Nik McLaughlin is a Support Engineer and Product Manager at SkyVerge, where he leads the team behind 40+ WooCommerce extensions used by an estimated 200,000 stores. Nik has more than a decade of experience in WooCommerce ranging across merchant-side operations to product, support, and engineering roles. Hailing from Portland, Oregon, he’s fond of the quirky, personal, and exceptional businesses that the city fosters so well. At SkyVerge, he’s building the tools to empower merchants like them in the modern eCommerce landscape.
Q&A with Nik
Who or what helped you find your footing in WordPress, and how do you try to pay that forward today?
I had so many folks make space for me and invest in me while I was growing through the ranks at SkyVerge. I wrote my first lines of PHP code for that job application, and have since gone on to engineer, architect, and PM releases for large projects facing thousands of customers, and I owe so much of that to the generosity and investment of my teammates over the years. As a leader now, I work every day to bring that same generosity to the folks on my team, and I view my involvement in the WordPress community as an extension of that effort beyond the walls of our little brand.
What does the WordPress community get right that other tech communities don’t. What could we still do better?
The WordPress community does a great job of letting people bring their full selves to their professional lives, and valuing the relationships that come out of that. There’s a veneer of “cool” in other tech circles that WP people just see right through. Which isn’t to say that folks around here aren’t cool too! But that surface layer will only get you so far and there’s real value in the trust we build from deeper connections. At the same time, I think we could do better at some of that surface-level presentation stuff like Marketing and pricing. Brands and products built on open source should be seen as a premium on the market because of the opportunity and sustainability they create, which would better support the ideals of access and freedom.
What’s a form of contribution you think is undervalued, and why does it matter?
Explaining the project. I think this is the main activity of Contributor Day that gets overlooked, but just explaining to people what different things are being worked on can unlock so many new opportunities for them and for the project. It opens the door for them to move from being curious about something to actually using it, and then after using that thing for a while they’ll find some bug or want to see some new feature and now they have a pathway to move on to contributing to it because the benefit is more obvious to them. This is where new contributors come from and it starts with a conversation that builds connection.