Devin Walker has joined Automattic as Artistic Director of Jetpack, effectively leading the product. He brings 16 years across WordPress development, design, marketing, and support, plus experience founding GiveWP and creating WP Rollback. He chose Automattic for the scale and impact Jetpack can have: a product used by millions that can move the broader self-hosted WordPress ecosystem forward, even though Jetpack is large, complex, and sometimes divisive.
Focus and product vision
– The immediate mandate is clarity and focus. Jetpack historically became “a little bit of everything” — backups, stats, protection, performance, forms, VideoPress, SEO, and more. Many of those features were pioneering but now face specialized competitors.
– Rather than continuously adding features, the priority is to polish and consolidate what’s already there: strengthen core areas (forms and SEO are called out), simplify overlapping UIs, improve onboarding, and concentrate on what delivers value to most users.
– Devin accepts that Jetpack won’t be as deep as best-in-class niche products for the top 2% of advanced users. The goal is a solid, approachable solution that meets the needs of roughly 98% of sites.
Organization and delivery
– Automattic is moving from siloed product teams to a matrix model with shared architecture and design across .com, Jetpack, WooCommerce, and other products. This supports tighter integration, reuse of services, and cross-product initiatives.
– The matrix setup lets engineers and designers be allocated to focused efforts (for example, a sprint dedicated to upgrading Forms). Devin is personally leading the forms initiative and highlights strong engineering resources at Automattic.
– The model also makes it easier to create integrations between Jetpack and other Automattic products while maintaining user choice and privacy.
– Jetpack ships on a monthly release cycle. Given its install base, Devin emphasizes caution: breaking changes affect many users and create negative reviews. The plan is to balance safety with the need to move more decisively on improvements.
User experience and simplification
– Users face confusion from complexity: multiple toggle locations, scattered settings, and inconsistent behavior across themes (classic vs block themes). Devin advocates a Jobs-to-Be-Done mindset: design around user goals instead of toggles and feature lists.
– Concrete UX work includes consolidating toggle locations, simplifying onboarding and the WordPress.com connection, reducing surprising behaviors, and clarifying Jetpack’s purpose. Recent onboarding tweaks have shown positive results and will be expanded.
– The ambition is to make Jetpack the default toolkit that takes a vanilla WordPress site to a credible, featureful state with clear, easy-to-use interfaces.
AI as a strategic frontier
– AI is an accelerating focus. Jetpack already has quiet but useful AI features (auto excerpts, featured images, content assistance), and these are just the start.
– Automattic has large AI efforts and intends to bring many .com AI features to self-hosted WordPress via Jetpack: broader content help, admin tooling, visitor-facing features (conversion workflows, presales Q&A, newsletter sign-up help), and richer editor capabilities.
– Tools like Telex (prompt-driven block creation) show what’s possible: non-technical users generating custom blocks on demand. Devin sees AI as the glue tying Jetpack components and WordPress Core into on-the-fly, site-specific features.
– Current AI work will be reworked as foundations evolve; Devin expects substantial changes over the next 8–12 months with deeper, integrated AI across admin and site.
Marketing, perception, and community
– Jetpack’s marketing has been quieter as the ecosystem grew more specialized. Devin plans clearer messaging about what Jetpack is and the value of its free and paid tiers.
– He notes an engineering-led culture with fewer marketers and wants to increase communication so internal progress and improvements are more visible to the community.
– Transparency is important: many internal updates deserve public attention to shift perception and highlight real improvements.
Scale, reliability, and support
– Jetpack’s core active installs are large — roughly 4 million for core features — which requires careful releases and a focus on avoiding breaking sites. Breaking changes and poor support lead to low ratings; Devin wants to reduce those pain points.
– User feedback will guide redesigns. The team will invite the community to report issues and quirks so changes reflect real needs rather than assumptions.
Next steps and how to engage
– Immediate priorities: iterative upgrades to Forms and improvements to SEO and other underdeveloped areas. Some features may be enhanced; others may be sunsetted if they don’t provide enough value.
– Devin is mapping internal knowledge across Jetpack’s history and meeting teams to connect expertise and prioritize work.
– He invites feedback: [email protected], jetpack.com/feedback, or via his Twitter (@innerwebs) and website (devin.org).
A public check-in
– Devin frames this as a journey and suggests checking back in 12 months. The measurable aims are clear: simplify and focus the product, ship meaningful UX and AI improvements, strengthen marketing and messaging, and raise quality and satisfaction — all while protecting Jetpack’s huge existing install base.
If you use Jetpack now, Devin encourages trying it and sharing what’s working, confusing, or broken. The team plans to rely on user feedback as they refine the product.