Philip Arthur Moore is the Premium Theme team lead at Automattic. I’m thrilled to have been able to ask Philip some questions about WordPress.com premium themes, their processes, and working at Automattic.
His answers are thorough and very insightful, and I’m thankful for the time he spent on this.
You’re the Premium Theme Lead at Automattic. So what does your typical day entail? Support, brainstorming, code?
I spoke a lot about what I do on the WordPress.com blog and much of that still applies. I make sure that premium theme users are supported well, see to it that every single line of code that comes into the premium theme repository on WordPress.com is audited for security, bugs, and best practices, and manage the onboarding and ongoing relationships we have with new premium theme partners.
During the last several months since taking on a more active team lead role I’ve also added a few more things to my plate: organizing team meetups; acting as an ambassador for all things premium on WordPress.com; interacting as much as possible with the business-focused WordPress community; checking in with my teammates to make sure they’re all set; and thinking deeply about what the next 6, 12, and 18 months will look like for premium themes on WordPress.com.
A typical non-lead day involves performing code reviews on premium themes, triaging Trac and destroying theme bugs without remorse, working on public-facing documentation for WordPress theme developers, jumping into _s, and continuing learning how to code. A typical lead-day involves any task that will see to it that the premium theme team train stays on the tracks. This can mean anything from team meetings to partner meetings to brainstorming to project management.
It’s important for me to stress that if you were to ask me the same question six months from now, the answer would probably be different. Things change rapidly at Automattic, and what’s most important is not what we’re working on now but whether or not we’re making ourselves better and more suited for the work to come.
