I had the opportunity recently to talk to Cory Miller, the founder of iThemes. Cory started iThemes in January 2008, so they are currently celebrating their 6th anniversary.
Cory is a really thoughtful businessman and leader, and I really enjoyed our chat. If you’d like a good compliment to this interview, also listen to his talk with Troy Dean of WP Elevation.
Here’s the interview:
Structure and culture at iThemes
iThemes has twenty two employees today. Cory (CEO) and Matt Danner (COO) make up the executive team, but then they also have a bevy of designers, developers and support personnel. Cory found that growing from ten to twenty employees was the hardest, because it was the point where he had a much harder time having one on one relationships with each person.
Matt becoming COO in 2011 was a huge help for iThemes to reach and maintain “that perfect equation” Cory notes in the interview. Cory is quite good at crediting the team around him — something I find to be a common quality of good leaders.
We talked about culture at iThemes and other businesses. Cory and I agree that culture is hugely important, and Cory made the wise point that companies are different everywhere, and it’s a “unique set of DNA, personalities, and experiences that shape that [culture].” In our example, bean bags and trendy offices as a “culture” driver may work in some places, but it doesn’t have to be what ties a company together, and doesn’t have to be.
iThemes is a hybrid company; a number of their team works out of Oklahoma City, but many employees work remotely as well. One of the challenges for them has been working to ensure that culture is not fractured between on location and remote employees. Cory still would only give themselves a “B” grade for managing this barrier, but it’s something they actively work on.
Tools for communication and operations
Being a new remote worker myself, I was interested in tools iThemes uses for communication and internal operations.
One of Cory’s favorite tools is Trello, which they got to know this last summer as they prepared for the launch of Exchange and had six different developers working on one project. They’ve now expanded their use of Trello across their projects and processes, including public roadmaps that anyone can view.
For chat iThemes uses HipChat, a tool they’ve embraced after enough struggles with tools like Google Talk and Skype. They currently have HipChat rooms for each of their major product lines as well as generic office chats.
I personally am a big fan of HipChat as well. In fact, I’d say that it’s probably been the best help for me to transition to remote work, always having coworkers in HipChat that I’m able to communicate with at any time.
Really, Trello and HipChat have been revolutionary for connecting people.
iThemes also uses P2 for internal announcements, but it’s not as big of a part of their processes as the others.
iThemes product lines
I discussed a number of iThemes’ product lines with Cory. Interestingly missing from our conversation was at-length conversation about themes. Toward the end we brought this up and Cory noted that plugins really are their main business now, and it’s a testament to how the commercial space in WordPress has evolved.
