Topic: Lightning Talk

  • Joonas Holm

    Joonas Holm

    Joonas Holm

    Joonas Holm works as a Customer Success Manager at Hion. In his day-to-day role, Joonas acts as a bridge builder and translator between clients and development teams. He believes that the best digital services and most successful projects are built on trust, clear communication, and a deep understanding of real client needs.

    Session

    Even the Best Code Can’t Save a Bad Customer Experience

    Lightning Talk

    11:15 – 11:30

    Complexity: Easy

    Intended Audience: Developers & Freelancers who want to communicate better with clients, set expectations, and avoid endless “lost in translation” ticket rounds.

    How can a technically flawless WordPress project still leave a client feeling uncertain and disappointed? The answer often lies outside the code editor: in communication, managing expectations, and human interaction.

    In this talk, Joonas Holm, Customer Success Manager at Hion, explores the daily life of acting as a “translator” between clients and developers. He’ll cover why developers shouldn’t just be ticket-resolvers in the background, and how involving developers in client understanding improves both customer experience and the dev team’s peace of mind.

    This talk offers practical insights on how to translate technical expertise into the client’s language — without having to write a single line of code yourself.

  • Henrik Björklund

    Henrik Björklund

    Henrik Björklund

    Henrik Björklund has worked with the web for over two decades, including 18+ years building WordPress systems for clients. He founded one of Finland’s first WordPress agencies and has contributed to the WordPress open-source project and community.

    Today, Henrik works independently across web development, technical strategy and product decisions, helping organizations build and improve digital services. He is particularly interested in pragmatic technology choices, maintainable web systems, and how AI is changing the way software is designed and built.

    Session

    Building WordPress Websites to Last a Decade

    Lightning Talk

    11:35 – 11:50

    Complexity: Medium

    Intended Audience: Developers

    A website should be able to change dramatically without requiring its content to be rebuilt along with it. In practice, however, content and presentation often become so intertwined that redesigning a site means rebuilding much of the system — and sometimes the content itself.

    This talk presents a practical architecture for building long-lived WordPress sites around structured, portable content. We’ll look at where core blocks, custom blocks, custom fields and post types fit; how much control editors should have over layout; and how to keep presentation decisions out of the content where possible.

    The goal is not to predict what WordPress will look like ten years from now. It is to build sites where the content can survive whatever comes next.

  • Niko Vittaniemi

    Niko Vittaniemi

    Niko Vittaniemi

    Hi, I’m Niko Vittaniemi, a WordPress and WooCommerce consultant, trainer, and all-around WordPress nerd from Finland.

    I run WP-opas, where I create practical WordPress and WooCommerce guides, and I’m the founder of WPWoofi, a Finnish WordPress community for professionals, business owners, and beginners.

    In my day-to-day work at Innovitale, I build, optimize, troubleshoot, and maintain WordPress and WooCommerce sites, with a particular focus on e-commerce and solving real-world problems for online merchants.

    Session

    I Built a Custom WooCommerce Dashboard for My Clients – Here’s Why

    Lightning Talk

    11:55 – 12:10

    Complexity: Medium

    Intended Audience: WordPress and WooCommerce developers, freelancers, agencies, and anyone who builds or maintains WooCommerce stores for clients.

    WooCommerce gives store owners a lot of tools and data – but not always in the easiest places to find them.

    In this lightning talk, I’ll show a custom WooCommerce dashboard I built for my maintenance clients and explain why I decided to build it. The goal was simple: give store owners one clear place for the things they actually need, from store management and sales data to maintenance information and getting support.

    I’ll share what ended up being useful, what I learned while building it, and how small improvements to the WordPress admin experience can make everyday life easier for both clients and the people maintaining their sites.

  • Jaakko Saarenketo

    Jaakko Saarenketo

    Jaakko Saarenketo

    I’ve been working in the software industry since 2009. I started with my own startup and then moved into more stable entrepreneurship. Since 2021, I’ve been working full-time in software companies, which eventually brought me to my current position at Knowit Experience.

    I’m more of an artist than an engineer, but there has always been a spark that drives me to solve problems, and it became clear that the easiest path to doing that was to dive headfirst into coding.

    Session

    Building Blocks for the Agentic WordPress Experience

    Lightning Talk

    15:10 – 15:25

    Complexity: Low

    Intended Audience: Developers

    Merge some sh*t, commit gitignore, add the MOT*******ING user profile, 14 mysterious stuff, ???? merge

    AI can generate code but passion generates reasons.

    From atomic coding patterns and tool opinions to career-changing events – strong emotions have always played a big part. And now, in the time of magic computers, they are more important than ever.

  • Marcel Tannich

    Marcel Tannich

    Marcel Tannich

    Marcel Tannich is a WordPress consultant, developer, Technical Support Team Lead, and a member of the WordPress.org Plugins Team. With more than 15 years of IT experience, he specializes in technical troubleshooting, debugging complex WordPress issues, and support engineering.

    His passion lies in technical education and tooling for support professionals. Through Project99, he shares practical knowledge on debugging, automation, and WordPress internals. He particularly enjoys helping support professionals develop a deeper understanding of the systems they work with every day and adapt their skills to a rapidly changing, AI-driven industry.

    Session

    The New Reality of WordPress Support

    Lightning Talk

    15:30 – 15:45

    Complexity: Medium

    Intended Audience: Support Engineers, Developers, Support Leads, and Decision Makers

    AI is increasingly handling the routine WordPress support questions. What remains are the complex, ambiguous issues that resist automation and don’t have an obvious answer.

    This talk explores what happens when AI, documentation, and even experienced developers reach their limits, and the unresolved problem lands on a support engineer’s desk. Through real-world examples, we’ll look at how modern support professionals investigate issues, form hypotheses, communicate uncertainty, and work toward solutions when there is no clear path forward.

    As AI changes the support landscape, the most valuable skills are no longer knowing the answer, but knowing how to find it.

  • Pirjo Sohlo

    Pirjo Sohlo

    Pirjo Sohlo

    Pirjo Sohlo is a Content Marketing Strategist at Valve One. After years in organizational communications, both as a consultant and in-house, she shifted her focus to content marketing and SEO. Over the past year, her work has expanded into Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), exploring how organizations can improve their online visibility through their own websites and their presence across the web.

    Session

    What can you actually control in AI search?

    Lightning Talk

    15:50 – 16:05

    Complexity: Medium

    Intended Audience: Marketing and communications specialists

    AI search is changing how people discover companies, products, and information online. As organizations try to improve their visibility in AI-generated answers, it’s easy to focus on the most obvious thing under their control: their own website.

    But AI visibility goes beyond website optimization. Can AI find you? Does it mention you? What does it say about you? Your own content is only part of the picture. Industry publications, reviews, discussions, third-party websites, and other sources across the web can all shape whether your brand appears in AI-generated answers – and how it is represented.

    Drawing on lessons from client work and current research, this talk explores what organizations can actually control, what they can influence, and what they need to observe. We’ll look at the role of your own website, your wider presence across the web, and the difference between having your content used as a source and having your brand actually show up in the answer.

    The goal is not another GEO checklist, but a practical framework for understanding what you can do to improve your visibility in an increasingly AI-driven search landscape.