| | | |

“Taylor excels at problem solving with systems and a plan.”

“I hired Taylor, and I thought I was a hard worker. I had no idea someone could be so dedicated and pay attention to so many details and have so much ownership over their work as Taylor has and does.

Taylor excels at problem solving with systems and a plan. That applied to marketing, customer feedback, internal crisis management and PR, and eventually also leading product roadmaps with vision towards longterm sustainability.

I honestly think Taylor can do any job you give her. She’s an A-player. She manages people into better performers by being one herself. She’s the talent you’re looking for.”

Matt Cromwell
Sr. Director of Customer Experience @ LiquidWeb, Cloud One Digital
on LinkedIn

Reviewer Meta Data

relationship: direct_supervisor → leadership_peer+
length: 8_years
taylor_versions: vGiveWP_all → vStellarWP_ProdMarkDir → vLearnDash_ProOwn
focus: distr_leadership; customer_voice; team-building; crisis-communication_framework; wp-repo_readme_framework
 Learn more about this relationship.

This section describes how I know the reviewer, how long we’ve worked together, and what version(s) of my career they’ve intersected with — the contextual release notes of our collaboration.

Relationship:
Matt hired me in 2018 and became the first person to show me how leadership and empathy could coexist in a product-driven environment. He taught me how to navigate the WordPress open-source community and the chaos of startup life at GiveWP, where “content writer” was a title that barely scratched the surface of what I actually did — marketing strategy, content management, user testing, product feedback, market research, and feature ideation.

Matt and I co-developed many of the early marketing systems that helped GiveWP grow from a small plugin (active on 60K websites) into a flagship product (active on 130K+ websites). Through the Liquid Web acquisition and the formation of StellarWP, he ensured our team stayed intact and supported. Not only that, he ensured we thrived in the new organization until the end of our time there.

Length:
Eight years, spanning multiple brands, leadership levels, and two major career transitions.

Taylor Versions:
Our collaboration began when Matt hired me as a Content Writer at GiveWP. Over the years, he guided me through multiple promotions and eventually passed me along to new leaders as my scope expanded across StellarWP. Later, as LearnDash Product Owner, I worked with Matt again during our team-rebuilding phase — ensuring customer priorities were reflected in the roadmap (and debugging more issues than either of us care to count).

Our work together touched nearly every layer of product evolution — from messaging to systems leadership.

  • distr_leadership → Matt modeled distributed leadership through trust and transparency, guiding me through my first months as a (remote team) people manager — including performance improvements and team mentorship.
  • customer_voice → He taught me how to champion the customer as a constant stakeholder — a principle that shaped every roadmap and release I’ve managed since.
  • team-building → Matt instilled the value of intentional team culture. Team Give’s success was never accidental; it was engineered around working in public, communication, trust, and accountability.
  • crisis-communication_framework → My first major test came during a critical WordPress plugin vulnerability. Matt coached me through the process, and those lessons became the foundation of the crisis-communication framework I later formalized and handed down to Camber Clemence.
  • wp-repo_readme_framework → Matt introduced me to the mechanics of WordPress.org’s plugin repository — where the README.txt file doubles as a product landing page. Combining his product insight with my SEO and writing background, I developed a reusable README framework optimized for visibility, compliance, and conversion — a pattern later used across multiple StellarWP brands.