Grove: Engineering Partnership for DXP

Grove is TBSCG's engineering partnership for live DXP estates. The buyer profile is specific: an organisation that has migrated to a modern platform (with TBSCG or otherwise); a head of platform or head of engineering who needs ongoing engineering capacity but does not want to either build an in-house team or fall back on time-and-materials consulting; an executive sponsor who wants predictable engineering throughput rather than variable consulting spend.

The name comes from what a single banyan becomes over time: multiple trunks under one canopy, growing in parallel, all part of the same organism. The engagement mirrors that. Several engineering workstreams run in parallel under one named team, with the same senior bench carrying the platform forward year after year.

The standard alternative is either an in-house engineering team or a time-and-materials consulting retainer. Both have known problems.

In-house carries recruitment cost, management overhead, and retention risk. Senior platform engineers, the ones who can carry a complex DXP estate over years, are difficult to attract, expensive to keep, and easy to lose to better offers. The business carries the full cost of the bench whether the work is there or not.

Time-and-materials consulting carries different problems. Cost is unpredictable. The consultancy is structurally incentivised to keep finding more work rather than to leave. The platform context resets every time the engagement shifts shape.

Grove sits between the two. TBSCG carries the engineering capacity and absorbs the bench cost; the client carries the product direction and signs off on what each workstream is doing. The engagement is fixed-price per quarter, which makes spend predictable. The named team is consistent across quarters, which means the platform context compounds rather than rebuilding from scratch every time.

Grove engagements run several engineering workstreams in parallel under one named team. Typical workstreams:

• New feature development on the live platform
• Platform optimisation (performance, accessibility, search indexing, technical debt reduction)
• Integration evolution as adjacent systems change shape
• Content and design system maintenance
• Platform upgrade work as the underlying vendor releases new capability
• Architecture evolution as the business changes

The workstreams are not fixed at engagement start. They evolve quarter by quarter against the business roadmap. A quarter that needs heavy feature delivery sees the team weighted toward that; a quarter where platform debt is the priority sees the balance shift. The named team stays consistent; the allocation moves.

The engagement starts with a quarterly planning session: workstream allocation, team composition, deliverable targets, and any platform context updates. The named team carries the work through the quarter with regular product cadence (sprint planning, demos, retrospectives) sized to the client's preferred operating model. End of quarter is a review and reset.

The named team includes a Grove engagement lead (senior consultant), platform architect, and rotating engineering specialists drawn against the workstream needs. The engagement lead is the consistent presence. Specialists rotate to match what the workstreams need.

Predictable engineering capacity quarter by quarter. A named senior team that carries the platform context over years. The same engineering bench that delivered the migration or transformation, if the engagement started there. Workstream flexibility within the engagement envelope: feature work, optimisation, integration, design system, and platform upgrades all delivered through one engagement rather than separate procurements.

For organisations that would otherwise build an in-house engineering team, Grove provides the capability without the recruitment cycle, the management overhead, or the retention risk.

AWS Advanced Consulting Partner. Magnolia Gold Partner. Certified across Contentful, Contentstack, Cloudinary, and commercetools. Twenty years of enterprise engineering for FS&I, retail, manufacturing, and global brand clients including Nikon, Bobcat, Herbalife, and El Corte Inglés. Senior engineers on bench, drawn on for the work, not assembled from offshore graduate pools.

The brand position: the endpoint of the engagement is your team running the platform without us. Grove exists for the years between launch and that endpoint, where ongoing engineering capacity is the right shape.

Canopy for buyers who need 24/7 support of the running platform rather than active engineering. Recovery for buyers whose platform has gone wrong and needs remediation before ongoing partnership makes sense. Advisory for buyers who need senior counsel on a specific decision rather than ongoing capacity.