Category: Blog

Published: 2025-06-11

I must have attended roughly 10+ sessions over the two days in Basel, and to be honest, my focus as a CRM nerd gravitates toward the business side of WordPress. While the technical sessions were impressive (Ryan Welcher is a legend), I found myself drawn to conversations about customer relationships, business models, and strategic positioning—areas where“CRM is a mindset”becomes essential for understanding WordPress’s evolution.

Before diving into my analysis, I want to mention two sessions that were emotional in their own ways. The first was WordPress without Borders — The Fight for Digital Freedom by Noel Tock. The experiences he shared from the front line in Ukraine put everything we do in tech into perspective and made everyone more reflective.

In quite the contrast, there was the session by Marieke van de Rakt, Jono Alderson, and Amber Hinds where they live-critiqued three websites—super insightful and genuinely entertaining to watch (Schadenfreude is real, sorry). They highlighted crucial technical details like excluding staging sites from search engine indexing (something many agencies miss) and demonstrated how to prepare websites for the European Accessibility Act (EAA) coming into effect on June 28, 2025—practical insights with immediate legal and SEO implications.

But three sessions stood out for their strategic implications, revealing patterns that only became fully clear after hearing the leadership perspective during the fireside chat. A dedicated blog coming soon – Follow on X to be the fist to know.

Session 1: Building Support as Core of Product

Anna Hurko – Crocoblock

Key Insight: Customer-centric businesses should let support lead the strategy

Anna Hurko’s journey from Senior Technical Support Specialist to CEO at Crocoblock isn’t just an inspiring career story—it’s a masterclass in understanding that customer support is fundamentally a CRM function. Her presentation challenged the traditional support hierarchy with three rule-breaking principles:

🔄 Support = Customers (not a cost center)🎯 No tiers = Everyone gives top-level support👥 Whole team ownership = Everyone is part of the support team

What struck me wasn’t just the philosophy but the implementation. Crocoblock involves QAs, developers, project managers, product managers, community managers, copywriters, and video content creators in support. This isn’t about efficiency—it’s about relationship intelligence.

From a CRM perspective, this approach creates unprecedented customer data flow throughout the organization. When your entire team interacts with customers across live chat, tickets, Zoom calls, GitHub issues, refunds, interviews, community platforms, and WordCamps, you’re not just providing support—you’re building a comprehensive customer relationship ecosystem.

The audience questions revealed a common pain point: agencies struggling to scale personalized service. Anna’s model suggests the solution isn’t automation—it’s systematic human engagement.

Let’s stop calling it “Support” and start recognizing it as what it really is: distributed customer relationship management, or better CRM is a Mindset.

Session 2: WaaS for Agencies: Opportunities, Challenges & Pricing

Sandra Kurze – GREYD

Key Insight: Scale through systems thinking, not just resources

Sandra Kurze presented Website as a Service (WaaS) as more than recurring revenue—it’s a fundamental business model shift toward standardization, scalability, and automation. But what initially appeared to be an agency-focused session revealed something much larger.

The Reality Check: Traditional agency scaling means hiring more people for each project. WaaS means building systems that handle hundreds or thousands of sites with the same core team.

The technical demonstrations showed how GREYD handles systems of hundreds of connected sites, but the real insight came through examples:

• Mrs. Sporty franchise: 250 locations across Europe

• Enterprise partner programs: Partners pay “marketing fees” for branded landing pages

• Centralized control: Global updates with local customization capabilities

The community reaction was telling. Questions focused heavily on pricing models and client retention, but missed the strategic implication: WaaS isn’t about selling websites—it’s about selling business systems.

With a CRM mindset, WaaS represents a shift from project-based transactions to relationship-based subscriptions. The customer data, behavioral patterns, and business intelligence generated across these connected systems create competitive advantages that traditional one-off web projects simply cannot match.

Sandra’s mention of small agencies handling thousand-site projects through scalable systems wasn’t just about operational efficiency—it was about data scale and relationship depth that rivals enterprise platforms.

Session 3: What We Learned Building Site Kit

Maria Moeva – Google

Key Insight: Organize around customer questions, not internal capabilities

Maria Moeva’s session on Google’s Site Kit plugin was surprisingly under-attended, which was unfortunate because it contained some of the most actionable strategic insights of the conference. Her 15-year journey at Google—from classical Japanese literature through beekeeping to product management—brought a unique perspective to making complex tools accessible.

The Three Lessons from Site Kit:

• Make complex tools accessible → Bridge the gap between power and usability

• Translate data into action → Answer customer questions, don’t just show data

• Show the whole story → Connect visitor behavior to business outcomes

The most significant insight was organizational: Site Kit’s evolution from product-organized to question-organized dashboards. Instead of “Analytics section, Search Console section,” they pivoted to answering customer questions:

• “Am I getting traffic?”

• “Is my content performing well?”

• “Is my site fast?”

• “Am I making money?”

This represents a fundamental shift from tool-centric to customer-centric thinking. CRM is a mindset means organizing around customer needs, not internal capabilities. Site Kit’s personalization feature—asking “What’s the purpose of your site?” and curating metrics accordingly—demonstrates how proper customer segmentation drives product decisions.

Forward-looking implications: If Google is moving their WordPress integration toward question-based, personalized experiences, agencies and enterprises need to think beyond feature sets toward customer outcome optimization.

(🐝 And yes, I would have loved to hear more about the beekeeping—managing 50,000-60,000 bees definitely provides unique perspectives on systems thinking!)

The Pattern Recognition

Three different rooms, three different topics, but one consistent message emerging about WordPress’s evolution: the business model is shifting from transactions to relationships.

Anna’s support-as-product approach, Sandra’s WaaS systems thinking, and Maria’s customer-centric tool design all point toward the same strategic direction. WordPress isn’t just enabling websites—it’s becoming the infrastructure for customer relationship platforms.

🔄 The Recurring Theme: Every session emphasized systematic customer engagement over one-off deliverables.

❓ The Missing Conversation: Nobody explicitly discussed how these approaches generate competitive customer intelligence, but that’s exactly what they do.

🎯 The Competitive Response: While other platforms focus on features, WordPress is positioning around relationships and business outcomes.

This pattern became crystal clear when I later analyzed Matt and Mary’s fireside chat, where strategic directions that weren’t publicly announced but were hinted at revealed the full scope of WordPress’s business evolution.

The strategic direction hinted at in these sessions was confirmed—and expanded upon—during the fireside chat. But Matt and Mary’s conversation revealed implementation timelines and business implications that most attendees completely missed. Those insights explain exactly why the energy in that packed main hall might have felt different from previous WordCamps.

Coming soon: Part 3 will dissect the Matt Mullenweg and Mary Hubbart fireside chat, revealing the strategic decisions shaping WordPress’s future that weren’t in the official announcements.

Published: 2025-06-09

Sitting in the front row at the fireside chat with Matt and Mary talking about the state of affairs of WordPress, I came across a term again that I haven’t read in a while:

“data liberation“.

It perfectly reflects what I’ve been thinking and working on over the past few years. You have to own your content, you have to own your data, and be free with it to share it with the platform that you like.

This isn’t only true for CRM systems that I’m focused on—it’s fundamental to how we should approach data and personal information online everywhere. This was a key moment across the three days, and I’m getting ahead of myself because there’s a lot more to unpack.

From Spontaneous Discovery to Strategic Insight

Four weeks ago, I didn’t even know about the WordPress community. Then, thanks to the WordPress dashboard (which needs some strong improvements, by the way—I agree with Matt on that one), I discovered WordCamp Lisbon and attended it spontaneously. That’s where I met the vibrant people of the community and learned about the event in Basel.

Despite all odds, I booked the flight and attended without any time to build expectations. In this approach, you’ll find my honest impressions. Since there’s substantial ground to cover, I’m creating three parts: this raw take from the event, a deep dive into the sessions I strategically attended, and a detailed analysis of that revealing fireside chat with Matt and Mary.

The Community Pulse: Alive and Evolving

WordPress is alive and powering roughly 50% of the internet, with Google and Salesforce there as title sponsors. The vibe was vibrant—everyone discussing what’s genuinely interesting about WordPress, what they can accomplish with it, and expressing gratitude for what the platform offers. The hundreds of volunteers working on the event is a statement by itself. This volunteer-driven approach mirrors what I see in successful CRM implementations—community ownership drives better adoption than top-down mandates.

The Elephant in the Room

Of course, there were dark clouds—not only over Basel’s sky but within the community. I won’t dive into anything that’s in progress, but the launch of Project FAIR was something that surprised many and will definitely impact the path forward.

What I took away was Matt’s statement: “A lot of great inventions in the WordPress community started with ‘we don’t like the way this is done. Let’s do our own thing.’” Then later, these innovations made it back into core. That’s a productive mindset, but the situation was definitely a discussion topic on and off stage.

Three Moments That Shifted My Perspective

1. The AI Team Formation

I didn’t see many AI buzzwords across the booths and speeches, but AI was part of numerous conversations. The fact that WordPress is forming its own AI team proves this matters strategically. This reminds me of how forward-thinking organizations approach CRM—not chasing every trend, but methodically building capability where it delivers real value.

2. The Block Editor Evolution

Gutenberg Block Editor and Interactive API were huge topics. Everyone was discussing them, and my take is that most have converted to block editor advocates. There’s still ongoing discussion, and it’s productive to observe.

As a satisfied user of WordPress 6.8 with standard Twentytwentyfive theme, using Gutenberg blocks, I can confidently say this is remarkable. I used to purchase premium themes for commercial projects. Now I can accomplish more than 80% of the work with everything available in the free version of WordPress, which creates tremendous opportunities.

3. The Unexpected Q&A Dynamic

Something few people anticipated was an actual Q&A session during Matt and Mary’s fireside chat, which included genuinely direct feedback from the community. I’ll examine this in a dedicated analysis, so stay with me through this series.

What Nobody Was Discussing

Something absent from conversations was WooCommerce’s current limitations and the competitive landscape against platforms like Shopify or Wix, who make user onboarding significantly easier. For WordPress to compete effectively, substantial work remains—particularly around WooCommerce’s checkout process, which is still restrictive with considerable development needed.

This presents future risk, as confirmed by several one-on-one conversations I had with community members. This connects to a principle I call “CRM as a mindset“—the best systems prioritize user experience over technical features, and WordPress still has work to do here.

The Generational Challenge

There’s a saying: “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” I like to adapt this to: “If you’re the oldest person in the room, bring in more young people.”

In this event’s context, I felt great company, but I was particularly intrigued by something Matt mentioned about bringing younger people into the developer community. I’ll dissect that comment and its implications in my upcoming analysis of the fireside chat—it reveals more about WordPress’s strategic challenges than most realize.

Coming Next: In Part 2, I’ll break down the three strategic sessions I attended, including insights on enterprise WordPress implementation, potential CRM use cases and integration patterns, and the technical demonstrations that revealed WordPress’s actual capabilities and what plugins might make it even more fit for purpose.

Coming soon Part 3: The complete fireside chat analysis—including the uncomfortable questions, strategic admissions, and timeline revelations that most attendees missed but every WordPress professional should understand.