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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone, and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack. Today's episode features a segment from my interview with WordPress Executive Director, Mary Hubbard. Mary stopped by to fill us in on the project's big picture goals for 2026 and her experiences in project leadership. Now you can catch the entire interview over on our WP Minute Plus channel. Visit thewpminute.com for all the details.
Eric Karkovack (00:29)
what's been the biggest challenge you've found so far? mean, is it integrating with the community that much or being out front a little bit more than maybe you're used to?
Mary Hubbard (00:38)
I mean, the challenge hasn't been with the project itself. The challenge is ⁓ where the project is headed versus where it has come from. And I think we saw a shift in that. And ⁓ I have a very different style of leadership and I have a very different way of communicating. And so I think that the biggest challenge is how I can adapt my skills and my expertise to an open source project of this size and really have specific focus areas that we can move things forward while
what the community wanted and needs, right? So I think that that balance and getting in there and doing it had been the biggest challenge in my first year here. ⁓ Pivoting off of that, it's really now how we can ⁓ increase contributors, make a better ecosystem and continue doubling down on the product. I think we'll have natural challenges of scale.
Eric Karkovack (01:34)
Yeah, you talked a bit about, you know, just kind of integrating with the community, being a part of the community before you started making suggestions. Have you learned anything ⁓ that you didn't realize about the community in this time?
Mary Hubbard (01:50)
I don't think it was anything I didn't realize, but there's a difference between having a logical understanding and an experience. People are passionate. This is what they love. ⁓ This is the backbone of what they do. And I think that with...
understanding that and being in it and listening to people and listening to their concerns really just helps shape a better WordPress, not just from the product, but how the ecosystem can thrive, how businesses can actually build on top of it, how the platform can grow. And so a lot of the problems that I've learned over the last year, I think we have and can have solid solutions for. ⁓ And it's going to take time to do that. But we're slowly starting to integrate and implement some of these solutions. Like, you know, a big, big part of what I heard when I first
came on was ⁓ visibility into non-code contributions. So what does that mean and why? what are we looking for just the visibility of it? Are we trying to track and understand how people contribute, why they contribute, where they fall off? ⁓ And so a lot of community members were trying to lift this off the ground. And I think visibility into that and launching the contribution platform can really help us identify some other issues or bring visibility to non-code
contributions ⁓ and show where we should put attention in the project. So things like that which sure I could have understood, but people wanted it. But like being a part of it and seeing out of how we try to lift that up and what we do and how we can do it together. I think I really learned and understood by being in it.
Eric Karkovack (03:29)
That's good to get your hands dirty once in a while with that kind of thing, right? I mean, because it's hard to make those decisions just from above and because they impact everybody, right? And and as you said, there's so much passion.
Mary Hubbard (03:39)
Yes, there's so much passion and there's great ideas. mean some of the ideas that we're pushing forward, ⁓ my understanding is that they were told no multiple times before they got guesses. Right? And so it is kind of like re-bringing things up, right? Or like my...
My whole thinking is, you know, do the meritocracy. We should just be doing, we should be doing, we should stop waiting for mission and just do. And I really want that to happen. And I say that with, you know,
wait, I don't just say it, I mean what I'm saying when I say that. Like come and do it, try it. ⁓ And we'll go from there. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, we could try something else. But there are a lot of ideas that maybe came too early or didn't have steam or didn't have the right support. And then now the environment is different or the people are different. So there's a lot of opportunity that I think we can try. And what we need to do is remember that.
know, showing up and doing is what's most important.