WordPress.com

The Blueprint for Radical Speed How does a fully distributed tech giant with 1,400 employees rewrite its development playbook overnight? For years, Automattic—the powerhouse behind WordPress.com, Jetpack, and Tumblr—built software through structured, documented, asynchronous processes. But a month-long initiative called "Radical Speed Month" disrupted this status quo. The company paused its standard product roadmaps, grouped employees into tiny teams, and gave them 30 days to build and ship real-world software. Around 500 employees participated in the first cohort, producing 794 projects and proving that deep-seated product habits can change in weeks when organizational barriers vanish. Shifting Roles on the Fly During this fast-paced month, product designer Sanja Grbic participated in an intensive AI training program while tackling three distinct projects. Her journey kicked off with a board game session manager app, built in just two hours alongside another designer, an engineer, and a product lead. For Grbic, who had never shipped production-ready code, the project was less about the app itself and more about a major shift in team dynamics. Backed by an engineer who set up GitHub repositories and explained version control, the non-engineers committed code directly. This hands-on exercise highlighted a key lesson: as AI tools democratize development, engineers must transition from solo builders into educators and technical enablers. The Rise of the Design Engineer Empowered by her first success, Grbic spent the next two and a half weeks tackling a major issue within the WordPress ecosystem: design system tracking. Because the system is open-source and constantly changing, keeping humans and AI agents updated is a massive challenge. Grbic built a live design system status tracker that pulled data directly from Figma and Storybook. By writing the code herself using AI-assisted environments, she bypassed the usual back-and-forth negotiations of traditional designer-to-developer handovers. This marked her transition from a traditional designer to a hands-on design engineer who can push functional code directly to staging and production environments. From Zero to iOS App in Six Days With just one week remaining, Grbic paired with a fellow designer to build an iOS chat application for WooCommerce merchants. Working entirely in a Cloud Code directory to keep their collaborative ideas in a unified file system, they completed a fully functional proof of concept in only six days. The app included secure authentication, a custom widget that matched live site themes, and an autonomous AI agent capable of scanning storefront data to answer customer questions in real time. Rather than spending weeks refining visual pixels in Figma, they built the functional prototype first and used design tools afterward solely for minor styling tweaks. This rapid development loop proved that when cross-functional partners share tools, they unlock speed that traditional product management structures simply cannot match.