Building a team starts with hiring the uber-experienced folks who have the ability to mentor. Nothing in this primer matters as much as that single decision.
Why experience compounds
Adobe Commerce is a deep platform. Every layer — the Zend framework, the EAV data model, the plugin system, the caching architecture, the ecosystem of extensions, the integration patterns — has its own history, conventions, and gotchas. A developer who has shipped five Commerce projects has internalized those layers in a way no amount of documentation can replace.
Experience compounds in two directions. The senior engineer ships their own work faster and with fewer mistakes. And they accelerate everyone around them — through code reviews, mentorship, and the everyday small corrections that prevent junior developers from learning bad habits.
Hiring for mentorship
Not every senior engineer can mentor. Some are individual contributors first and want to stay that way. Others get satisfaction from growing the people around them. The best Commerce teams are built around the second kind — people who can ship and teach.
When hiring, ask not just about the projects someone has built, but about the people they’ve grown. “Who have you mentored?” is a better question than “What have you built?” if you’re hiring for a senior role on a growing team.
The cost of not having experience
Junior-only Commerce teams will ship — eventually — but they will rediscover every wheel that has already been invented in the ecosystem. They will design themselves into corners that the experienced engineer would have seen coming. They will build custom solutions where third-party extensions exist, and try to use third-party extensions where custom is the only sensible answer.
All of that is recoverable, but the cost of recovery is usually higher than the cost of hiring experienced people in the first place.
Adapted from the Adobe Commerce Primer, slide 44. Last reviewed May 2026.