This is Russell with Adobe, evaluating the team and the project when moving to Adobe Commerce. Let’s start with evaluating the team and some elements you should consider. The team should consist of several roles, and they can be one individual per role, but it’s not uncommon for one person to assume multiple roles. A few examples of some roles would be a project manager, QA, testing, developers, business stakeholders, architects, maybe some business systems analysts. As far as technical roles, staying on the backend side of things, you’ll need to evaluate the people who are filling these responsibilities and ensure that their strengths along with your project goals are a good match. If your team has a strong background with JavaScript and working with the integrations for your backend systems, then your project is in a good starting point to leverage Adobe Commerce and App Builder. However, if their strengths are in Java, PHP, Go, some other language, then it might be worth considering using an Adobe Partner or perhaps Adobe Consulting Services for building out your App Builder portion of your project. As far as the front end goes, if your team has a background with headless implementations, it’s going to be rather easy for you to get started. You can choose the front end experience as you wish, but just realize that Adobe has edge delivery services and that can give you a faster time to launch with amazing performance and Lighthouse scores. Edge delivery services offers document-based authoring so changes can be made without needing a developer. Now let’s go on to some other areas that might be overlooked. Let’s start with evaluating your existing in-process PHP modules and other third-party extensions. Using pre-built App Builder modules or recreating this functionality using App Builder is a smart idea. The goal is to remove as much in-process PHP custom code as you can or third-party PHP modules. The upgrade of the core application can be tricky to estimate for the level of effort, so we often skimp on the end-to-end testing estimates and the QA cycles needed. Take time to evaluate all aspects of your project and see if there’s anything that can be changed or removed to reduce during this phase. It’s more about thinking about things as it affects the core application rather than the task of upgrading it. Things like removing excess product attributes, customer groups, coupons, things like unused categories, all will help. I’d also recommend looking at some custom database tables that you might have. Anything that’s only used for logging or has just unused data, by excluding them, it can reduce the overall time it takes for the data synchronization and the migrations Remember, it’s not just the core application that needs to be upgraded. You need to recognize elements that are going to affect your level of effort. So hopefully your tech team will have some insights into those areas that are going to be troublesome and that might affect the overall level of effort for your project. These things should start as soon as possible, and I would recommend that you have frequent check-ins on their statuses to make sure that they are on track for the duration of the project. When migrating an existing Magento open source or Adobe Commerce project, check on the end of life for your PHP, MySQL, Redis and others. Taking time to upgrade them now is going to save you some headaches later. Adobe Commerce also integrates with other Adobe solutions. For example, AJO. This can allow for abandoned cart emails in Adobe’s Journey Optimizer using commerce data. You can also do things like activate personalization using audiences from Adobe’s real-time CDP. By using Adobe Commerce catalog services and Live Search, you gain AI tools to provide product recommendations. We also have payment services, we offer B2B functionality and more. You can learn more about these by visiting Experience League. And when you’re on Experience League, you’re going to find developer docs, webinars, tutorials and videos. I hope you continue to use Experience League for your learning paths on Adobe Commerce and other Adobe solutions and make your journey successful and productive.
