Devin Walker recently joined Automattic as Artistic Director of Jetpack, bringing 16 years of WordPress experience—co‑founding GiveWP, building WP Rollback, and working with brands like iThemes, Kadence, LearnDash, and The Events Calendar. He moved from Liquid Web to take on Jetpack, a broad and controversial product that touches millions of sites.
Why Jetpack?
Devin weighed launching another independent product versus joining Automattic and chose Jetpack for scale and influence inside a company he respects. Jetpack bundles a wide range of features—analytics, backups, security, performance tools, sharing, forms, VideoPress, basic SEO, and more. Many of those features were trailblazing when introduced, but specialist third‑party plugins have since raised expectations in each niche. Devin’s aim is not to make Jetpack the deepest tool in every category; instead, he wants to sharpen and elevate the core capabilities so Jetpack reliably serves the needs of the vast majority of users.
Organizational approach and scope
Automattic has moved from strict silos to a more matrixed structure that shares architecture and design across .com, Jetpack, and other teams. This makes it easier to align shared services and bring .com features to self‑hosted WordPress via Jetpack. Devin is leading substantial upgrades—forms is a marquee example—working closely with senior engineers and prioritizing where to invest effort to get the most user impact.
Tradeoffs and focus
Devin is explicit about tradeoffs: Jetpack cannot and should not aim to outcompete every specialized plugin on every advanced feature. The pragmatic goal is excellence for the 95–98% of users who need dependable, straightforward functionality. For edge cases requiring heavy specialization, third‑party solutions will remain the right choice.
User experience and simplification
A major immediate priority is simplifying Jetpack’s user experience. Over time the interface accumulated multiple places to enable or configure settings, confusing connection flows, and inconsistent behavior across themes and between block and classic contexts. Those inconsistencies drive many negative reviews—often rooted in breakages or unclear expectations. With roughly four million core installs, changes must be cautious, but Devin plans to tackle onboarding, consolidate toggles, clarify navigation, and reduce surprises.
He’s adopting Jobs‑to‑Be‑Done thinking: start with the user’s desired outcome and design flows that deliver it. The aim is for Jetpack to help novices get to a credible, well‑functioning site quickly—an integrated, polished companion to WordPress rather than a patchwork of modules.
Product cadence and risk management
Jetpack ships monthly and touches large parts of Automattic’s ecosystem, so regressions are a real risk. Devin wants to balance prudence with visible progress. Small, targeted changes—like improvements to the connection and onboarding flow—have already increased successful connections without introducing major risk. The plan is to iterate deliberately, act aggressively where UX debt is obvious, and follow user feedback to guide the pace of change.
AI: present and future role
AI is a major strategic area. Devin returned from demos with Automattic’s AI engineering teams impressed by existing features such as automatic excerpt and featured image generation, viewing them as initial steps. Automattic has invested heavily in AI (50+ engineers) and intends to bring .com AI capabilities to self‑hosted sites via Jetpack.
The vision is for Jetpack to act as a “content companion”: helping inside and outside the editor with post content, metadata, block creation, visitor engagement, conversion prompts, and form flows. Tools like Telex, which can generate blocks on demand, point to a future where you can prompt Jetpack to create custom blocks while Jetpack manages any necessary plugin code behind the scenes. Devin sees AI as the glue that helps disparate Jetpack features work together and integrate more tightly with WordPress Core and the Abilities API.
Marketing and perception
Devin also sees marketing as an underused lever. Jetpack benefited historically from Automattic’s brand and early mover advantage, but the plugin landscape now includes many focused competitors with strong messaging. He plans to improve Jetpack’s public narrative by polishing the website, being clearer about which features Jetpack provides, and surfacing internal posts and demos to broader audiences. He’s observed a relatively low marketer‑to‑product ratio and intends to scale marketing to better communicate improvements and shift perceptions.
Community, feedback, and measurement
Devin is encouraging more public feedback and plans to make the process more transparent. Current channels include [email protected], jetpack.com/feedback, his Twitter @innerwebs, and devin.org. He will rely on user research, one‑on‑ones with teammates, and public engagement to inform decisions.
Progress will be measured against tangible metrics: connection rates, review scores, successful feature usage, and overall user satisfaction. Reducing one‑star reviews tied to breakages and support gaps is a key objective. Devin invites users to test Jetpack now and report pain points and successes, with an expectation to reassess progress in about a year.
Summary
Devin’s plan for Jetpack centers on focus, user‑centered redesign, smoother onboarding, clearer product boundaries, stronger marketing, and an ambitious push into AI that brings .com capabilities to self‑hosted sites. The challenge is to modernize and simplify a sprawling product without disrupting millions of active installations. Devin frames this work as a career capstone and a team effort—incremental, measured changes aimed at significant long‑term improvement, especially around forms and AI‑driven site building.
