Beyond the ticket: what a Happiness Engineer does with two hours a day

Before starting at Automattic I wondered what the Happiness Engineer role involved outside of direct support work. Happiness Engineers (HEs) are customer support agents who help users with WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, and other Automattic products and services. HEs spend six hours of their day on direct support in chat or answering emails, and two hours on what we call citizenship time. This post is a peek inside the other work we do in our citizenship time, when we aren’t answering WooCommerce support tickets and chats.

Learning

Outside direct support, Happiness Engineers spend time learning, testing tools, and improving how they work. That might mean exploring a product feature, experimenting with AI-assisted research, or refining a process that keeps causing friction.

Questions and patterns from customer conversations help guide that work, and what they learn feeds back into support through clearer documentation, shared knowledge, and better ways of investigating problems.

Things are constantly changing, so we need to keep up with the latest developments. A big part of this is taking time on a daily basis to read P2 posts. P2 posts are WordPress blog posts for team updates, project proposals, decision logs, documentation, retrospectives, and open discussions. Some of us have set up our AI agents to summarize the P2 posts we subscribe to into a list in our personal Slack channel.

Guilds and projects

A guild is a collection of Happiness Engineers working together to tackle or improve a specific area of support. It typically involves ongoing work. A project also focuses on improving a particular area of support, but it usually has a set timeline and end date.

Here are some areas that have a guild or a project:

• Accounts and privacy: This guild handles the most sensitive requests we get about user accounts and personal data. Members help people get back into accounts they’ve lost access to and re-secure accounts that have been hacked.
• Documentation: This guild writes, reviews and maintains our support guides, both the public ones customers read and the internal ones Happiness Engineers use. A Happiness Engineer can help a few dozen people a day. A clear guide can help thousands.
• Domains: When a domain problem goes beyond the basics, other Happiness Engineers bring it to this guild. One common case is a customer who accidentally cancels a domain their business depends on. The guild works to restore it before it’s lost for good.
• Payments: This guild handles billing problems such as failed purchases, refunds and payment methods. Members also report recurring billing bugs to the developers who can fix them.
• Product ambassadors: They develop deep expertise in a product’s features, architecture, integrations, and technical limitations. They troubleshoot implementation questions, turn customer needs into practical use cases, and share community technical feedback with product and engineering teams. Before a launch, they learn about new features early so support is ready on day one.
• Quality feedback: This guild reviews customer conversations, especially ones where the customer left a low satisfaction rating. Members look at what went wrong and follow up with the customer when it makes sense.
• Queue management and triage: Members of this guild sort incoming support requests so each one reaches the right person quickly. They merge duplicate tickets and pick out urgent issues so those get handled first.
• Scheduling: We’re a fully distributed team spread across time zones, and people choose their own working hours. The scheduling guild makes sure enough Happiness Engineers are available to help customers at every hour of the day, every day of the week.

Citizenship time is where the role goes beyond answering tickets. It lets us learn, improve our tools and processes, and shape the products we support. Every guide we write, bug we report, and pattern we flag helps far more customers than any single reply could. It’s one of the things I enjoy most about being a Happiness Engineer.

If you work in support, how do you make room for work like this? I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments.