Leading Magento Enterprise builds in Magento's own consulting group

Challenge

Between 2009 and 2011 Magento Enterprise was new, and the merchants betting on it were large. The Expert Consulting Group (ECG) was Magento’s own consulting arm. It was a small group of engineers sent in when an Enterprise customer needed people who knew the platform from the inside. I was a member of the original group.

Easton-Bell Sports ran one of the largest Magento Enterprise deployments of its time. Longines, part of the Swatch Group, needed a Magento Enterprise store for a luxury watch brand. Both were built on a platform that was still maturing, with few established patterns to borrow.

Approach

On Easton-Bell Sports I led an ECG team of 11 engineers; on Longines, a team of 4. The method was the same in both. We agreed the architecture early and decided what belonged in configuration and what needed custom code. Every change was reviewed against the platform’s own conventions. The aim was to leave the customer’s team able to run the store without the consultants.

Alongside the projects I served on the S.W.A.T. unit, the small group Magento sent to urgent escalations at Enterprise customers. The job there was narrow. I had to find the cause quickly and leave a fix the merchant’s own engineers understood.

Result

ECG work taught me to read an unfamiliar Magento codebase fast and to tell platform problems from customization problems. Leading engineers on a customer’s code, I learned to weigh every fix against its cost to the business.

Long engagements such as Teabloom and MarketNation still follow the rule I learned there, which is to leave a team that can carry on without me.