattic. And Jetpack’s the way we’re going to bring a lot of what we’re bringing to .com to self-hosted users. And it’s not going to cost you really much at all and it’s gonna be done in the WordPress way.

Right now it tries to be your content companion, is kind of how I call it, but it’s going to do that a lot better, and it’s going to reach outside of the post editor and do a lot more helpful items for you in the WP admin. And not only in the WP admin, also provide some tools for you in the future for your visitors and how you can convert them, how you can get them to sign up on your newsletter, or you can get them to ask presales questions, or fill out forms or what have you. It’ll be very moldable and shapeable.

So I delightfully was at several demo presentations at this meetup where I was just blown away. Sat down with Matias, James, a lot of the key stakeholders and players here at .com on how and when we can start bringing this into Jetpack.

And what’s there right now is good. It’s almost going to be entirely rewritten and thrown away for what the foundation now is going to become. And so that’s one of the more exciting, more immediate, roadmap items that I’ll be really working on the next 8 to 12 months. You’ll see a huge change.

[00:22:54] Nathan Wrigley: I feel like at the moment the AI implementation in Jetpack is about content, the content that you’re creating right at this moment. We’re creating, I don’t know, SEO fields and we’re creating excerpts and things like that and featured images and what have you. But if you haven’t had a play, again, I’ll link this in the show notes, Automattic’s Telex, which is the capability to, you write a simple prompt and it will create a block for you. I feel that something like Jetpack with something like Telex, just hidden in the sidebar of a WordPress blog post would be really kind of interesting. You know, the idea that, I need a block for this.

[00:23:26] Devin Walker: Are you reading my DMs? Because, exactly. You’ve already sort of got a crystal ball right there. And with Telex, that’s a huge opportunity for site building, for imagining anything that WordPress could be, and having it created there.

Right now it’s great. It creates separate plugins, you can download and install them, you can’t sync them per site. It’s kind of annoying how there’s all these plugins there. There’s not much management updating over time. Jetpack can be that bridge for you, and that’s really an exciting future where it needs to go.

[00:23:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because at the moment, if you are an inexperienced WordPress user, if you’re not technical, let’s put it that way, then you are constrained entirely by what’s there or what the developer has built for you or the range of plugins that you’ve installed. And I feel like in the near future, you reach that point of frustration and you suddenly realise that, oh, there is no block that does that thing. Well, why don’t I just make one?

And you’ll write a small prompt, I don’t know, I need a real estate block, or I don’t know, I need a block because it’s coming up to Christmas. I need a block which is going to show snowflakes falling on this particular post. Please don’t do this by the way, but you get the point. I’m just going to go ahead and make it, and it’ll be this entirely disposable thing. And when I’m finished with it, I’ll probably just throw it in the trash or maybe keep it until next year.

But the point is, your WordPress becomes like this, how to describe it, it’s almost like the scaffolding for an infinite arrangement of possibilities. Whereas before, WordPress felt a bit like a box. If it wasn’t in the box, it couldn’t be done. But now the box got opened and there’s all this scaffolding everywhere and it can do a million more things. And as Matt Mullenweg said, you know, it’s becoming like the OS for the web or something like that.

And the fact that AI is binding to the abilities inside of WordPress, so with the Abilities API and things like that, it knows everything that your WordPress website can do. You know, create users, create posts, delete posts, all of these kind of things. And Jetpack seems really aligned to doing that. I don’t know how it would fit into the bigger Jetpack picture, but, yeah, interesting.

[00:25:27] Devin Walker: Yeah, well, I think AI can be the glue that binds a lot of these individual products together and really paint the picture on how they work well together, and work within your WordPress Core to make it the Jetpack that is supercharged, right? I mean the WordPress that has a Jetpack strapped to it.

There is a great number of, kind of mission statements and taglines over the years for Jetpack. None of which I think have been fully fulfilled. So I really want to revisit that, revise that, and you’ll see a lot of updates coming to the website soon, soon-ish. Telling and bringing people along this journey.

If you look at the website and a lot of the marketing right now, it’s kind of on idle. So that’s another big part of what I’m being focused on, and that will help change the perception in the community and outside of it, of what Jetpack is and what it can do for you is, pulling up the curtain, if you will, on all the cool stuff we’re doing here.

You could read P2s all day here and many of them are so impressive and I feel like a lot of them should be public. There’s so much good content here that is really impressive. For somebody like me who’s been in the community for 15 years, like, oh my gosh, we have the best engineers, the best designers, and it’s all in this P2. Like, let’s get some of this published.

[00:26:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, that’s curious. So I was reading your mind a minute ago, you’ve just read my mind, because the next little bit was going to be all about marketing. Because it doesn’t matter, with the best will in the world, the best product in the world will probably fail, if not marketed correctly.

And it feels as if, when Jetpack began, because it was kind of the thing, a long, long time ago it was the thing, it had that success kind of built into it. You know, it was an Automattic thing, it was a WordPress thing, it became popular because it did so many things that nothing else could do.

Fast forward till today, it feels like the wheels have come off the marketing a little bit, or the train has completely pulled into the station and not moving at all. You know, I can’t remember the last time I saw something engaging, like a YouTube video or somebody experimenting on their YouTube channel with a Jetpack thing.

Whereas with third party plugins, it’s happening all the time, you know? And so it feels like that’s going to be a very big part of where you are, you know, you’ll build hopefully some amazing things, but then trying to turn the tide and get people to be engaged and interested and see the utility of it. I’m guessing that’s going to be a part of the job which is separate to the technological part.

[00:27:46] Devin Walker: It will, absolutely. I think for quite some time it was almost build it and they will come here. And for many, many years they did come. And now it’s harder because the marketplace has expanded quite a bit. There’s a lot of other folks out there doing really cool things with WordPress and have a lot more focused marketing efforts behind them.

I mean, point and case was GiveWP, we were just, people weren’t turning to Woo or Gravity Forms because we made it that it was the number one solution you had to go do it. We just hammered that point through WordCamps, through videos, through podcasts, whatever it was, that was our mission.

And for Jetpack, we really need to refocus on that and do that a lot more. It’s very engineering led organisation. I think marketing to some point is built into their roles and they’re not doing that part as much as I would like.

And on another aspect, I think we definitely just need more marketers. I’m not going to say the exact numbers, but it was a surprisingly low number of marketers to the size of the organisation when I came in. I’m used to a much better ratio.

So I’m going to be hammering that point a little bit more home as I get through the door, but it’s something that I’ve mentioned a bit already in my 5 weeks here.

[00:29:02] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t know what the install base is specifically. It’s a lot, right? Jetpack has a lot of installs and so presumably you’ve.

[00:29:08] Devin Walker: The core is 4 million.

[00:29:09] Nathan Wrigley: 4 million. Okay, so, wow, gosh. So presumably that means anything that you do do, you’ve really got to tread carefully. So for a start, you can’t break things. You can’t just ship a brand new UI in let’s say the forms aspect of it overnight. And I presume that’s kind of like a bit of a noose around your neck in that, you know, you want to move fast and break things in some respects, but with 4 million installs, which is really right at the very top in the WordPress ecosystem, that’s big, big numbers. You are going to constrained in what you can do and how fast you can move things and how quickly you can break things.

[00:29:40] Devin Walker: Somewhat. Somewhat I agree with that. Right now we are on a monthly release cycle and there’s definitely a lot of caution around that. And Jetpack touches a lot of .com too, so there’s that extra added user base, which is humongous. So there is that bit of treading carefully.

But I want to balance that with being aggressive. We just shipped, prior to me coming on board, a new onboarding for getting connected. It’s just through the connection segment, getting connected to .com, and that really had positive results and saw an uptick in connected successful sites. I think we can take that to the next level and explain what Jetpack is, what they need it for, and really optimise it for the best use case based on what that particular site wants or needs.

Going beyond onboarding is then getting into the product UI itself, making the navigation much more clear and understandable.

You know, there’s three different areas in Jetpack right now where you can toggle on and off different modules or products.

[00:30:39] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I’ve discovered many them.

[00:30:41] Devin Walker: Yeah. So I think we need to consolidate that at least. And there’s more Easter eggs. I don’t even want to call them Easter, I don’t know what you’d call that, but interesting quirks that we can clean up.

And for the most part I think we do have to be a bit careful because it’s such a massive user base. Breaking things, just look at some of the Jetpack reviews. Breaking them and lack of support. Those are the two main cause of one star reviews. And with that many, I really want to get that review base above 4.0 stars. But with 3000 or whatever reviews it is, it takes a long shift to get that. And we’re not going to do that by continually breaking things, so it’s a balance.

[00:31:19] Nathan Wrigley: It’s kind of interesting that me, a relatively inexperienced user of Jetpack, I was able to discover many of the quirks that you’ve just mentioned almost immediately. You know, just being curious. And I’m the kind of person that when I download anything, I go and look at every single menu item and kind of think, well, what does that do? How would that work? It really didn’t take me long to discover, well, hang on, that is somewhere else. If I engage that, does that mean it conflicts with this thing over here?

And I saw this over and over again. And so I think that, as you imagine, would be some of the very, very brilliant low hanging fruit. To just have a UI which does, you know, there’s one place for one thing, it works as expected that you don’t, I’m sure you know where I’m going with this, basically, just simplify things, make it elegant in the same way that we’ve seen with so many third party plugins.

Because at the moment it kind of feels like a whole range of different things that have been slammed together and forcefully told to get along with each other, as opposed to like a happy family that, just everything works and everybody’s happy and there’s bliss and rainbows everywhere. It feels a little bit like that, if you know what I mean?

[00:32:21] Devin Walker: Oh, I completely agree. I think we used in the pre-show and it’s a bit of a Frankenstein. We need to change it from that. If I had a nickel for every toggle in Jetpack, I don’t know if I’d need to work anymore. There are quite a few toggle on, toggle offs in just a row. You can imagine how this interface could be much more elegantly put together.

And we’re going to use user feedback for a lot of this and ask, hey, what do you guys think of this? Because we can’t do it successfully in a bubble.

[00:32:52] Nathan Wrigley: Well, and the other thing is, given the perfect UI, it does so much stuff. If you just had Jetpack, if you had a vanilla version of WordPress and you installed Jetpack and everything was easy to navigate and worked as expected first time and maybe there was no dependency on having a .com account or what have you. It does all the things. It would take you from like zero success to broadly speaking, okay, you’ve got a credible website. Maybe there’s going to be some interesting cases where you want a little bit more SEO finesse or something like that.

It would get you to the races, you know, it would get you to put your horse in the race and have a good go. And there’s not much like that out there. There really is nothing that I can think of in the WordPress space. But it’s a leviathan and it’s got many heads. We need it just to have the one head, I think.

[00:33:35] Devin Walker: Very much so, and that’s the challenge that I’m in here to work with this entire team and put a lot of thought behind it.

[00:33:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it’s all on you. So if Jetpack is a success in two years time, we know who to thank for that. And it does genuinely seem, for somebody with your obvious interest and capabilities, it does seem really, really enjoyable. I’m sure it’ll keep you awake, but an enjoyable challenge. Something that you get your teeth into. Something where the success can be measured fairly quickly. You know, does the discontent diminish? Does the UI improve? Tick, tick, tick. We did a good job.

And also, there’s loads of room for improvement. So you’ve entered on a, you’ve definitely got yourself into a position where you’ve taken on a project where the improvements are evident everywhere. I hope that you managed to grab hold of them and wrestle this to the ground.

[00:34:21] Devin Walker: Well, I really appreciate that, Nathan, and why don’t we have a check in in 12 months and see where we’re at on this journey. I think that would be a good way to keep us honest, follow along in this journey along the way, we’ll see how far we’ve gotten.

[00:34:35] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, well, for now then, go and install Jetpack. If you’re listening to this, we’ll be back in 12 months time, so go and have a play with Jetpack as it is now and see.

It sounds to me that Devin is like all ears. If you’ve got some quirks and you found something that’s curious or unexpected or dissatisfying or just downright annoying, where do we get in touch with you? Oh, also, I suspect Devin’s more than happy to receive positive commentary as well.

[00:35:01] Devin Walker: Yeah, I mean the positive stuff’s great too. Right now feedback@jetpack.com is a good place, but we’re going to make this a lot more public in the near future. You can also just tweet at me @innerwebs, I-N-N-E-R-W-E-B-S, or go to my website devin.org. But jetpack.com, jetpack.com/feedback is also a great place. So that’s a bit about me and where you can find the Jetpack information.

[00:35:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. So definitely a challenge out in the public for Devin to get his teeth into WordPress’ Jetpack, and see if he can figure it out and make it better. Let’s check back in 12 months time and see how we’re going. Devin Walker, thanks for chatting to me today.

[00:35:38] Devin Walker: Thank you.

On the podcast today we have Devin Walker.

Devin’s journey in the WordPress ecosystem spans many years, with experience in development, design, marketing, and customer support. He’s best known as the co-founder of GiveWP, which he built and scaled before it was acquired. During his time there, he touched a variety of prominent WordPress brands including iThemes, Kadence, LearnDash, and The Events Calendar.

Today, Devin is starting a new role leading the Jetpack suite of services at Automattic. It’s a position with hefty responsibilities as Jetpack powers millions of WordPress sites, and integrates deeply across Automattic’s product portfolio.

I talk with Devin about why he took on this challenge, the divisiveness and complexity surrounding Jetpack, and his vision for refocusing the plugin and simplifying its user experience.

We start by hearing about Devin’s extensive WordPress background and the choices he weighed up when deciding to join Automattic. The conversation quickly moves to the scope of Jetpack, its evolution, the struggle to be a “jack of all trades, master of none”, and the recent efforts to bring greater focus and polish to key features like forms and SEO.

Devin gets into the organisational changes at Automattic, how Jetpack’s development teams now collaborate more fluidly with other product teams (such as WooCommerce), and the balancing act of shipping improvements to a 4 million strong user base without breaking things.

AI emerges as a massive new frontier, and Devin shares behind-the-scenes insights into Jetpack’s current and future AI capabilities, giving us a glimpse at content creation, block-building, and how AI might reshape user and developer expectations in WordPress.

Throughout, we hear about Devin’s approach to product marketing (and the need for more of it), the importance of listening to user feedback, and his plans for a more coherent and compelling Jetpack experience.

If you’re a WordPress user wondering where Jetpack is headed, what’s working, or how AI fits into the future of site building, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Jetpack

Jetpack feedback form

GiveWP

WP Rollback

Automattic AI team announcement post

Telex

Devin’s website