I left my role as CTO at XWP in March 2026 to start Principal WP.
The short version: I’m working with enterprise WordPress engineering teams on a problem that’s been bugging me since I started using AI tools seriously. Every developer I know got faster. Individually, the productivity gains are real, but if you zoom out to the team level, or the organization, almost nothing changed.
That’s not my just my personal experience, DX surveyed over 135,000 developers across 400+ companies and found roughly 91% AI adoption but less than 10% organizational productivity improvement. That gap between what individual developers can do with AI and what their organizations actually capture from it is structural. It’s not a tooling problem. It’s a framework problem.
Moving from Individual AI usage to Organizational AI Infrastructure
We work embedded with enterprise WordPress teams helping them build the organizational AI infrastructure that turns individual tool usage into something that compounds across the team. When a developer catches an AI mistake during code review, that knowledge should reach every future developer and every future AI agent that touches that area. In most organizations, it doesn’t. The fix gets shipped and the learning evaporates.
The consulting engagement runs 6 to 12 weeks. We don’t install a platform or hand over a playbook. We workshop with the teams to build their own system, shaped to their codebase, their standards, and how their organization actually works. They own everything when we’re done.
The framework
I’ve written up the full thesis on the Principal WP framework page. The core of it is five prerequisites that have to be in place before organizational AI gains start compounding: Coordination, Context, Pipeline, Harness, and Compounding.
The short version of what they cover: how requirements need to change when AI agents are downstream consumers instead of human developers. How to encode domain knowledge as organizational infrastructure instead of leaving it in individual developers’ heads. How to structure what happens between a spec and a commit. How to run AI agents that review and audit output before it hits your senior engineers. And how to build learning loops so feature N is measurably better than feature 1, regardless of who’s doing the work. Read the framework here.
Background
Before starting Principal WP, I was CTO at XWP (a WordPress VIP agency), Director of Technology at WordPress.com VIP, and Technical Lead on Canada’s COVID Alert exposure notification app. I’ve spent over 15 years in enterprise WordPress, mostly at the intersection of engineering leadership and platform architecture.
Some of the people I’ve worked with over the years:
“He will go out of his way to understand ‘what problem we are trying to solve’ instead of simply deploying something that works. Quite often, we will get a suggestion we never thought of.” — David Parsons, Senior Software Engineer, USA TODAY Sports Media Group
“He has never provided advice that we have turned away, making him a critical member of the team on the whole.” — Mark Parolisi, Director of Engineering, MailOnline
“Always looking to provide a solution to the problem at hand without sacrificing performance, security, or the long-term maintainability of the code.” — Aaron Jorbin, WordPress Core Committer, Director of Editorial Technology, PMC
If any of this is the kind of problem you’re thinking about, the framework page is the best place to start. And if you want to talk, you can get in touch.