Jeremy Herve

I was the person who didn't shy away from the unglamorous work. I handled bugs in older parts of the codebase, improved the quality of crummy old code, and took on maintenance that needed doing. I focused on the parts that don't get much attention but that everything else depends on. I also owned the Jetpack plugin's monthly releases and built processes to make them smoother, including an internal beta testing program. I monitored each release, watched customer and support feedback as it came in, and moved quickly when something needed fixing. When security releases were needed, I coordinated those too. Jetpack is one of the most popular WordPress plugins, used by millions, and Automattic is a high-profile name in the WordPress community. All of this had to be done at scale and in a way the community could respect. That meant communicating publicly about new features, doing developer relations work, and handling the occasional crisis: reaching out and answering questions when a release caused problems.

This is where I started at Automattic. It began as customer support and quickly turned technical, taking on the harder problems before they needed to go to engineering. From there it grew into mentoring and leading our Jetpack support team. Over time the role kept widening. I split my days between handling technical support, guiding support folks by explaining the inner workings of our products, fixing bugs reported by customers, improving our developer documentation for external developers, and acting as the liaison between support and engineering. Even in these years I was triaging the Jetpack repo, testing changes, and submitting fixes, the engineering work that the later title would make official. Underneath all of it, the job hadn't changed since my first support ticket: pay attention to what people actually need, and make sure that knowledge reaches whoever can act on it.

Managed projects supporting the brand's growth in France and other European markets, working closely with product managers and developers on specifications, implementation, and SEO.

Built liligo.com's social media presence and ran its WordPress corporate blogs. This is where my developer relations and community work first started.

Tested and managed the daily release process for the travel search engine, coordinating changes between developers and the wider team.

Ensured a good customer experience on the liligo.com travel search engine through testing and monitoring.

Managed delivery of replacement products to clients across Europe using SAP, communicating with customers in French and English.