Your agency doesn’t need all the answers. It needs access to the people who do.

A performance issue can turn out to be infrastructure. A checkout problem can involve payments, front-end performance and third-party integrations. A security concern can require expertise spanning the application, hosting environment and several technology providers. A seemingly straightforward roadmap decision can have implications across systems that are owned by different teams and different businesses.

That reality was particularly visible at eCommerce Expo this year.

We spent two days exhibiting as part of the Hyvä × Hypernode Pavilion, surrounded by agencies and technology specialists with different areas of expertise. Inevitably, plenty of conversations started in one place and ended somewhere completely different.

And that, for us, is the point.

Commerce is a team sport

There is a lot of pressure on agencies to position themselves as having the answer to everything. We don’t think that’s particularly realistic. More importantly, we don’t think it’s necessarily useful to merchants.

The modern commerce stack is simply too broad. Even within the Adobe Commerce and Magento ecosystem that GENE specialises in, there are deep areas of expertise spanning infrastructure, security, search, payments, integrations, data, performance, front-end technology and countless other disciplines.

GENE has broad and significant expertise within our own team, but part of our job is recognising where specialist knowledge outside it will get a merchant to a better answer.

An agency that believes it needs to own every part of the solution has an incentive to keep everything inside its own walls. An agency focused on solving the business problem has a different question:

Who needs to be in the room to get this right?

Our approach to client work already reflects that. We’ve previously described radical collaboration as the ability to scale multidisciplinary teams and bring additional expertise into significant transformation work without disrupting the people responsible for the day-to-day platform, but radical collaboration goes further than resourcing a project.

It means being comfortable with the fact that sometimes somebody else knows more than you do.

A good network is part of an agency’s expertise

We’ve deliberately spent years building relationships across the Magento and Adobe Commerce ecosystem.

That includes platform, hosting and infrastructure specialists; payment providers; security experts; search and merchandising technology; PIM and ERP providers; email and CRM platforms; and the wider network of people who have spent years working on difficult commerce problems.

Those relationships aren't simply logos for a partner page. Our partner ecosystem spans areas including payments, search and merchandising, ERP integrations, security, PIM and customer engagement technology.

The important part is what happens when those relationships are put to work.

If we’re investigating a problem and believe somebody at Hypernode can add something to the conversation, we can bring them in. If there’s a question better answered by Hyvä, a payment provider or another specialist, we can go directly to people who understand that technology in depth.

Sometimes the most useful thing your agency can say is: “We know who we need to speak to.”

That isn’t an admission of weakness. In a complicated technology ecosystem, it’s good judgement, and for the merchant, it can remove an enormous amount of friction.

Instead of becoming the intermediary between several suppliers - raising one ticket, relaying the response to another provider, taking that answer back to the agency and trying to establish who actually owns the problem - you have a partner prepared to help connect the dots.

That’s particularly important when something goes wrong. Our approach to incident management, for example, is explicitly built around coordinating the relevant stakeholders across the commerce stack rather than treating the boundary of Adobe Commerce as the boundary of our responsibility.

The objective isn’t to own every answer. It’s to get to the right answer faster.

What eCommerce Expo made visible

That’s why being part of the Hyvä × Hypernode Pavilion felt like a good physical representation of something we believe quite strongly.

Put people with complementary expertise in the same space and conversations become easier.

Our team's notes from the two days are full of conversations spanning merchants, agencies, integrations, hosting, technology providers and existing partners, often crossing several of those categories at once.

The useful conversations at an event like Expo aren't always a merchant walking onto an agency stand with a perfectly formed brief for a piece of development. They're often much messier than that.

Someone is considering a change to their infrastructure. Someone else is looking at a new front end. A business is trying to work out whether its current technology can support where it wants to go next. A technology provider knows a merchant facing a problem that isn't really theirs to solve. An agency recognises that another specialist has knowledge that would materially improve the solution.

Connections get made, information moves, problems become clearer.

That is an ecosystem doing what an ecosystem is supposed to do.

Competition and collaboration aren't opposites

Of course, there were other agencies at eCommerce Expo. Some of them compete with GENE. We don't think pretending otherwise makes collaboration more credible.

There will be pitches where we're sitting on opposite sides of the table. There will be merchants we'd both like to work with. We will disagree about technology, strategy and the best way to solve particular problems. but competition doesn't mean expertise has to exist in isolation.

The Magento community has always been unusually good at this. Agencies, developers, merchants and technology companies have historically shared knowledge, challenged one another and solved problems collectively, even while operating competing businesses.

There is commercial value in protecting genuine intellectual property. There is also a point at which being excessively territorial makes the entire ecosystem weaker.

For merchants, that distinction matters enormously. You don't benefit from your suppliers refusing to talk to one another. You benefit when the right people are prepared to sit around the same table and solve the problem.

From Expo to MageCamp

In a couple of weeks, we're taking that idea considerably further.

On 14 October, MageCamp returns to Manchester.

GENE is one of five agencies working together to bring it back.

That's worth dwelling on for a moment.

Five businesses that could quite reasonably look at one another primarily as competitors have instead chosen to organise an event together for the wider Magento community.

The same principle extends beyond the organisers.

MageCamp will bring agencies together with merchants, developers and technology specialists who are prepared to talk openly about what they’ve learned: what's working, what isn't, where commerce is changing and what businesses operating on Magento and Adobe Commerce are actually dealing with.

Not five versions of the same sales pitch, but different perspectives in the same room, because collaborative conversations hold so much more value when it isn't limited to the people who already agree with you.

Your agency’s network is part of what you’re buying

When businesses assess an eCommerce agency, the obvious questions tend to focus on the agency itself.

How experienced is the team? What have they delivered before? Do they understand our platform? Can they handle our complexity? Do they understand our business?

Those are important questions, but there are others worth asking.

Who do they know?
Who trusts them?
Who will pick up the phone when they call?
And when the best answer sits outside their own organisation, are they secure enough to bring that person into the room?

The strongest agency relationship shouldn't make your world smaller. It should give you access to a much bigger pool of expertise than you could realistically assemble yourself.

No agency can know everything, and in modern commerce, pretending otherwise is far less valuable than knowing exactly who to call.