From Product Founder to Scaling CX: Launching Roots & Fruit to Democratize Growth for WordPress Products

Announcing Roots & Fruit, my fractional Chief Growth Officer practice for WordPress product teams who want growth to feel intentional instead of reactive.

I’ve been on a journey to find my next right thing. After a lot of listening and interviewing, I landed on something simple: working alongside teams who care deeply about the products they’re building and want growth to work as well as their product does.

Roots & Fruit exists to bring SaaS-style growth for WordPress into teams that already have solid products but struggle to turn effort into consistent outcomes. That means embedding with teams as a fractional CGO and helping connect product decisions, customer insight, and growth execution across onboarding, retention, and positioning.

Since leaving StellarWP and GiveWP, I’ve been talking with as many product founders, developers, marketers, and support leads as I could. What an amazing, thoughtful, creative community the WordPress product community is.

Across all those chats, some patterns emerged. People kept saying some version of the same thing: I love building product, but I don’t know how to get the word out and attract users and sales. Not as a complaint, but as an honest struggle. The work of building felt intuitive; the work of growing felt evasive and elusive.

It reminded me of so many similar struggles I had with my team at GiveWP. And so many leadership meetings at StellarWP. The struggle is real, and we’ve all felt it.

I’ve done the work of growth at GiveWP and across the StellarWP brands. Hearing these struggles again and again, I couldn’t shake the same question: what if I could tackle these problems alongside the teams feeling them? Not as an outside advisor, and not by handing over another playbook, but by working inside the real constraints product teams live with every day.

Growth Was Always Part of the Job

For most of my career, growth wasn’t a role I stepped into. It was a responsibility I carried as a founder and operator. When you’re building and running products, growth shows up whether you plan for it or not. It appears in support queues, onboarding friction, refund reasons, and the space between what you think you’ve built and how customers actually experience it.

At GiveWP, growth was shaped by how clearly we connected features to real fundraising workflows, how we handled pricing and packaging, and how seriously we treated post-purchase communication. After the acquisition, those same dynamics played out at StellarWP at a larger scale. Growth surfaced in leadership conversations about positioning, renewals, and support capacity. None of this lived neatly in a growth roadmap, but all of it directly affected revenue and retention.

What became clear over time is that growth rarely fails because teams are careless or inexperienced. It breaks down because the work is fragmented.

I’ve experienced that first hand. In one case, the fix wasn’t better campaigns or faster shipping. It was restructuring how documentation, support, and product feedback flowed together, so decisions upstream reduced pressure downstream.

That’s the pattern I couldn’t unsee. The work that mattered most lived between disciplines, not inside them. And it required leadership that could move across those boundaries without turning growth into a side project or a grab bag of tactics.

The Turning Point: Owning the System, Not the Channel

Over time, I’ve come to believe that product roadmap clarity and purpose matters more than velocity, and that most growth problems show up first in onboarding, support, and renewals.

Once I saw growth as a systems problem, a lot of things snapped into focus. The question stopped being which channel to optimize or which experiment to run next. It became about ownership. Who is responsible for how product decisions, customer insight, and marketing effort reinforce each other over time?

In healthy teams, growth doesn’t live in a dashboard. It lives in trade-offs. Do we ship this feature now, or tighten onboarding first? Do we push this campaign, or fix the confusion support keeps seeing? Do we optimize for short-term conversion, or long-term retention? These are growth decisions, even when they aren’t labeled that way.

I’ve made those calls before. At one company, that meant delaying feature work to clean up onboarding and post-purchase communication first, because support volume and refunds were telling us the system wasn’t ready to scale yet.

Why Fractional Was the Right Shape

I spent a lot of time thinking about how this kind of work actually fits into real teams. Full-time executive hires don’t always make sense. Agencies often sit too far outside the work. Advisory roles tend to stop at recommendations.

Fractional leadership, when done well, sits in a different place. It allows for shared ownership without forcing a premature hire. It creates space for strategy and execution to live together. Most importantly, it respects that growth work has to be grounded in how teams already build, ship, and support their products.

That model wasn’t an abstract idea for me. It was the only shape that matched the reality I’d lived for years.

Introducing Roots & Fruit

Roots & Fruit is the result of that realization.

It’s my way of working alongside WordPress product teams to make growth more understandable, more accessible, and more connected to the work they already care about. The focus is not on quick wins or isolated tactics. It’s on helping teams identify meaningful growth levers and act on them with clarity and confidence.

This work pulls from product, CX, marketing, and operations because that’s where growth actually happens. It’s hands-on, collaborative, and grounded in real constraints.

What Working Together Looks Like

Roots & Fruit is for WordPress product teams who care about what they’re building and want growth to feel clearer, steadier, and less mysterious. You might have a strong product and a capable team, but the results are uneven. Launches do not compound. Support keeps surfacing the same friction. Marketing is busy, but it’s not translating into retention.

Working together is simple: I embed with your team, learn how the product actually gets built and supported, and help you connect the decisions that usually get made in separate rooms. We pick a small set of levers worth pulling right now, then we ship. That could mean tightening onboarding, clarifying positioning, fixing renewal drop-offs, or setting up a healthier way to turn customer signals into product and marketing moves.

This is a good fit if you want someone who will own outcomes with you, not hand you a deck of suggestions. If you value clarity, shared ownership, and sustainable momentum, we’ll work well together.

If that’s you, let’s connect!