Dive into our blog where we turn complex data into clear, actionable insights. Stay tuned for fresh perspectives and expert advice from the heart of Automattic’s data team.
One distinguishing feature of Automattic’s work culture is a team rotation, through which an individual can move from one team to another. A rotation can happen for a few reasons: to “try out” a new role and gain new skills, to backfill an understaffed team, or to cultivate cross-pollination and diversity across the company. Some rotations…
During an interview, a candidate recently asked me why, after more than five years, I still work at Automattic. Why? I like the people I work with, and they alone are a good reason to stay. Being globally distributed means I get to work with colleagues from various backgrounds. This helps me understand first‑hand what’s happening…
When we started working on Automattic’s new experimentation platform (ExPlat), it became clear that we needed to agree on the development practices for the project. Achieving consensus was critical, given Automattic’s fractal nature and its strong emphasis on autonomy. In practice, these attributes lead to a high variability of project development cultures across the company, depending…
Last month, my colleague Aaron Yan published a broad overview of Automattic’s new Experimentation Platform (ExPlat). This month, we’ll dive deeper into ExPlat’s architecture and design, explain how the landscape at Automattic informed our architectural decisions, and describe the platform’s main components. Future posts will share details on each component and other aspects of experimentation…
Over the past 18 months, the Decision Science team has been building the Experimentation Platform (ExPlat): a tool to help our colleagues run experiments to improve customer experiences, inform product decisions, and quantify the impact of newly released features on many of Automattic’s products such as WordPress.com, Jetpack, Akismet, and more. In this multi‑part series, we…
Five perspectives on working remotely in a company distributed across the planet.
Today, I wanted to share how we’ve empowered colleagues outside the data engineering team to write their own data transformations by overcoming coding language barriers. Within our Data team, there are several specializations: Data Analysts create dashboards and analyze data for business leads and product teams across the company. Data Scientists apply machine learning technology at…
A few of my colleagues — with tenures at Automattic from just a few months to many years — share their highlights of working here. Robert Felty Robert, you rejoined us a few months ago. What has been your highlight so far? I would like to focus on one aspect of Automattic which has been dramatically…
I asked my colleagues in India, the United States, the Netherlands, and Germany about how the COVID‑19 pandemic has affected them. They share how reducing their time online has helped them, and compare their experience at Automattic with those they had at companies that are not fully distributed. Anand Nalya Anand, how has COVID‑19 affected you…
Vicki Boykis shares some tips on how to teach beginners to code.