Category: Business

Growth and sustaining a product or service always come back to solving customer problems. Doing this well isn’t just a contest of technology or talent. It’s often about who is doing a better job of listening to their customers. Some call this “strategic empathy.” This can become a challenge as businesses grow, and as markets quickly change. So if you want to build a successful product or service, understanding your customer is paramount. In this talk, we will explore the ways that we can make data-informed decisions, and use design thinking tools to better understand our current customers and our future customers. And you don’t have to be a designer to use design thinking tools and techniques. We’ll see some real-world examples from companies like Ancestry.com, Bluehost, and others. And we’ll be sure to leave some time for a discussion on how this kind of thinking might help your business scale its ability to listen.

An overview of business models in the WordPress ecosystem, focused on product companies. We’ll review the benefits and tradeoffs of each model and then discuss improvements to each of the models to better reflect the value and market size of the WordPress ecosystem.