Aurélien GOUTAL, Adobe Commerce CTO at DATASOLUTION
#AdobeCommerce #CMS #eCommerce #nomination
Twelve years after discovering the Magento solution, Aurélien GOUTAL took over the technical management of the Adobe Commerce division within DATASOLUTION.
DATASOLUTION is currently a Silver partner of Adobe Commerce, with no less than 80 employees, 26 of whom are certified, an award-winning project and many great references such as PAUL, la Monnaie de Paris, Christofle, Optic 2000, Dinh Van, Dickson Constant, SOL’S, Mondial Tissus, Dalloz, Clauger, LIDL Vins or RIU Paris.
What does a CTO do?
The purpose of the Adobe Technical Directorate is multiple and will evolve over time and projects.
Currently, the outlines are as follows:
- Build a strong team around the Magento 2 technology: source, recruit, on-board and support developers to help them reach their career goals
- Increase the skills of the technical teams and ensure that the DATASOLUTION group maintains its Adobe Commerce know-how
- To have a perfect knowledge of the teams: identification of the soft & hard skills as well as the skills of each person in order to optimise the staffing choices with the aim of satisfying the teams, limiting turnover and better serving our clients.
I am not alone in working on the Adobe technical direction, I surround myself with people who wish to contribute to it and position themselves as local relays in one of the 14 DATASOLUTION agencies.
What are the missions of a Technical Director?
The Adobe Commerce know-how of DATASOLUTION is entirely based on our employees.
My main tasks as CTO are to :
- Maintain a DATASOLUTION knowledge base dedicated to Adobe Commerce technology
- Detect the training needs of employees and organise internal or external training
- Maintain and share methodologies and/or guidelines: coding standards, typographic rules, backend, frontend, use of composers, backend > frontend handover (brief), commits and pull requests, performance and security…
- Organise workshops on various topics: headless, zero downtime, hyva/breezefront, cache management (redis/varnish/fastly), dev best practices, composer, docker, MEP/agile flow process, load estimation…
- Share Snippets, Gists, Gotchas or other useful tools in the toolbox of each developer: debug toolbar, magento2 plugin for phpStorm, n98-magerun2, newrelic, blackfire, mail-tester…
But also… Communicate :
Communication is an essential basis for building solid expertise over time. This involves 2 types of communication:
Internal communication:
- Implementation of a monthly “DT News Adobe Commerce” for all DATASOLUTION employees working with Adobe Commerce, in French
- News, community and monitoring: sharing of best practices, tips & tricks, interesting blog posts, snippets/gists, feeding the internal knowledge base
- New Magento 2 extension releases made in DATASOLUTION and pull requests (improvements) processed: keep our teams informed of the new internal releases available for all projects
- Community module audits: update on new modules used and audited for our projects so that we don’t have to audit the same module twice and rely on feedback from our colleagues
External/customer communication:
- Latest Adobe Commerce updates, reminder of the lifecycle
- Events around the solution (pitchfest, mageconf, trade shows, conferences, webinars…)
- Our nuggets of the month: specific communication on 2 or 3 DATASOLUTION extensions or community “must-haves
- Sharing of key indicators: customer satisfaction, number of deployments in the month, number of new lines of code produced…
And “process”!
In particular, recurring or critical operations in order to set a framework for teams and clients to work more serenely: homogeneous docker work environments, MEP build checklist, versioning and CI/CD, escalation processes, community module audits, frontend or backend web performance audits, etc.
Finally, centralization!
Projects, with an exhaustive and precise follow-up of the different Magento 2/Adobe Commerce projects in progress, allowing us to have an overview of the different projects we are working on, bringing a sharing of knowledge and important information for each project: who is the project manager, who is the lead developer, the host, QA in place, SonarQube (for code quality analysis), CI/CD, Magento version, last patch installed, production url, SWAT test score (Commerce Cloud), WebPerf score, Security Scan tool score, etc…
And Magento 2 technical teams: Front/back or fullstack, agency, specialities (Flux, PWA/JS, advanced caching…), project type appetence (build, TMA, PWA, Js, Hyva…), Adobe certifications obtained… The aim is to get to know each other better in order to make the best planning and team choices to best satisfy the projects and our clients, while taking into account the specialities and appetences of each.
Some developers prefer to work full time on a BUILD for several months in a row, while others prefer to “switch” from one project to another by working on several accounts in TMA… All tastes are catered for at DATASOLUTION!
It’s my job to satisfy everyone, both our clients and our employees.
Learn more about our Adobe Commerce CTO, Aurélien GOUTAL
16 years after co-founding the SOON Paris agency as Technical Director and then Consulting Director, Aurélien GOUTAL joins DATASOLUTION in 2021.
Magento Certified Developer since 2013 and committed to your side, I advise our customers from the pre-sales phase to the project committees, during the operation phase, in order to ensure the smooth running of the projects of redesign or creation of digital commerce platform.
My objectives are multiple:
Validate the adequacy of the chosen technology with your needs and advise the business teams
To frame the specific needs and ensure a robust overall design
Support internal and client teams by transferring expertise
My various experiences as a developer, lead developer, technical project manager and then Technical Director have enabled me to acquire a 360° vision of the design and implementation of omnichannel digital platform projects in order to provide optimal advice to prospects and client accounts.
The partnership with Adobe Commerce boosts our creativity and productivity. This comprehensive eCommerce solution grows with your business, regardless of size or industry. Create hybrid B2C and B2B multichannel commerce experiences from a single platform. From catalogue to payment to order processing, its future-proof technology allows you to benefit from a flexible, scalable and extensible commerce platform.
