What skills do I need in-house to run a Magento 2 store?

Whether you run Magento Open Source or Adobe Commerce, you need in-house people who can run the Magento admin every day: products, orders, customers, promotions, and content. You also need someone who owns marketing and SEO. Development, hosting, and security patching can sit in-house or with a partner, depending on how much custom code your store runs on.

The technical side is where Magento teams get surprised. Every extension and customization adds code that someone has to understand, test, and keep compatible through upgrades.

Magento 2 skills at a glance: in-house or outsource?

Which Magento skills should stay in-house?

Four day-to-day Magento skills belong inside your business, because they depend on knowing your products, customers, and trading calendar.

• Admin operations: managing products, attributes, attribute sets, and categories, and handling orders, invoices, credit memos, and returns. The person running the admin needs to understand configuration scopes. A setting saved at the default scope when it should apply to one store view is a classic Magento support ticket.
• Merchandising and content: category sorting, CMS pages and blocks, banners, and cart price rules.
• Marketing and SEO: URL rewrites, product metadata, feed quality, and campaigns.
• Reporting: sales, conversion, and search term data, from Magento’s own reports or your analytics setup.

Which Magento technical skills can you outsource?

Magento’s technical layer needs specialists. A general PHP developer can struggle with Magento’s architecture, and few people cover every technical skill below well.

• Backend PHP development, with working knowledge of Magento modules, dependency injection, plugins, and observers.
• Frontend theme work: LESS and Knockout.js on Luma-based themes, or Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js on Hyvä.
• Hosting and DevOps across Linux, Nginx or Apache, MySQL or MariaDB, Redis, Varnish, and OpenSearch, plus a repeatable deployment process.
• Cron and indexer health. When Magento cron stops, scheduled indexers fall behind and catalog changes stop showing on the storefront.
• Upgrades and security patches, including a compatibility check on every third-party extension first.
• Integrations with ERPs, PIMs, payment gateways, and shipping carriers.

If you’d rather not hire for Magento’s technical layer, a Magento development partner can own all of it under one arrangement.

How should you split in-house and agency work?

The right split between an in-house Magento team and an agency depends on store size and how often your code changes.

What team does a small Magento 2 store need?

A small Magento 2 store with mostly standard features needs one ecommerce manager covering admin, merchandising, and marketing. A freelance Magento developer or agency handles code, hosting, and patches as needed.

When should you hire an in-house Magento developer?

Hire an in-house Magento developer once new features, integrations, or checkout changes land most months. Keep an agency for DevOps, major upgrades, and busy periods.

What team does a large or B2B Magento store need?

A Magento store with multiple store views, B2B pricing, or ERP and PIM syncs needs a small internal team: a product owner, backend and frontend developers, and an infrastructure owner. Outside specialists then handle performance audits and version upgrades.

Who should own Magento security patching?

Security patching is the Magento task that slips when nobody owns it. It feels optional right up until an extension breaks at checkout or someone exploits an unpatched vulnerability. Give patching a named owner, whether that person sits on your payroll or your agency’s.

For examples of Magento builds and support work, see our Magento case studies.

Where to start

Hire or train the Magento operations role first, because no agency can run your store day to day. Then size the technical team to the custom work you actually have, and expand it only when that workload holds steady.