I must have attended roughly 10+ sessions over the two days in Basel, and to be honest, my focus as a CRM nerd gravitates toward the business side of WordPress. While the technical sessions were impressive (Ryan Welcher is a legend), I found myself drawn to conversations about customer relationships, business models, and strategic positioning—areas where
“CRM is a mindset”
becomes essential for understanding WordPress’s evolution.
Before diving into my analysis, I want to mention two sessions that were emotional in their own ways. The first was WordPress without Borders — The Fight for Digital Freedom by Noel Tock. The experiences he shared from the front line in Ukraine put everything we do in tech into perspective and made everyone more reflective.
In quite the contrast, there was the session by Marieke van de Rakt, Jono Alderson, and Amber Hinds where they live-critiqued three websites—super insightful and genuinely entertaining to watch (Schadenfreude is real, sorry). They highlighted crucial technical details like excluding staging sites from search engine indexing (something many agencies miss) and demonstrated how to prepare websites for the European Accessibility Act (EAA) coming into effect on June 28, 2025—practical insights with immediate legal and SEO implications.
But three sessions stood out for their strategic implications, revealing patterns that only became fully clear after hearing the leadership perspective during the fireside chat. A dedicated blog coming soon – Follow on X to be the fist to know.
Session 1: Building Support as Core of Product
Anna Hurko – Crocoblock
Key Insight: Customer-centric businesses should let support lead the strategy
Anna Hurko’s journey from Senior Technical Support Specialist to CEO at Crocoblock isn’t just an inspiring career story—it’s a masterclass in understanding that customer support is fundamentally a CRM function. Her presentation challenged the traditional support hierarchy with three rule-breaking principles:
🔄 Support = Customers (not a cost center)
🎯 No tiers = Everyone gives top-level support
👥 Whole team ownership = Everyone is part of the support team
What struck me wasn’t just the philosophy but the implementation. Crocoblock involves QAs, developers, project managers, product managers, community managers, copywriters, and video content creators in support. This isn’t about efficiency—it’s about relationship intelligence.
From a CRM perspective, this approach creates unprecedented customer data flow throughout the organization. When your entire team interacts with customers across live chat, tickets, Zoom calls, GitHub issues, refunds, interviews, community platforms, and WordCamps, you’re not just providing support—you’re building a comprehensive customer relationship ecosystem.
The audience questions revealed a common pain point: agencies struggling to scale personalized service. Anna’s model suggests the solution isn’t automation—it’s systematic human engagement.
Let’s stop calling it “Support” and start recognizing it as what it really is: distributed customer relationship management, or better CRM is a Mindset.
Session 2: WaaS for Agencies: Opportunities, Challenges & Pricing
Sandra Kurze – GREYD
Key Insight: Scale through systems thinking, not just resources
Sandra Kurze presented Website as a Service (WaaS) as more than recurring revenue—it’s a fundamental business model shift toward standardization, scalability, and automation. But what initially appeared to be an agency-focused session revealed something much larger.
The Reality Check: Traditional agency scaling means hiring more people for each project. WaaS means building systems that handle hundreds or thousands of sites with the same core team.
The technical demonstrations showed how GREYD handles systems of hundreds of connected sites, but the real insight came through examples:
- Mrs. Sporty franchise: 250 locations across Europe
- Enterprise partner programs: Partners pay “marketing fees” for branded landing pages
- Centralized control: Global updates with local customization capabilities
The community reaction was telling. Questions focused heavily on pricing models and client retention, but missed the strategic implication: WaaS isn’t about selling websites—it’s about selling business systems.
With a CRM mindset, WaaS represents a shift from project-based transactions to relationship-based subscriptions. The customer data, behavioral patterns, and business intelligence generated across these connected systems create competitive advantages that traditional one-off web projects simply cannot match.
Sandra’s mention of small agencies handling thousand-site projects through scalable systems wasn’t just about operational efficiency—it was about data scale and relationship depth that rivals enterprise platforms.
Session 3: What We Learned Building Site Kit
Maria Moeva – Google
Key Insight: Organize around customer questions, not internal capabilities
Maria Moeva’s session on Google’s Site Kit plugin was surprisingly under-attended, which was unfortunate because it contained some of the most actionable strategic insights of the conference. Her 15-year journey at Google—from classical Japanese literature through beekeeping to product management—brought a unique perspective to making complex tools accessible.
The Three Lessons from Site Kit:
- Make complex tools accessible → Bridge the gap between power and usability
- Translate data into action → Answer customer questions, don’t just show data
- Show the whole story → Connect visitor behavior to business outcomes
The most significant insight was organizational: Site Kit’s evolution from product-organized to question-organized dashboards. Instead of “Analytics section, Search Console section,” they pivoted to answering customer questions:
- “Am I getting traffic?”
- “Is my content performing well?”
- “Is my site fast?”
- “Am I making money?”
This represents a fundamental shift from tool-centric to customer-centric thinking. CRM is a mindset means organizing around customer needs, not internal capabilities. Site Kit’s personalization feature—asking “What’s the purpose of your site?” and curating metrics accordingly—demonstrates how proper customer segmentation drives product decisions.
Forward-looking implications: If Google is moving their WordPress integration toward question-based, personalized experiences, agencies and enterprises need to think beyond feature sets toward customer outcome optimization.
(🐝 And yes, I would have loved to hear more about the beekeeping—managing 50,000-60,000 bees definitely provides unique perspectives on systems thinking!)
The Pattern Recognition
Three different rooms, three different topics, but one consistent message emerging about WordPress’s evolution: the business model is shifting from transactions to relationships.
Anna’s support-as-product approach, Sandra’s WaaS systems thinking, and Maria’s customer-centric tool design all point toward the same strategic direction. WordPress isn’t just enabling websites—it’s becoming the infrastructure for customer relationship platforms.
🔄 The Recurring Theme: Every session emphasized systematic customer engagement over one-off deliverables.
❓ The Missing Conversation: Nobody explicitly discussed how these approaches generate competitive customer intelligence, but that’s exactly what they do.
🎯 The Competitive Response: While other platforms focus on features, WordPress is positioning around relationships and business outcomes.
This pattern became crystal clear when I later analyzed Matt and Mary’s fireside chat, where strategic directions that weren’t publicly announced but were hinted at revealed the full scope of WordPress’s business evolution.
The strategic direction hinted at in these sessions was confirmed—and expanded upon—during the fireside chat. But Matt and Mary’s conversation revealed implementation timelines and business implications that most attendees completely missed. Those insights explain exactly why the energy in that packed main hall might have felt different from previous WordCamps.
Coming soon: Part 3 will dissect the Matt Mullenweg and Mary Hubbart fireside chat, revealing the strategic decisions shaping WordPress’s future that weren’t in the official announcements.
