Author: Andrea Badgley

Reader, writer, gardener. Andrea grew up on the coast of Georgia and now lives with her husband and two children in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia.

Freelancers: The secret sauce to scalable support operations

Freelancers- The Secret Sauce to Scalable Support OperationsDownload Working with freelancers is a hands-on approach to outsourcing that offers you agency, flexibility, and the potential to make great hires from a pool of folks who have on-the-job-training at your company. Outsourcing adds elasticity to your support team: it helps you flex quickly with changing support … Continue reading Freelancers: The secret sauce to scalable support operations →

I’m a Happiness Engineer again!

Butterfly Mind

I’ve had a black Happiness Engineer T-shirt hanging in my closet the past two years. The Editorial team at Automattic sent it to me in a thank you package for working on a project with them in early 2014, when I was a blogger using WordPress.com, before I even knew Automattic existed (Automattic is the maker of WordPress.com). I thought the T-shirt was so cool, but I didn’t feel right wearing it because I wasn’t actually a Happiness Engineer. I didn’t even know what a Happiness Engineer was. So I looked it up. I followed the breadcrumbs from the care package to Automattic’s Work With Us page.

And my life totally changed.

Here was a company dedicated to democratizing publishing. Here was the company that had made it easy for me to share my writing with the world, without having to go through the gatekeeper of a publishing house…

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Forging a career path… through blogging

Butterfly Mind

As a writer and a power user of WordPress.com, landing a job with Automattic and supporting the WordPress.com blogging software was a dream come true. In addition to helping users learn how to publish their content on their own personal sites, I also got to spend my days writing. At the end of my 3.5-year tenure I had written more than 635,000 words on Automattic’s internal blogs.

As a customer support agent, I wrote internal documents on how to lean into customer frustration, reminded ourselves to under-promise and over-deliver, and recommended we say “Thank You” more than we say “I’m sorry.” As a team lead I wrote about how I approached performance reviews with my team, shared leadback survey methods and results, and wrote about how to advocate for team members through goal setting.

I wrote and wrote and wrote. All of it within our internal, private blogs.

One day…

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From worry lists to pipelines: 4 steps we used to design processes so we can scale

In the past 18 months since I joined Support Driven, we've moved from a dependency on one person's expertise to scalable, documented processes for producing Support Driven conferences. When I signed on in an operations role, we didn't have a plan laid out for operationalizing the conferences. Like so many things, we made it up … Continue reading From worry lists to pipelines: 4 steps we used to design processes so we can scale →