Dean Sas

Five weeks ago our CEO issued a challenge:
Pair up with someone in your timezone. Pick almost anything. Ship something valuable in a month. Just define a metric that tells you whether it is working. We’re calling it Radical Speed Month.

Reading the challenge, a whole wave of emotions washed over me. First: tiredness – I already had a new project lined up and some bugs I wanted to squash beforehand, and now I needed to pivot? That quickly turned to apprehension about what I could work on and who I could work with. But as I noodled over ideas, the negative emotions started dissipating and instead I started to feel excited, and freed.

I shared some ideas with my team, but Achievements on WordPress.com was clearly the best one, and quickly caught Copon’s attention. I’d found my project and my partner, and couldn’t wait to get started.

I landed on this project, because it sounded like it’d be both fun to work on, and also be fun for WordPress.com bloggers. One of the things I like best about WordPress.com, and perhaps flies under the radar a little bit, are the blogging communities. If we can encourage more people to build their community by posting, liking, and commenting on each other’s blogs, then even better.

As part of our initial brainstorming, we came up with some principles:

• Everything should be easily disabled, because while we think it’s fun, not everyone will.
• People should have control over their privacy.
• There should be more achievements for things within people’s control than without.
• Achievements should be fun and quirky. Like easter eggs.

Freed of the usual approvals and consultations, we were able to move quickly. We didn’t need to debate priorities and find time in the roadmap. We didn’t need to assemble a full cross-functional team or coordinate an A/B test. Just two responsible engineers, moving nimbly, coordinating with people as we deemed necessary.

Within the first week, we had revamped the back-end system that powered user anniversary and milestone notifications and had an early achievements page available in staging. Not long after that, staff were already starting their activity streaks and sharing feedback on achievements. Over the following weeks we added streak freezes, refined the UI, added “bazillions” of achievements and rolled out to all of WordPress.com (and then added a few more achievements for good measure).

I’ve enjoyed working on this, but my favourite part has been watching people discover it. People blogging about it before the official announcement went out. People realising how far and wide their word spreads, swapping screenshots of the achievements they’ve unlocked and being delighted at some of the odder achievements.

As a software engineer, the people we affect can be detached from us – behind screens miles away. There’s something deeply rewarding about being able to make people smile and be curious, and getting to see it happen.