2. Jetpack: the Automattic experience for WordPress

From a bundle of features

Current stack

Jetpack is a bundle of useful WordPress.com features (CDN, UI) and other Automattic products (Vaultpress & Akismet). But it doesn’t deliver the full WordPress.com experience. Nor does it include a key Automattic product—WooCommerce.

This makes Jetpack feel like a good but incomplete solution. It also leaves out the opportunity of bringing together all Automattic products to users in a single, coherent solution.

To a single, consistent ‘Automattic layer’

Suggested stack

1. Make Jetpack an interface to all Automattic products for non-WordPress.com users
2. Make Jetpack the application layer for WordPress.com

Why?

Because it can bring the full “Automattic experience” to all WordPress users.
Because it can be a unifying layer for various Automattic products.
Because it ought to be Automattic what early AWS was to Amazon.com.

How?

Jetpack, the Automattic experience

Integrate all relevant Automattic products—WooCommerce, Crowdsignal, Akismet, Happy Schedule, more¹—through the Jetpack interface. Give Jetpack users a single, consistent, rapidly improving interface for all Automattic products.

Help users access and manage the various Automattic products coherently from a single plugin, with fewer external dependencies or security risks, and with a single point of billing and support.

Help Automattic in bringing all products in front of the users—for use, for cross-sell, and for data-analytics.

Jetpack, the WordPress.com application layer

Jetpack should encapsulate all WordPress.com functionality that is not a part of WordPress core.

All WordPress.com feature should be available between Jetpack APIs and the core WordPress APIs.

WordPress.com = WordPress + Jetpack

Use the Jetpack APIs, instead of individual product APIs, to integrate other Automattic products into WordPress.com.

Starting points

I prefer starting small. We could start by requiring that all custom updates to WordPress.com—upgrades, fixes, features—must be via Jetpack.

This action will slow down the pace of development. It may also cause dissonance within some team. But, it will put the impetus on both the WordPress.com and Jetpack teams to align to the new product stack.

Organisationally, this would need a common leader for the Jetpack and WordPress.com teams. The leader will have charge of a successful transition to the new model.

In parallel, the Jetpack team may start integrating other Automattic products. Then provide access to these products through the Jetpack API. (I would suggest starting with WooCommerce.)

Next step would be transitioning rest of custom WordPress.com code into Jetpack, and field testing the transition with both WordPress.com and self-hosted users.

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All opinion notes:

1. We need to do something about the WordPress.com Reader
2. Jetpack: the Automattic experience for WordPress
3. WooHoo.com—a hosted, tightly-integrated version of WooCommerce
4. Woo Two — More ideas for WooCommerce
5. Earn with WordPress
6. Pricing—more and less
   • WordPress.com new user sign-up flow
7. TBC: A publishing platform for today’s content formats