Suzanna Capone, Director of Product Operations
When Your Client Forgets You're a Contractor (In a Good Way!)
You know you've built something special when your client forgets you're not actually on their payroll. It happened to me recently - I was in a client meeting about some tricky support work outside our usual territory. The conversation turned to finding contractors to help, and their engineering manager spoke up about being careful with mission critical work. Then, without missing a beat, they added "Not everyone operates like Commerce Architects - they're just part of the team."
I couldn't help but smile. Here they were, talking about the risks of working with contractors... while completely forgetting they were saying this to, well, a contractor. It's exactly what we tell clients when we start working together: "You'll probably forget we're not part of your team." Turns out, we mean it literally.
So why is that? How do we go from "those external consultants" to "just part of the team"?
Context is Everything (And We're a Bit Obsessed With It)
We're kind of context nerds, if we're being honest. Sure, we get excited about your tech stack, but we also focus on understanding the full picture. We want to know how your team works, what keeps you up at night, and why that one feature request keeps coming up in every other meeting. We dig into your industry challenges, your company culture, and team dynamics. This deeper understanding is what helps us spot the real opportunities and challenges that you won't find in any requirements doc.
We Share Our Take
You know that friend who just tells you what you want to hear? That's not us. We're the friend who tells you when you have spinach in your teeth. We form opinions based on our experience and your context, and we're not shy about sharing them. Sometimes this means challenging assumptions or suggesting a different path. Don't worry—we're nice about it. But we care too much about your success to just nod along when we see another way.
We're Problem Junkies
Sure, we geek out over cool tech as much as the next developer. But what really gets us excited? Solving actual problems. Sometimes that means recommending a boring-but-reliable solution over the shiny new framework everyone's talking about. Sometimes it means telling you that the feature you're considering might create more problems than it solves. We measure our success by your outcomes, not by how many lines of code we write.
We've Seen Some Things (And We Remember Them)
After years in the trenches, we've developed a pretty good spidey-sense for what works and what doesn't. We've seen projects soar and projects face-plant. We've watched great ideas flourish and "can't-fail" plans... well, fail. All these experiences have given us a mental library of patterns—think of it as our very own "Choose Your Own Adventure" book of software development.
Knowledge Sharing is Caring
One of our favorite pieces of feedback goes something like this: "Our team is better for having worked with you." That's not an accident - it's built into how we work. We're not interested in being the heroes who swoop in, write a bunch of code, and leave you wondering how it all works.
We share our thinking out loud. A lot. Whether it's walking through why we chose a particular architecture, explaining the trade-offs in a technical decision, or sharing war stories from similar challenges we've faced, we're always teaching. Sometimes it's formal - like architecture reviews or pair programming sessions. But more often, it's organic - those moments in Slack where we drop in an article relevant to what we're building, or when we take an extra few minutes in a PR review to explain not just what needs to change, but why.
This goes beyond technical skills. Maybe your team picks up our approach to breaking down complex problems, or starts asking different questions in planning sessions. That's the kind of lasting impact we love to see.
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When you work with a true partner, something magical happens. The line between "their team" and "our team" starts to blur. You find yourself forgetting we're not actually full time employees because we act like we are. We care about your success as much as you do. We celebrate your wins and lose sleep over your challenges.
That's what happened in that meeting. Our client had stopped seeing us as "the contractors" and started seeing us as "the team who happens to have a different email domain." And honestly? That's exactly what we aim for.
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