In this episode of The Salesforce Posse Podcast, host Francis Pindar sits down with Shane Smyth, CTO of Saltbox and Salesforce B2B Commerce expert. Shane shares his fascinating journey into the Salesforce ecosystem, starting back in the days of ExactTarget, and dives deep into the world of B2B Commerce. From the evolution of Salesforce Commerce Cloud to practical tips for creating successful storefronts, this conversation is packed with valuable insights.
Key topics include:
The history and differences between Salesforce B2B and B2C Commerce
Best practices for storefront design and platform integration Navigating product pricing, order fulfilment, and checkout complexities
Future trends in B2B Commerce and the impact of Salesforce innovations like Hyperforce and Data Cloud
Whether you’re a seasoned Salesforce professional or new to B2B Commerce, Shane’s advice and experience will provide actionable insights to help you elevate your digital commerce strategy. Don’t miss this knowledge-packed episode!
00:00 Introduction to the Podcast 00:15 Meet Shane Smith: B2B Commerce Expert
01:56 Shane’s Journey into Salesforce
04:21 Understanding Salesforce B2B Commerce
06:00 Differences Between B2B and B2C Commerce
10:28 Building a Successful B2B Storefront
16:08 Challenges in B2B Commerce
25:26 Future Trends in Salesforce B2B Commerce
30:43 Getting Started with B2B Commerce
39:39 Final Thoughts and Advice
42:09 Closing Remarks
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In this episode of the Salesforce Posse podcast, host Francis Pindar sits down with Ian Gotts, founder and CEO of Elements.cloud, for an eye-opening conversation that every Salesforce professional needs to hear. Ian takes us on a journey from his early days as one of Salesforce’s first customers to the cutting-edge innovations in Data Cloud that are shaping the platform’s future.
Curious about how Salesforce is evolving to handle the massive amounts of data that drive today’s business decisions? Want to know how Data Cloud can finally deliver on the promise of Customer 360? Ian doesn’t just talk theory—he shares practical insights and real-world examples that can help you navigate this complex landscape. From understanding the critical importance of planning and data strategy to avoiding costly pitfalls, this episode is packed with advice that could make or break your next Salesforce project.
But that’s not all. Ian and Francis dig into why the days of being a Salesforce generalist are over and why specialising in areas like data and AI is the key to future-proofing your career. They discuss the challenges of implementing Data Cloud, the hidden opportunities it presents, and why getting your hands dirty with this technology could be the smartest move you can make this year.
Whether you are just starting your Salesforce journey or looking to deepen your expertise, this episode will inspire you to think differently about your career and the technology shaping our world. Don’t miss out—tune in and get ahead in the rapidly evolving Salesforce ecosystem.
Step into the forefront of Salesforce innovation in this captivating episode of the Salesforce Posse podcast. Recorded at the heart of London’s Calling, this episode features host Francis Pindar in conversation with Salesforce experts Vanessa Grant and Adam Olshansky, exploring the architectural advancements and strategic insights driving Salesforce’s next era.
Amid the vibrant atmosphere of London’s premier Salesforce event, this episode unravels the journey from traditional Salesforce roles to the cutting-edge realms of AI and architecture. Vanessa, with her extensive consulting experience, and Adam, hailing from his technical architect role at Google, shed light on the evolving Salesforce landscape, highlighting the critical role of business analysis and the transformative power of AI.
“Architecting Success” offers a deep dive into the pivotal shifts and emerging trends in the Salesforce ecosystem, providing listeners with a roadmap to navigating and excelling in this dynamic environment. The podcast not only charts the technical evolution of Salesforce but also captures the personal growth stories and professional insights of those leading the charge.
Tune in to “Architecting Success” for an insider’s perspective on the next generation of Salesforce development, the strategic importance of business analysis, and the innovative integration of AI. This episode is a must-listen for anyone eager to grasp the future directions of Salesforce, from seasoned architects to newcomers aspiring to shape the next wave of success in the Salesforce community. Join us on this journey at London’s Calling and be part of the conversation defining Salesforce’s next era.
In this episode of the Salesforce Posse podcast, host Francis Pender engages with Vanessa Grant, a Los Angeles-based business analyst and consultant with over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. Vanessa discusses the critical role of quality business analysis in Salesforce projects, sharing insights from her experience and emphasizing the importance of effective stakeholder management. Ideal for Salesforce professionals seeking to enhance their BA skills or understand its impact, this episode is packed with valuable advice and fun anecdotes from Vanessa’s career journey.
What you will learn
What is a Salesforce Business Analyst?
Why developing strong business analysis skills is crucial for Salesforce admins and developers.
The significance of quality business analysis in Salesforce projects.
Vanessa Grant’s journey from music to Salesforce and her approach to business analysis.
Strategies for managing complex stakeholder relationships effectively.
The challenges business analysts face in the Salesforce ecosystem and how to overcome them.
Welcome to another riveting episode of the Salesforce Posse Podcast! In this episode, we’re diving deep into the fascinating intersection of Salesforce and the nonprofit sector. Our special guest is Lawrence Newcombe, a Lead Technical Architect and Certified Technical Architect (CTA) at giveclarity.org. With years of experience in the charity and nonprofit sectors, Lawrence is the go-to expert on how Salesforce architecture is being leveraged to bring about positive change.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
Getting Started: Lawrence shares his journey of how he entered the nonprofit world and the role Salesforce played in that evolution.
Salesforce and Nonprofits: Discover the primary reasons why nonprofits and charities are adopting Salesforce for essential tasks like fundraising and program management.
Implementation Nuances: Learn about the distinct strategies employed when implementing Salesforce in small vs large nonprofit organisations.
Career Tips: Hear Lawrence’s advice for anyone looking to gain experience and build a career working with Salesforce in the nonprofit sector.
Challenges: Understand the hurdles nonprofits face, including the difficulties in recruiting the right talent for Salesforce roles.
Future Outlook: Get a glimpse into what’s on the horizon for Salesforce’s Nonprofit Cloud and how data analytics and artificial intelligence might shape the future. If you’re interested in the Salesforce ecosystem, particularly in a nonprofit or charity setting, then this episode will offer a wealth of knowledge and insights. Don’t miss out! Tune in to enrich your understanding of how Salesforce is not just a CRM but a powerful architecture that can drive change and impact in the nonprofit and charity sectors.
00:00 – Introduction 02:21 – How Lawrence got started in nonprofits and Salesforce 03:21 – What are nonprofits and charities? 04:33 – Why nonprofits use Salesforce 07:38 – Examples of how Salesforce is used by nonprofits 10:46 – Ecosystem products used by nonprofits 12:11 – Advice for getting experience at a nonprofit 13:52 – Differences between small and large nonprofit implementations 16:08 – Tips for volunteering at a nonprofit 18:08 – Building experience by creating a project for a small nonprofit 22:12 – Challenges of small vs medium nonprofit implementations 25:16 – Workforce challenges for nonprofits 27:22 – What nonprofits look for in candidates 29:57 – The future of nonprofits and Salesforce 32:51 – New products and areas of focus 35:52 – Final thoughts 38:14 – Final question: Advice to past self
In this video, we will reveal the secrets to successful Salesforce implementations. By the end of this video, you’ll know exactly what to do to ensure a successful deployment! If you’re considering implementing Salesforce or currently are struggling, this video is for you! By the end of this video, you’ll know what to do to make your Salesforce implementation a success. From planning to execution to post-implementation support, we’ll cover it all in this video! Join us in this captivating podcast episode, where we converse with Kristian Jorgensen, an accomplished Salesforce professional and author of the ‘Salesforce End-to-End Implementation Handbook.’ Kristian offers invaluable insights and knowledge about Salesforce implementation and project management, making this conversation enlightening and informative.
00:00 Intro to Implementing Salesforce Projects
03:36 Journey into the Salesforce Cloud
05:15 Shifting Landscapes in Salesforce Implementations
07:05 Salesforce Governance and Control
08:57 Striking the Balance
12:22 Harmonizing Salesforce Vision and Structure
13:23 Balancing Inclusion and Technical Integrity
14:50 Strategically Streamlining Salesforce
16:05 Guiding Success to Salesforce
18:07 Steering Clear of Salesforce Pitfalls
19:32 Unveiling the Salesforce Customer 360° Reality
26:21 Unlocking Salesforce Value
31:17 Reviving Salesforce Projects from Chaos
35:25 Empowering Salesforce Implementation
40:15 Harnessing Past Wisdom
Transcript
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Hello, my name is Francis Pindar, and you are watching or listening perhaps to the Salesforce posse podcast, where I speak with Salesforce industry influencers so we can gain a better understanding of how to excel in a career path from a Salesforce admin or developer, to an architect. But before we start, I’m on a bit of a mission to prove that there’s an inner Salesforce architect in all of us, because for me, a Salesforce architect is all about design. But not all design is architecture. So I think of an architectural decision as something that’s gonna be hard or expensive to change in the future. So if you create an object in Salesforce, but flows, put reports on it, do integrations link it to other objects, this is going to be hard to change in the future. But I’m also trying to debunk the myth that Salesforce or an app at Salesforce architect is all about understanding the technical aspects of Salesforce, which is really not the complete case. So if you head to Salesforce AdminToArchitect.com/scorecard, you can score yourself against a free scorecard that measures yourself against the key skills that a Salesforce architect needs to be successful, and also gives you personalized feedback at the end. And you may be a little bit surprised by the results. But back to the show. And in this conversation, I’m going to be talking to Kirsten Johansson, who is a solution architect and now Team Lead at wag an IBM s company. And he is a fountain of knowledge around making Salesforce project successful. So I wanted to pick his brains around the things that you should be focusing on to really delight your users and customers that interact with Salesforce. He’s also written a fantastic book, the Salesforce end to end Implementation Handbook, which really is that end to end picture of how to deliver superior business outcomes using the Salesforce platform. So if you’re interested in understanding how to link the visions and goals of an organization to a Salesforce implementation, or want a demo to want to really show the demonstrate the value of Salesforce, or struggle to do that, or how how to manage everyone wanting a bit more than Salesforce, I’m really not knowing where to start. Or even just understanding the common traps that people fall into running Salesforce projects or agile programs, then I think you can get a lot of value out of this conversation with Christian. So without further ado, let’s go. I guess Welcome to the show.
Kristian Jorgensen
Thank you so much. Great to be here.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
So yeah, so I wanted to kind of get you on the show because you were kind of all things, you know, project manager and project creation and getting the best practice out of Salesforce implementations, and making sure it’s done the right way. But before we kind of get all into that, what was your history? How did you get into Salesforce originally?
Kristian Jorgensen
Yep. Great question. So I think it was about 10 years ago, I was working with a company that was going to replace both the billing platform and the CRM in one go, going from on prem to the cloud, Salesforce, and that’s where I first heard of it. I was in a in a channel management function, supporting sales directors and contact center managers in how to keep track of their business and control it. So I was an SME in the Salesforce project from the customer side. And then some, some years later, I moved over to the to the consultant side with the same company that was that was helping out.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Okay, cool. So how long have you been in kind of in it, I suppose for
Kristian Jorgensen
Could you repeat
Francis Pindar (A2A)
that? How has it How long have you been in it kind of the IT industry before kind of moving into Salesforce? Yeah,
Kristian Jorgensen
absolutely. So it would be around five years now. First Four Years at Capgemini. And then now about a year at Wake which is a specialized Salesforce boutique company within IBM.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Okay, cool. So how like, I think the so set the way Salesforce is implemented, I think is kind of starting to change, hasn’t it? Kind of we’ve kind of we’re seeing this shift in projects. Do you have kind of any insight in that and what you’re seeing currently in the industry?
Kristian Jorgensen
Yes, sure. And maybe it’s helpful just to go a bit down memory lane, even before I was part of the ecosystem, right? Because Salesforce started out as this with only Sales Cloud, right? That’s what it was helping out sales organizations, you know, better than me from back in the day. And it’s then evolved, right, with the both organic expansion product development. So Service Cloud, and then now spends marketing, commerce, field service, you know, integrations, analytics, so many things, and companies also leveraging and taking use of all those great innovations in the portfolio. Right. And, and that’s, I think, is what you’re asking, implementations have they also, yes, they have also seen a massive increase in complexity, technically, business, you’re talking to so many different parts of the organization now that you weren’t back then in the early days, right.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
I think also people, I think it almost get the right people are more aware of Salesforce, I think now. And it’s almost like, you know, you’re in when you’re even within your company, you know, people go, Oh, we got Salesforce. Now I you know, can we do this, this and this. And suddenly you’re kind of the scope of work kind of increases, I suppose, across across the project. So how, you know, when you’re first implementing a project, it’s kind of like, it’s always Greenfield very easy, right? So as the honeymoon, you know, this honeymoon period, I know, you talk about is kind of like these a bit of a start, and then you start maturing, and things get more complex, how do you see, you know, putting kind of governance and controls and things in a project, you know, what are the kind of key things you find people mistakes that people make going along that road?
Kristian Jorgensen
Sure. So I think, if we just go back to that, that Greenfield implementation, right, just just a little bit, because that’s really interesting, because it’s not all, all honeymoon, as a child that they’re the people you’re interacting with. On the customer side, may have heard of Salesforce or other CRM, but they there are so many things you need to introduce terms, best practices, what comes out of the box, what’s not, what does it mean configuration versus not? All these different things, is what you you need to slowly use change management for to get the insight, right. But then, yes, if we talk about the rollout, and the continuous improvement, there, you will likely have digressed or transgressed from being in this project mode to more continuous improvement of the domains you already have there. And how do you decide where to go? What what user stories or features or business problems? Should you attack an x? Right? How should you do it? Who reviews and qualifies? Do you have a design authority? If you’re working with partners, how do you structure that? Is it still statements of work? Yeah, sorry. Go on.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Yeah, yeah. So do you even like you said, like design authority, it’s like, do you need when you know, when you need to design authority, or when you it’s a lot of complexity in that right as well. You might be in an ad stablish organization that has a design authority, but doesn’t know Salesforce? So yeah, how do you? How do you make those decisions? Right? Yep,
Kristian Jorgensen
sure. Yeah, for sure. I think if you know, in the traditional waterfall, you would have these gates along the way. Other business requirements understood and detailed, check. Okay, then go into design phase is designed to live up to and so on. So there you had it built in sort of, sort of, where if you’re going anything that looks like agile or hybrid agile, where you don’t do all of that architecture upfront to the detail, then you need to have regular points throughout with a regular cadence where someone with experience assesses proposed solution designs, and that may be at a mid mid level or it might be at the at the user story level.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Okay, so going back to the greenfield site, if I’ve kind of like done initial implementation, relatively small, but it’s really successful. And now it’s kind of been socialized within the organization of people to kind of get They want to see what Salesforce can do. And everybody’s wanting a part of it right? And want to bring their their changes in. You know, adoption is high, and it is things are going are going well, but how do you manage that? How do you kind of make sure you’re doing the right thing? And you’re not kind of death by backlog almost. Yeah,
Kristian Jorgensen
absolutely. So I think they’re the whole concept of the product owner really plays a big, big role. Some Greenfield implementations are sort of hybrid, agile or more agile, meaning they definitely need to have a product owner part of the development team. And ideally, that person with all that knowledge that they have built up, should continue being part of the Salesforce team. And, and would also know how to qualify any requests that come in, right. But you need to have a forum where you review these types of things. What, what should be assessed against other product goals, which should be aligned to the overall vision and strategy of the company. But there’s there of course, needs to be the synthesis of what’s expected and desired by the organization and users of the solution, versus what’s the overall business strategy. So that’s, that’s where the rubber meets the road for whether this whole setup is really working, right? Because it’s sometimes two different things. Sometimes it’s aligned. And that’s great. But you need to have some some guidance there.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Okay, and how does that work with so? So you got the product owner, who is kind of the responsible party, making sure that what he’s getting built is relevant for the values and the goals of the organization? But how do you kind of balance that with, like, the architectural and technical goals, like maybe the project’s been around for a lot longer? And there’s a lot of a lot of tech debt in there. And actually, it’s always constantly just swept under the carpet, because you’re focusing on the backlog and the business change. Right? So how do you manage that?
Kristian Jorgensen
Yeah. So ideally, the product owner is experienced, because it is a senior role, you are making big, big decisions within your organization. So the person should be experienced knowing there is something called enablers, or technical enablers that need to be in place for the fun, functional features to be able to be developed for the benefit of users. It needs to be a close cooperation between the architect and the platform architect or the team of architects and the product owner or product owners. So it’s a it’s a marriage, you could say, because fulfilling a long term roadmap takes a takes both views.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
So how do we get so it’s really just making sure everybody’s included? And those technical elements are thought of as we’re kind of rolling through through the change? Yes, yeah, exactly.
Kristian Jorgensen
And if you were asking, so how do you do that? Specifically, concretely, practically. I think there are different models, right? Maybe the more DevOps see is to say, we do a continuously in every sprint, we will also have some time allocated for technical debt or refactoring, continuous refactoring. For some organization that works for others, it’s to say, every four or eight sprints, we will have a dedicated sprint just for refactoring. I think there are pros and cons to each way of doing that. The latter may seem less Devoxx II or less agile. But if you have that concretely on your on your plan, you know, okay, every two months, we have a sprint dedicated to that, then it actually gets done. So yeah, better to have something that actually gets done than something that is, we’ll do it within the sprint. But
Francis Pindar (A2A)
yeah, I tend to prefer that as well. Because it also you can kind of like, get the stats out of what are the slowest running processes? What are the things that actually you want to focus on during that sprint? until you’re ready and prepared for it rather than, Oh, we’ve got 10 story points we need to use on technical debt this month. I’ll just tidy this up. Or whatever.
Kristian Jorgensen
Yeah, exactly. So if you’re, if you’re not doing anything to alleviate technical debt or continuous refactoring, maybe start with that latter approach where you save, dedicate a space And or some time at certain increments, but then have the ambition to go to the more correct or DevOps the way of doing it continually, right. Yeah,
Francis Pindar (A2A)
absolutely. I think yeah, I think and also it kind of comes down to like the level of technical debt, your as well, I think, a real problem for you for delivering change. Based on you know, which approach you take, which I think is fine. Yeah. So also, there’s a thing called the Center of Excellence, right? And you’ve actually just written the book, the Salesforce end to end Implementation Handbook, which is fab. Yeah. And in there, you kind of talk about the center of excellence and the importance of a center of excellence. Can you kind of describe basically what it is? And but also, why is it important when at what point should this start to become kind of brought into an authorization? Yeah, I think yeah,
Kristian Jorgensen
absolutely. So I think, maybe we can say, well, what it’s not right. So it’s not a management or that type of body. It’s a Governance Forum, a structure to guide a team or teams of people working on the Salesforce platform. Right? And, and when should it be there? So if you consider before you even buy Salesforce licenses, right, you will likely have a team of people in your organization who are assessing what should we do we want a CRM or a new CRM, okay, let’s go with Salesforce. And then they’re looking into what capabilities should be supported the business case, all of this, those people are likely some of the good people that are going to be part of the implementation as well. And on an ongoing basis. And likely, it needs to require both business and technical and project or PMO. Delivery people, because it’s really those three aspects that you want to put some governance in place around. So both business technical governance and delivery governance. Why? Because it lowers risk. If you have, if you have guidelines and structures and guardrails in place, then it just lowers risk, risk that you built the wrong thing that you don’t deliver according to your your plans, and so on.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
And you’re continuously maturing, rather than doing the same old, same old versus well.
Kristian Jorgensen
Absolutely. Yeah.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
So when you’re kind of working in Salesforce change projects, what are the kind of common mistakes you see happening when I try to manage a project?
Kristian Jorgensen
Yeah, I think let’s just highlight two or three of them, right? So I think it’s typically that end users or the target users of your solution, have not been involved or not enough, are not early enough. And that’s really a big risk, right? If you, you can sit and you can have workshops with yourself or some other parts of the business and say, Hey, we really need this. But it’s not really until you go to market that you see if what you’re thinking of actually meets meets the goals, right. The other is that it’s a siloed organization and what you’re doing in the corner, let’s say it’s an IT lead project. It should ideally be both IT and business altogether in some symbiosis. But if it is just isolated, and you don’t have anyone from the business or from senior management, sponsoring, and being part of the conversation, you risk that you’re building something that isn’t really in line with the overall business and business strategy. Right. So that’s, that’s probably the second one lack of executive sponsor involvement. Because if you don’t have that continuously throughout that, that that’s a big risk.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
So what would happen if you’d if you didn’t for some examples? Sure.
Kristian Jorgensen
So if you don’t have, let’s say, the alignment to the overall business strategy, and you have little engagement with executive sponsor, sometimes people leave the company. So let’s say you, you, someone else joins to take the role of executive sponsor, look at the project and see Oh, but what you’re doing here is not aligned to the business strategy, let’s discontinue it, or let’s go the other direction. So it’s really there. So lack of continuity if you don’t have all those things in place.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Yeah. And I think I’ve Yeah. And also, I’ve kind of been on the projects where it’s a kind of a lift and shift technical fix side where it’s kind of like we’re replacing this with Salesforce because Salesforce is so much better. But they’re just lifting and shifting all that bad practices and everything into the new system value. And it’s not linked to any strategy or goals or anything approach that they’re trying to go to. And you just
Kristian Jorgensen
Conway’s Law, right? Where, if you’re designing it within the context of your own organization, and you don’t have external input or inspiration, right. Yeah. And
Francis Pindar (A2A)
I think this is where Yeah. And is that kind of the is that pull tug, I suppose between getting external people in to implement Salesforce versus the implementation yourself, or trying to do it in a hybrid way? And what level of engagement that has as well, I think, because even when you’re working at a consultancy, I think I’ve been in projects where it was almost like, they let the consultancies just do everything, right. And they had they really kind of as a hands off approach, and you’re kind of consultancy, you’re trying to, you know, deliver a result. But then they’ve got nothing to go on. They’re not listening to any goals or anything, or strategic vision. And yeah, again, it’s like, doesn’t give good positive outcomes.
Kristian Jorgensen
Absolutely, yeah. You got to have Yeah, sorry. No, go on. I was just gonna say, I completely agree. Right? You You need to have someone to interact with to understand the context and the users and the business. Absolutely. It’s key.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Yeah. And communication as well. But it’s happening that, you know, that people are aware of it, that people engage with it to kind of get the buy in and get the adoption and get the kind of the quick wins and what’s in it for me. You know, how but yeah, absolutely. Okay, so Salesforce is all about, like, the customer 360. And I think, yeah, I think we’ve all been there where it’s like, yes, we want a 360 degree view of the customer. But what are the kind of realities? When so if you’ve got a project that is, yeah, we want a customer 360 degree view of the customer go? The realities around that? Yeah.
Kristian Jorgensen
No, I, I’ve heard and seen many different impressions of what that actually means, right? From account page layouts with everything on it, and endless scrolls. So yes, there you have it, all the information you want it about your customer, but is that in a meaningful way? Right. And then also, just to the, to the completeness of it, I think, yes, it should be perhaps the ambition, right. But also important to think of in the context of the specific user. So for a salesperson, the 360 means one thing, right? It’s things that are key and important to know, same for a customer service, same for a field service person, many different types of roles. And then I think secondly, the, it should be the ambition to get there. But it’s okay to start with one ad or to 90 customer view. As long as that’s the the ambition, right? Cuz she didn’t want to.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Yeah, it’s kind of had the right data at the right time for the right role. Exactly. Yeah. Which is always tricky. And some organizations I remember, I was working for a insurance company. And actually, they were like, hey, Les. Yes. Because insurance is very siloed. Yeah, where you’ve got, you know, the organization sells many different types of insurance, but it’s all very separate. Yeah, life insurance is one department, you know, home insurance is another but they don’t really talk to each other. Like, they bring everything together. But then they started kind of coming across the challenges with that. So I remember there was an incident where there was, you know, rocking up to their customers houses and saying, Hey, look, here, we want to talk about your, you know, your life insurance and stuff like that. They’ve combined life insurance policies and home insurance together. And, and did have challenges where, you know, the people in the house, didn’t want the other people to know what insurance policies they’d had on them, right? Because they don’t want to get bumped off by their wife or their husband or whatever. And actually bringing all these policies together as a family unit, actually, Stein, oh, it’s challenges even just bringing data together, isn’t it? And wanting that 360 degree view and actually, he’s still going to have these kinds of firewalls and visible The key rules and stuff in place. So that not every, you know, yes, it’s tied together. But in some cases, not everybody can see everything. For the record seeing it for the right reasons.
Kristian Jorgensen
Yep, that sounds a bit more like also organizational business change. Challenge, right. For the insurer, right. Yeah. Yeah. With different divisions at the same time for the same customer segments. And so that
Francis Pindar (A2A)
yeah, and they know that they’ve got to connect together. But then yeah, it is finding that that approach that allows them to market right, but not Yeah, yeah, it’s challenging space. So if how would you go about if you were like, I know, there’s value in using Salesforce? Yeah, I know, the organization can really value on doing some processes or doing something in the Salesforce. But I know, obviously, I’ve got to get a budget for it. I’ve got to prove that it’s worth doing. Yeah, how do I get a case together to actually pitch it to say, hey, look, I think this is going to be a good piece of work to do.
Kristian Jorgensen
Yeah. So let’s say you, for example, that you are a business person within the company, right? Let’s say you’re working in sales as a sales manager or sales director, you will likely have seen that it works Salesforce works for you, or it has worked for you in in another company previously, so you want to interact with the executive sponsor, you want to get someone in senior management who can be part of that journey to convinced the organization to go for this right? You need someone from it like an Enterprise Architect, or some someone who can who can talk about, okay, system landscape, how’s it looking? What capabilities are supported by what what’s the roadmap? Where would Salesforce fit into that? Because you also need the buy in from the IT organization typically. And then you need this, this driver, it can either be yourself, or you can have someone from like a PMO. Organization, if you have that. And then you need to go, you’d need to do the work, right? You need to interact and understand those capabilities. Let’s say its sales, its account management, lead management, opportunity, quote, management, all of that you need to understand not in the detail, but you at least need to understand what what what are the processes? What are the pain points? Because if they’re on pain points, what are you really trying to do, right? So that that work you need to do and then look at the KPIs look, look at where you’re, where you’re tracking. Now, if it’s a, let’s say, sales domain project, you need to see okay, is it our order value that’s lacking? Is it our hit rate? Is it how long it takes for us to close our opportunities? So you need to look at what what factors within revenue is that that you can change and want to change with your with your project. And then you can build a business case around that together with someone from finance, and then present that business case and get get funding. So it sounds really linear and simple. But oftentimes, you have to go several loops. And that’s all right.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Yeah, I think also, it’s kind of getting their credibility, right. So once you’ve proven that, hey, look, there’s a long lead time or is a manual processes happening here and getting X amount of mistakes, which is costing this amount of money, improving it at the end of the day, once you’ve done it, hey, I’ve reduced it by this. This, and then it’s almost like, yeah, the business cases that come from Francis, Oh, it’ll be fine, then because he knows he’s done. He’s always done your due diligence on this. Right. Yeah, which I think comes into that other part of that kind of magnet project or Salesforce implementation projects, that kind of trust. And that kind of moving from that functional way of thinking of implementing Salesforce and job done, kind of moving into that kind of trusted advisor, one to becoming vital for the organization. So you can start always fine. It’s kind of like, if you’re new, you don’t actually know truly, maybe what the actual goals and the vision of the organization are. And it’s kind of building up that trust such that you are actually then start getting privy to the what actually we’re selling five different products, and five different teams all selling it. And actually we just want have, you know it’s stupid, they can all sell the same set of products. And it means we have a cost saving by reducing the T, for example. And obviously, you’re not privy to that initially. But once you start building up the draft, and you know, you’re not going to go blabbing to that those teams, but then that can really help you in the way you kind of design and architect your solutions as well. Absolutely, yeah. So if I was like, going, so say, I’m on a project, and it’s not going so well, maybe it wasn’t, you know, it was more of a Big Bang project, you know, you’re halfway through and you realize that’s probably, you know, okay, we’ve got, it was a mistake, you know, we’ve now got a lot of stuff that we need to deliver, there’s lots of issues. And you’ve got problems happening? How do you kind of take yourself out of that kind of type scenario where, or maybe you’ve kind of been brought into a project where it is a little bit chaotic? And what are the kind of first key steps or key things you think about or do to kind of try and get the project back on track?
Kristian Jorgensen
Sure. So you’re saying it’s a project that was meant to be released in a big bang, after a bunch of different capabilities should have been built? Or are being built, but have not yet been released? Something like that? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I think I would follow the steps. Right? So what is it really that we’re trying to achieve, but what’s really key? So going through all the things that should be done earlier in the in the pre development phase, as like, as I call it, go back to the to the business case, go back to see what were the key pain points for the capabilities that are part of the scope? And then try to work with the with the with the project team to see is it possible to chop something up in releases? Could we perhaps go live with let’s say, the sales domain or the service domain, and then add on marketing and commerce later? Is that an option? Sometimes it is, sometimes you need interim integrations, otherwise, people will need to work in two systems. So there are of course, trade offs. That’s what being an architect is about is sharing the options, but highlighting the trade offs with with either one, right? Yeah. So I think, be clear on what what the goal is, see if you can chop it up. So it doesn’t become sort of much as a big bang. And maybe go with more of a pilot approach, and then roll out in waves. That that set of functionality. And then you can always add, add more later.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Even Start Yeah, start small and experiment. It doesn’t have to be rolled out to everybody, maybe I think the smallest I ever did was literally account and contacts. And that was it. It was literally a company Rolodex. And that was it. It was just to prove that the integration, you know, the data migration worked to prove that, you know, they could see all the data. And really, it was all read only because obviously, we didn’t know if the data was right. So you can create any new records, it was literally a company Rolodex, but they could do a reporting, they could do loads of stuff they could never do previously, which they found really valuable. And then we just slowly iterated from there. But
Kristian Jorgensen
could they log calls and activities against those?
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, even just that. And you know, it’s just kind of a revelation for some companies. On my word, we can see who’s actually contacting customers. Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s, I think, obviously, you kind of get a bit bogged. I know I didn’t, you kind of get a bit bogged down in that. Salesforce is so vast and could do so much. You think that you need to deliver a lot to get value, when actually, if you really look at it, and really kind of talk to people and users and read the the vision of the kidnappers, the strategic goals of where they want to get to, some of it is very simple, almost just get loads of value out of Salesforce by just using even just the company Rolodex and bringing that data together, right. Yeah. And so really kind of understanding that is like, absolutely key, and kind of measuring it as well. So you can see, actually, yeah, I did make a benefit, you know, did benefit the users. And they are, you know, finding it useful and now, the organization as a whole can can have a better picture of what’s going on. So you say your book coming back to your book you Why did you create the Salesforce in 20? Implementation Guide? Because yeah, it’s a lot of project management books out there. There’s a lot of Salesforce books out there. So why did you feel that you wanted to create a book on Salesforce implementation? Yes.
Kristian Jorgensen
Good. Good question. Well, I, through the years in consulting, I often wondered, there should be a structured way to do this repeatedly, just like we have best practices, and we have architecture patterns. We have development guidelines and testing guidelines. There are so many things. Ensure there is also for project management. And there is for agile, different things. But how do you mix and merge it all together in a in a Salesforce context? So I thought that’s missing. And then I frankly, just became confident enough and was pushed a little bit by by someone I have worked with previously, Tommy Berry, who I’m grateful for giving me the encouragement to pursue it, right. So it’s this, this mix of thinking, I would really have liked to have had this book when I started out in Salesforce, yeah, maybe I don’t get to work on all the different corners in the book, because it does span the entire implementation lifecycle, right. Sometimes, you’re only part of the development, sometimes you’re not part of rollout. But it’s still seeing what are the different bits and pieces involved and considerations and change management and communication and local deployments. I just think it’s a, it’s something that I would have loved to have had when I when I was starting out. And I also like to think that it’s, it can improve increase empathy. So because there are so many different people involved, it’s not just end users and developers, it’s many different parts of the organization. So if you read it, and you get to see what changes for many different parts, it’ll increase your empathy when you get to be part of projects and start to engage. That was my, my hope, at least, yeah,
Francis Pindar (A2A)
the challenges that other people have in the organization have that you can Yeah, definitely. And also, I kind of find that. Yeah, I don’t know. I feel like Salesforce is a lot more business led than it led. So it, it does have a kind of a different implementation approach. I suppose that a traditional IT project where you’re maybe thinking a lot more about the non functional requirements, so a lot more about, you know, the security implications where a lot of that is kind of taken off your hands by Salesforce. And not as the case may be. So making sure you get that balance. But yeah, it’s yeah, it’s a really fascinating book. And it’s definitely definitely worth a read. What do you think, like? Who’s the who’s the book? So you said it’s kind of like it’s aimed at like the people that you’d wish you’d had when you started? Your your Salesforce journey. But also, there’s loads of other stuff in there, like, you know, creating a CEO we creating, so it’s not just, you know, that kind of beginning journey, I feel anyway, I’m looking at it.
Kristian Jorgensen
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So I’d say it’s a, it’s targeted at, at mainly end customers who are actually having and using Salesforce more considering implementing Salesforce in their organization. And that could be a product owner, it could be PMO, lead could be a scrum master. It could be an architect. It’s it’s really for for everyone. And then I think it’s for also consultants who are working with customers, because this really shows the considerations that companies are having to go through throughout the implementation lifecycle, right. Yeah.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Cool. Okay, and if you have any other questions that you want to write
Kristian Jorgensen
not that I really, really can think of right now. I mean, I do know you have your last question.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Last question. Yeah, I asked everybody. You ready for the last question? Yeah. Okay, here we go. So, yeah, so you asked it to pretty much everybody If you could wind back that clock top point in time in your past, and you could give yourself some advice, what point in time would it be? And what advice would you give yourself?
Kristian Jorgensen
It’s a great question. Let me think. So I think I would probably go back to when I was when I started on the consulting side, like five, five years ago, and I had been doing a bunch of stuff before joining, let’s say, the IT side, I’ve been in sales. I have a degree in marketing, I’ve been in channel management, and bi and finance. So a lot of different things. And I think it’s the same story for many different people in the Salesforce ecosystem, not everyone studies, computer science, and then goes into development or architecture, right. So my advice would be, have more confidence to bring your knowledge and your context and industry knowledge to to work. And then also, as soon as I, I got the appetite to do more than, let’s say, use the story, development and so on. Just speak up and say, I have appetite. For more, please, can I be part of, let’s say, an epic or feature level? Design? And so on. So speak up and reach for the for the opportunities? Yeah, absolutely. They’re not always just given to you.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Yeah, completely. And even like, yeah, advice on your previous experience, you can bring on board, I think a lot of people, like, a lot of my students are kind of like, I’ve come from this industry or that industry. And I think everything’s amazing. Everybody thinks it’s like a stop. And Salesforce is a completely new thing, right? But it’s not, it’s like, it’s so linked to specific industries and industry knowledge and, and things like that. And actually just, you know, you can, you know, if you’ve come from a retail background, or a finance background, or whatever it may be, all these organizations in those industries use Salesforce. So it’s, and then Salesforce is so close to the business. Knowledge is so important, and so useful in your career. So, yeah, absolutely. Couldn’t agree more with that. And also, yeah, the opportunity asked for those opportunities and find out, but like trailhead, you know, find out or more about it. So you can go and give that advice and kind of go, Whoa, have we thought of this? This could be interesting. Yeah, and asking for that. Because I think organizations aren’t really, you know, well, back in my dad’s Father’s Day, you know, the beginning training as a life career and all this kind of stuff was now it’s it definitely, you know, if you want to progress your career, you got to think about yourself, and, and learn for yourself and reach for those opportunities, because they’re not going to just come.
Kristian Jorgensen
Yeah, get a mentor, either internally, where you’re at, or externally. Or perhaps I’ve heard of this guy who, who helps admins become architects, so there are plenty of resources out there. So use them. Right, right.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Yeah. And even like, even if it’s not a mentor, a sponsor, somebody who can actually put your name forward or really kind of go, actually, you know, I can put you in contact with people that can help your career. So it’s not even you know, it’s not kind of mentor, such, you know, it always kind of helps as well. Yeah. Brilliant. So you’ve also you’ve actually created a website called the Salesforce implementation Help Center, which is quite cool. Can you tell a bit about that?
Kristian Jorgensen
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s based off the book where I describe four phases of a Salesforce implementation, there is pre development, before you even buy licenses and provision an org, or get new licenses for a new project. Then there’s development, this rollout where you want to ensure adoption and support it. And then there’s continuous improvement, which is everything after. And for each of those phases, you typically face some challenges, some common issues, and it’s around those that I thought, hey, maybe it would be useful for people to be able to access these different issues and the underlying root causes in a sort of knowledge article. So I went ahead and together with one of the technical reviewers, Tony calm. We built this community site or experience cloud site, where you can where you can go into SF dash e to e.com. You can find out okay, what phase Am I in? What overall common issue Am I facing and then you’ll be Presented with the potential root causes, and then you can see the resolution or strategy for mitigation. So sort of like the Help Center, where Salesforce has technical how to implement Sales Cloud or digital engagement or whatever it may be, then this is more for the implementation Help Center.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
I cool. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. It’s been.
Kristian Jorgensen
Thanks for having me. My pleasure.
Francis Pindar (A2A)
Thanks for watching or listening to the Salesforce posse podcast now please, please, please, if you like, or what you see or hear then please rate this podcast in your podcast player, as it tells me that there are people out there that actually are listening to this and that it’s useful to them. Also, it helps the podcast algorithms to kind of elevate the podcast in the different podcast directories which will be really helpful for me, as well. And finally, if you do have a question that you want to ask on the podcast, then head to Salesforce posse.com/message. And maybe you will appear in the next podcast, but apart from that, thanks for listening, and until next time,
Confidence is coming from a place of feeling comfortable. Andrea Pacini
In this episode of the Salesforce Posse Podcast, I have a conversation with Andrea Pacini. He is a presentation coach and Head of Ideas on Stage UK. He specialises in working with business owners, leaders and their teams who want to become more confident presenters.
Since 2010 Ideas on Stage has worked with thousands of clients around the world, including companies like Microsoft, Lacoste, The World Bank and over 500 TEDx speakers.
Andrea is on a mission to stop great ideas from failing just because of the way they are presented. His vision is to help hundreds of thousands of business leaders share their message so they can grow their business, increase their influence and make a positive impact in the world.
We start the conversation with Andrea’s childhood, career journey, and why he wanted to become a presentation coach. Communication is how we share thoughts, ideas, and feelings. To establish good communication between people, we have to explain them effectively. It doesn’t matter if you have brilliant ideas or experiences if you can’t communicate them properly. Every audience is different. Some prefer simple language, and some prefer more complex language. It’s based on the knowledge level the audience has on the subject. In this part of our conversation, we discuss the importance of using language that everybody in your audience can understand.
[03.12] Communication – It doesn’t matter that you have ideas, expertise, or experience if you can’t communicate them effectively.
[10.11] Pitching and convincing – Why do we want to adjust differently to different audiences?
[15.58] PowerPoint – Andrea explains what we have to do to deliver an effective presentation.
[19.29] Public speaking – What do we need to do to make a public presentation to our fullest potential?
[21.53] Rehearsing – The best way to address resistance, public speaking anxiety, or nervousness is to internalize your message.
[23.24] Confidence – The more you do something, the more confident you become at doing it.
[29.37] The advice – Andrea’s advice to improve your presentation skills.
[34.23] Online content – The difference between an average communicator and a great communicator is applying the fundamental principles of communication.
A brand new episode of the Salesforce Posse podcast is now live. I, Francis Pindar, had the honour of hosting Lars Malmqvist, Partner at Implement Consulting Group, a #Salesforce CTA from Denmark, who is the master of Salesforce anti-patterns and generative AI.
🔎 In this episode, we deeply dive into the world of Salesforce anti-patterns, like the common belief that ‘declarative is always safe’. Any seasoned Salesforce professional will confirm that this is far from the truth! As well as some other fascinating anti-patterns.
🧩 We also unpack the concepts of patterns and anti-patterns, highlighting their significance in architecting sound Salesforce solutions.
💼 If you are a Salesforce admin, developer, or aspiring architect, this episode is a treasure trove of tips and insights to help you navigate your career path and avoid common pitfalls in Salesforce implementation.
📘 Lars, author of two insightful books on AI and Salesforce anti-patterns, helps us explore the limitations of the platform and design decisions to take, which isn’t adequately addressed by Salesforce’s own training.
🎧 Tune in to the Salesforce Posse podcast to enrich your understanding of Salesforce anti-patterns and glean insights from industry influencers. You’re guaranteed to take away something valuable from my conversation with Lars!
Improving the maturity of the Salesforce DevOps process is essential for increasing work productivity and delivering value to an organization in a timely manner. A key aspect of enhancing DevOps involves prioritizing testing and shifting it to the early stages of development. It is crucial to choose the right functional testing tool, comprehend quality, and optimize release quality in Salesforce implementation projects. In this podcast episode, we have Samuel, a product manager and architect at Provar, a leading Salesforce testing tool, who shares his expertise on various quality and testing topics in the Salesforce ecosystem. He also explains how to integrate quality into all aspects of a Salesforce project.
Samuel is a respected figure in the Salesforce community, serving as a product manager and architect at Provar. He is known for his proficiency in developing apps on the Salesforce platform and his emphasis on quality. Provar is an automation testing tool that is integrated and code-free, tailored particularly for Salesforce. Samuel is also the founder of Yplicity, a Salesforce ISV partner, and has extensive experience in transforming intricate concepts into user-friendly apps for the Salesforce ecosystem. In this podcast, Samuel shares his perspective on what defines quality. The conversation then delves into the challenges of balancing automated testing with small development changes in Salesforce. Samuel also discusses the trend of embedding testing and quality frameworks within DevOps processes to maintain quality in the industry. Additionally, we explore how to handle failed deployments or implementations in production. We also touch on the importance of achieving comprehensive coverage across all systems through end-to-end testing expansion. Samuel offers recommended resources for those interested in unit testing, automated testing, and quality assurance. Lastly, Samuel shares his own experience in the Salesforce ecosystem. This podcast is a must-listen for anyone interested in quality and testing in Salesforce implementation projects.
Francis Pindar 0:00
Hello, my name is Francis Pender, and you are watching or listening to the Salesforce posse podcast, where I speak to Salesforce industry influencers. So we can get you a better understanding of how to excel in a career path from a Salesforce admin or developer, to an architect. And in this conversation, I’m going to be talking to Samuel Aurora, who is a product manager and architect at PROVAR, a fantastic testing tool for the Salesforce platform. But I wanted to pick his brains about how you build for quality, and how you stop pushing the needle to improve outcomes in Salesforce implementation projects. So interested in maximising release quality, I’ll want to take a look at how you choose a functional testing tool correctly, or even understand what quality is, then we’re gonna, you’re gonna get a lot of value out of this conversation with Samuel. So without further ado, let’s go. So here we have Samuel Arroyo. Arroyo, is that correct? I was getting those wrong. Brilliant. So how did you get into the Salesforce ecosystem?
Samuel Arroyo 1:26
But it’s a bit of a funny story I was studying at university. And I think it was it was a three year degree. It was a third year, and we had some conferences, and a startup from Madrid came, they did a couple of sessions. One was about Google Cloud. And the other was Salesforce. I didn’t care about Salesforce at all. We will was the name I wanted? Yeah, exactly. So I definitely went, went to the Google Cloud conference. And I will say there was they did like some sort of interview, where I tried to explain Oh, yeah, I did that. And this and that. And, and I will say that they never contacted me for a while then. I was on holidays. And they reached out to me. They got at the startup and they call me and like, Would you be interested in working in this startup working in in Salesforce like the Salesforce ecosystem? I don’t have a clue what Salesforce is. I’m calling your holidays. But I mean, it’s been, you’re a young person, you don’t say no to a job fairly. Recently, this 50% You’ll say no to a job. So that’s it, like okay, as I’ll be starting in a couple of weeks. And you also find like, when I started the team, that the few people that also joined the already one week training, were training, they were just following one of the Salesforce resources. And there was a like a big book of Salesforce where they they had everything, and they were going through that. But I figured out there were workbooks, there was a like a visa force workbook. And then I started using those, which were much more practical. And and in a week, I really caught up on surpass them, because they were so yeah,
Francis Pindar 3:25
brilliant. Yeah, I remember that. So when did you get started with how many years ago
Samuel Arroyo 3:29
in the cell now? Must be like 2012.
Francis Pindar 3:33
Okay, yeah. So yeah, it’s kind of like, all you had was like the workbooks, the online manual. And that was it. And the Salesforce courses, you know, which you could spend hideous amounts of money on? And that was it, and maybe some developer forums. I think that was it. We’re here. Yeah, talking about quality. And so I think kind of it’s it’s really important for the old days and architect and new way, making sure that that what’s being envisioned, what the goals of the organisation are, are being delivered, I suppose through my architectural designs and also being kind of implemented in the organisation. But I think, yep, I think maybe the first question to ask is like, what does quality mean to you? I think,
Samuel Arroyo
yeah, that’s a good question. Isn’t gnarling to me, I think quality means different things to different people. When I think about quality, I can think of the whole lifecycle and how different people will think that what they do, there’s an aspect of quality. So I think it’s easier when when we look at something that is not software, sometimes and when you have a watch, and you think this watch is quality, like it has good quality, but do you look in it, is it because it’s robust? You can go on the water? Or is it because it didn’t last very long. So I think For me quality, it is that something is doing what it’s supposed to be doing. By when it comes to software. For some people quality means it never breaks. But for other people that are more interested in the experience of the user, for them good quality means a good user experience sometimes. So as a business is important to define, what do we mean by quality? All the different angles by which you can look at quality with, which I think in the end is, well, why what, what is what does good look like? Then set the benchmark? And then once you know what good looks like, it’s like, okay, that is quality that we’re striving for. And, and then anything below that is room for improvement.
Francis Pindar 5:55
Yeah, I think it’s, I always found, yeah, when done done always is the same kind of thing. I remember working in a film post production company. And it’s like, when, and it’s very design thing, right? Creating CG graphics and stuff for films, and it’s very creative. And it was like, when is it got to that kind of quality bar, that you’re happy with it? And these designers that are constantly tweaking and twisting and making it even more perfect? And it’s like, for them the bar was when they ran out of money and ran out of time? That was it. That was the, that’s when you kind of hit that that quality level, right? Because you had to ship it. And I remember where one film, it was literally, it was releasing in two weeks, and they were still, you know, twiddling with it. But so, obviously, like, world, you know, everybody’s kind of looking at the kind of key kind of ways of improving my DevOps process quality being kind of core to that. And it Okay, so there’s one thing of kind of understanding from your organisation, what quality looks like for them, so you know what to focus on? But how do you then kind of understand what the maturity is, and what the kind of the process is to maintaining that and, and setting that, especially if you’ve come from like, a very manual testing, kind of organisation?
Samuel Arroyo 7:31
Yeah, that does a good a whole area in itself, there are different works that try to help people understand the level of maturity? I think it depends on in, how many parts? Are you looking at quality? How are you measuring it? Sometimes it’s not when measured, sometimes is not tested, so you know what quality looks like. But then once you ship a particular feature, and you tick the box, then that say that you never looked back to see if that’s still the case that there are many changes. You may have to do with automation as well. So without automation, it is very difficult to scale. And I’ve seen, I used to work in a consultancy, and quality was always a difficult topic because they pay you by the hour. And that means Well, the thing is, well, you will spend time making sure that everything looks perfect. That is time and money. So you need to sacrifice something, and sometimes you optimise for speed or for the budget that you have, and you have to sacrifice quality. And then the cases come later when they open a case this is not working as expected. And then you look back to the user story. And he was nowhere there. It wasn’t on the acceptance criteria. And then he’s like, Well, we never said that. This was what quality good quality man so even as a product manager, I find that sometimes that I may not spend too much time on a user story or the acceptance criteria. And then when the team comes back with most of it already done, I realise is not as good as I thought. But it’s not the team’s problem. It’s just I didn’t specify in detail what could look like what
Francis Pindar 9:37
is actually a picture isn’t it is that of that house and you’re kind of building a house and different people’s view the house looks different, you know, product, five storey massive mansion kind of thing. Where’s the developers just looking at as a cottage?
Samuel Arroyo 9:53
Yeah. Yeah. And that happens as well like probably In your case, like if you’re managing people, or you’re training junior developers or junior Salesforce admins, and they do something, and you look at the quality of what they’ve done, it’s not good enough for me. But I cannot just tell you all the time to come to my standards of quality, because that will mean that you are senior, and not Junior, like, you don’t have that much to learn. And also, I don’t want to micromanage you. So you have to sacrifice quality because the other person has to learn.
Francis Pindar 10:35
Yeah, interesting. So yeah, so it’s kind of a levels of quality based on the levels of experience developing in Salesforce, or implementing in Salesforce. So how do you manage that in React? So okay, so obviously, you said like, one of the things for scaling, tech quality and testing is going the kind of automated testing route. So what are the kind of the argument that we see got, because the scalable argument for automated testing, but what are the others because always find that, it’s almost like not dancing with the devil, but you can go down a road where everything is so automated testing. And there’s so much kind of engineering there in the automated testing, that when it comes to making small dev changes, which are small on the development side of Salesforce, the impact on the automation, automated testing is huge. And you kind of you almost ended up doing more work supporting the automated testing than you are actually doing the change. So I suppose it’s what’s the balance? How would you kind of achieve that you’re not kind of gone? So far, the automated testing? And what are the arguments for automated testing in that in those regards?
Samuel Arroyo 11:53
Yeah, I think that, that that may be some sort of implicit assumption, especially from I think, the software industry, where, because it’s so easy to build things, we are not used to having these processes in place where quality is very important. Like you look at the manufacturing of cars, yeah, then quality is much more important than it is for us, even though, because obviously, in that case, you’re risking lives. But some of the software, the more implications it has for human beings, or the economic system, whatever the more quality goes into it and cannot be escaped,
Francis Pindar 12:38
which I always find funny, because in the IT world, because it’s like, yes, you’ve got this risk of a life when manufacturing a car, but with it being so unregulated, essentially. But with AI, and many things kind of coming in that actually, the things you’re doing could impact the lives of people. And actually, yeah, having more focus on quality and testing is something that maybe is a safer way of working, then suddenly being liable for something that you had no idea that your development change, there’s my hate in the real world.
Samuel Arroyo 13:17
Yeah. And obviously, I think that there’s that famous debate where real real engineers say subway engineers are not engineers, that you don’t put into your software, the same amount of effort that somebody building a bridge, or our building is going through the risks, you need to calculate everything, you have to go through several levels of quality, everything’s tested. Whereas we software, we just do it and hope for the best. And
Francis Pindar 13:48
we use common of the
Samuel Arroyo 13:55
that I think that that is to say that maybe it’s because we undertake quality, as serious as other engineering specialties. So I think historically, we’re just not thinking about it. We think about speed, train the edge technologies, something that is new, we like to tinker with things. And when it comes to quality, even in the Salesforce world, I wonder how many people even do like test driven development, which I think is an effort on the part of engineers to start with testing and having already done from the beginning, instead of writing the unit test at the end, where it’s really a white box, like you implemented it, your destiny, you know, all the workarounds and all the backdoors and everything and you know how to make it pass like what’s what’s even the point? Some people say, Well, don’t do your own unit tests, have somebody else do them, which means there’s also some knowledge transfer and you cannot see it As you might bring up a box of doughnuts, and then the other person who does, like we tried to do, we tried to get around, improve quality. And I think the automation just makes you stay on top of your game. Because if you know you’re constantly being monitored, and whatever you produce is going to be tested. Like it’s not, it’s not, it’s not going to go into production ignored. If if the automated testing is realised in, for example, because of your changes, the code coverage is going down. What do you do? Or because of your changes, these are the code, these are the flowers, this this thing is breaking. It’s only you’re accountable. So the thing is, if you do that manually, again, you are at the risk of just missing testing a specific user journey, or? Yeah, I think automation allows you to scale, which I think is the main issue.
Francis Pindar 16:08
Do you are you seeing in the industry more because I’m seeing it from my side where, you know, augers are just getting more complex, more troublesome? And actually, people are thinking a lot more around actually, how do we maintain the quality but still kind of keep this feed through the orc and just kind of interesting, you see it like your side, actually more people wanting to kind of embed testing and quality frameworks within their kind of DevOps processes or within the way they’re working? Is that changing?
Samuel Arroyo 16:40
You know? Yeah, I think that there’s still picking up I think that’s why, for example, the likes of Kobato bought some testing software. And we see more Salesforce ISVs focused on on testing. But last month is DevOps is not as big as that, but I think it’s definitely something that people that have been burned with implementations are realising well, what’s the point on just wasting millions on implementing Salesforce? And not getting something in the end that we thought we were gonna get? He’s like, Oh, well, maybe the problem is not Salesforce. Maybe you then the fire what good looks like and how do you test the quality and
Francis Pindar 17:29
where the source of truth is, have been built? Yeah. Yeah.
Samuel Arroyo 17:33
And even the, the main didn’t maintainability of all of that. I think many businesses just use consultancies to implement Salesforce or changes to their Salesforce org. But when they’re gone, where’s that documentation? Where are the tests? How do I know if I can make a change? Will it break what the other company built for me? Am I going to lose all that investment? Because I like how do you now. So unless you have tests that allow you to feel safe to make improvements to your Salesforce org, you’re just in the unknown, you don’t feel confident to make any change?
Francis Pindar 18:16
is one of those problems isn’t the way the ecosystem has grown? Yeah, it’s it’s kind of very consultant driven implementations. And I think again, this is I think this is where again, where people have got to where the maturity the old you had, like, all kinds of different consultancies and people working in the same thing, and you’ve kind of got away with it. Yeah, it’s kind of Oh, issue small issues. Okay, resolve them, they are happening. But now it’s the well, actually, it’s a bit of a quagmire, you know, we change this things are hidden limits over here. And we didn’t realise, and you’re kind of, I’m not, it’s almost not quite the end of that kind of code thrashing. scenario, where literally, it’s just quicker to start, again, is to actually try and fix everything. So how, what would your approach be, then if you are in a scenario where you aren’t doing manual testing, or you your quality, you know, is suffering, you’re getting a lot of failed deployments or failed implementations going into production that just bugs appearing a lot more. And you know, your testing is kind of manual at the moment. What, what are your first steps you said, like you’re defining what quality is, and what good looks like, but then what’s the next step after that?
Samuel Arroyo 19:40
So Well, if you’ve had problems already, with your implementation, you can probably track back what the issue was. I’ve seen this many people working around the established process where it’s like, well, you want to make a change in production. You have to go through the different sandboxes somebody has to prove it. We need to run tests and then you we can deploy that, do you then just do changes in production? Yeah. So somebody may have done that without you knowing to make a validation rule. And then suddenly you want to deploy and you cannot do it anymore. So if you can prevent people from working around your process, that’s one thing. Then I think one of the barriers is something that you mentioned, which is not getting, it’s not bored, it’s just getting angry about how much time is consuming to just keep the quality up. And and the more changes that you do, the more you have to keep track of. So okay, how are you going to define what your business should be doing, like what the system should be doing? You’re going to rely on your you already know what user stories is. So I’m actually updating those once you finish with to reflect what the actual is in the system, because from the original idea until implementation, things may have changed. Some people might say, Well, why don’t you use the test cases? To tell you what the business is doing? It makes sense. Because, okay, let’s not think about test cases as something I need to do to do to, to make sure things I work in is like, these are the source of truth, the same way that you may argue, well, I don’t know what the code should be doing. But I, if I look at my unit tests, they should be telling me this is what they should be doing. If you don’t update your tests, suddenly you the now, but what the business should be doing what the system should be doing. So if you’re starting with manual testing, because it’s better than nothing, to be honest. And then it gets to the point where things break because Julian test them. And you may be the only person who cares about it, or the only person in the team that can do quality. And that’s something I’ve seen more recently, with all these layoffs, unfortunately, the people working in quality are laid off, because it’s one of those things that they sacrifice, like, Well, yeah, we need them. So we just lay them off, or
Francis Pindar 22:27
whoever wants to go, Yeah, you’re squeezed on time, what goes quality testing? It’s
Samuel Arroyo 22:34
and and then you see the result? companies try to release software after laying off. And then for some reason, there’s more quality issues than before. You never know.
Francis Pindar 22:48
You’re not implying something here that happened recently.
Samuel Arroyo 22:54
But I wonder, obviously, I’m thinking about it almost every day. And yeah, I wonder, well, who got laid off? And how do you fill the gap? If if the person was doing manual testing, and you lay that person off? That’s it, no one is doing quality. If at least you have some automated testing, while you can keep running those tests up to the point where you will need to update them eventually with with all the changes coming. So the thing with Salesforce developers are they have to do unit testing is inevitable for them. They can cheat the system because the only thing that is known as
Francis Pindar 23:33
just code. Yeah, get your code coverage. And away we go. Yeah.
Samuel Arroyo 23:37
Yeah. And it goes garbage is? Doesn’t really Yeah. Yeah, ideally, would be. And if it goes down, it’s telling you something is happening. But then you realise, well, that’s a problem for developers to figure out to make sure that they’re following their own best practices. But the thing is, I think in the Salesforce ecosystem, there is less and less push to code and more teachers built with flows and declarative tools. And I think the issue is, how do you test that because as a developer, you have unit tests, and the admins don’t have those tools. And it’s only been recently that Salesforce added a bit of testing or declarative testing on flogs. And from what I’ve heard, I haven’t used it myself. And what I’ve heard is, it’s not great. And
Francis Pindar 24:35
shall we say, yeah, yeah.
Samuel Arroyo 24:37
But it opens the conversation is like, Well, what about all these declarative processes that we’re building? How do we test them? While it’s flowers, you can still use unit tests, but then you need to rely on a developer.
Francis Pindar 24:52
And I think it’s also it’s like the the actual if you’re kind of thinking of the end to end testing, you could be including other systems. in that as well, so actually, it’s wider than Salesforce. Because you’re wanting to test that entire process through to an invoicing system or whatever it may be. And yeah, it’s more than just one piece of the puzzle, I suppose. And how would you kind of get that coverage across?
Samuel Arroyo 25:21
Yeah. And that’s where tools that allow you to automate through the UI. So from the perspective of a user that is interacting with the application, those are the ones that can help you to test your screen flows, your different user journeys. And obviously, there’s a number of tools in the market that allows you to test it there, you have tools that are more generic, even open source, anything like Selenium. They’re open source, but the definitely free. And those are generically you can test every website. The whole idea is, you locate something on the page. And then you just say how you want to interact, you want to click it the owner, put a text on the input, read the text, what do you want to do? And then you have different technologies as well, like, you have like the robot framework, which is a different way of writing your test scripts. And then you go, Okay, do I need to know development? Like, do I need to be a developer to try to automate my test cases? In some cases? Yes, like, if you’re using selenium, or you’re using the robot framework, is you may not look like COVID code. But still, you need to write
Francis Pindar 26:42
that code like way, yeah.
Samuel Arroyo 26:45
And you’re writing a file, it doesn’t feel intuitive, like just drag and drop, click lick lick. You have different tools in the market. And they have different approaches. As well, you have certain things with Salesforce because you may write your test script or read your test case with one of these tools. And then things may change. Even Salesforce may release a change that for some reason, it breaks your test case. And we’ve seen that as they were moving from aura into lightning web components, they were changing the UI back in they were in the way they were rendering things. And depending on your locators, then they could break or still work. And then okay, who do I need? What do I do every time Salesforce releases? Three times a year? Like, do I need to go through all my test cases and fix them? Or does it do allow me to work around that? Do they take care of that or not? So the effort that takes to maintain your test case is definitely something to consider.
Francis Pindar 27:55
So what else do you look for when you’re kind of looking for a functional testing tool?
Samuel Arroyo 28:02
So I think is how easy it is to build a test case. So what’s the learning curve? Is it easy to is it for developers, Kenyan citizen tester, like somebody with no experience whatsoever of writing any code? Start doing it? Or is it for people like admins who want to just automate their manual testing and get rid of all those hours spent to manual testing and do something else? So how easy is it to create a test case? And then how easy is it to maintain? I think those are the two main points. Forget about exporting your task is like, I think once you’re locked in with one tool, the pain of moving to another one is like, I might as well not do it. Yeah, I think that’s why it’s important to choose the right one at the beginning. Sometimes you don’t realise those two things, how easy it is to build and maintain until you’ve started using it. And sometimes there’s just not enough time during the trial period to figure out, is it something I can pick up? Is the name of months? Gonna take me? How do I test fictitious changes that may break? And so what I see with companies, they they tried to do a bit of due diligence. They compare different tools to see at a financial level. Yeah, and yeah, try to test them break them away. But yeah, also thinking of their arm people, like, well, if we need to rely on developers, then good luck trying to go like hiring them, and keeping them and then otherwise, we may have many more non technical people who could who could pick these up and make automated tests much more easily.
Francis Pindar 29:59
All right, cool. That’s fine. I think we get anything else you want to talk about quality? What are your best resources for finding out? How if if you want to learn more about unit testing automated testing quality?
Samuel Arroyo 30:18
Well, obviously there’s a lot out there. I did a course on Coursera. About software testing, I wouldn’t recommend it because it’s just too lengthy for people. But there’s many groups of people the same way we have our like Salesforce Developer Groups and user groups. They’re much more about testing because it’s everywhere. So you go to like Ministry of testing. There are testing conferences all the time going on. There’s test automation University. We have University of PROVAR. So there is a lot of courses information out there. Okay. Salesforce, I think that they have a few Trailhead modules for it. I know that the folks are probably if done two modules. Okay. Maybe going for a third? Yeah.
Francis Pindar 31:21
Okay. I’ll put those in the show notes if I can think about. Cool. Okay, so it’s probably a question I asked everybody at the end, or if I remember, at the end of the podcast, if you could wind back the clock to a point in time in the past and give yourself some advice would it be and when would that time be?
Samuel Arroyo 31:46
The I would probably go the five years ago. So yeah, since the beginning, I always wanted to work on products will product. done that since I started my career in, in Salesforce. But for some reason I was wanted to do that within the company I was at. And he actually never happened. Like, I didn’t get the support or things like that. So few years ago, I just thought, well, I could have just as bill as well build these apps myself. So I set up my own company. I created some epic things apps. And I use my free time to do that. And actually, that’s that’s how I sort of got the job. As a product manager, I switched from more technical tech, CTO to senior product manager, yeah, moved to product management, things to focus in on my free time to do products and just shifting. So I think it’s don’t expect other people or your company to fulfil your dreams. And just try and use even that. Yeah, whatever time you have free time after work hours to pursue those things. And you may be able to switch careers or to get something out of it.
Francis Pindar 33:16
Yeah, definitely. Great advice. Yeah. And to be. Yeah, it’s been the same and similar kind of journey, I suppose. And, and also, just that kind of realising that actually, I could ask my boss and the company to actually work four days a week rather than five. And they were actually up for it. And for me, that was quite a way of actually going well, I want to try something new. But I don’t want to risk everything. I’m just going to reduce my days down. And actually, I can start working on something else on the side. But yeah, fab. So these apps still on AppExchange?
Samuel Arroyo 33:50
Yeah, a couple of them. Going for us. They’re still going through security review, however. But yeah, sort of like a hobby of mine to just build interesting things in there.
Francis Pindar 34:04
So you know, are you the product owner of prover, or one of the products within prover?
Samuel Arroyo 34:11
So when I joined Pro was the company name, and the only product they had was PROVAR. Yeah, that was that was it. But then, a few months after I started working on a new AppExchange product so that the main product that does the test automation, is not on the epic scenes is a desktop app, where you build like a studio like an IDE. And you can run it on your laptop. You can write on the cloud wherever you want. I started working on an epic since product that Richard Clarke had worked previously. So yeah, yeah. And it was about test management. And my background is not quite yet. Oh, like I know what quality but I’m a tester. So I had to dive into what do testers Do what is the quality lifecycle? How does this even work? And, yeah, I’ve, I’ve been the product manager for what used to be test manager, and then they renamed it that to product manager. We launched it back in August last year. Okay. 2022. And it’s grown massively in terms of the scope of what he does. Because well, first is our first application on the App Exchange. But there there isn’t that much about quality on the App Exchange. And there’s even a handful of applications that focus on that. So we wanted to cover all the bases, we allow people to manage their testing lifecycle. So during the test products with test plans, many people don’t do planning at all, like they don’t think and write things down. Before they implement, they just go to straight to implementation. So we tried to train people and raise awareness like, first you plan your design, then you implement
Francis Pindar 36:04
agile, we just push it live.
Samuel Arroyo 36:12
The cool thing is that we wanted to make it sort of a hub to connect to all the different tools that do quality or have to do with quality. So I started, the thing is, obviously, with my developer background, is like, well, I’m going to build this thing, I’m not just going to manage it, I’m going to build the whole thing. And in a way, because it was so like a side project within the company, the main product was the automation baits. They left me like free rein, like do you want. So that’s what I did. I started growing and plugins, so like think extension packages to the main core baggage, and integrate. So you cannot do quality on its own. Like, you cannot just have test cases on its own, that you relate them to user stories, where two people have user stories, DERA Okay, I need to connect the JIRA, I need to bring those into the tool. And then as your DevOps people, at least our customers use that. So those two plugins, then quality is also part of DevOps. So the easiest thing is to integrate it with the native there was players. And the cool thing is good timing, because Salesforce even was getting into the game. So yeah, we have a plugin for Caballo plugin for for awesome, and a plugin for self was ever present. And we were working with, with Salesforce from the beginning, since they were on a pilot to see okay, what are you guys doing? And how can we plug into there, it’s not easy because of using how it is they have a separate interface, but we just worked around it. Like when I created our own app. It’s a nine and experience and just work that way. But that’s how we connect it to DevOps. And it brings something interesting to the table. Because sometimes when you are deploying a number of metadata changes, you’ll know what to test. Like, well, if you know, the test classes that I’ve been deployed, why do I need to tell you what you need test to run? Well, you know, you should know because the first time you don’t know but you should know. So, bro money are automatically tells you, okay, these are the test classes you should be running, or these are the test cases you should be writing because we know the coverage of the metadata, we know what metadata you’re changing, so we bring it out to the table. And then finally, something that personally I feel like is ignored sometimes or if it hasn’t picked up a smart is called quality. And there’s maybe a handful of players that that do that. So we integrated with Clayton we integrated with quality clouds with you, we want to be the central hub where people go to understand the quality of their Salesforce orgs. And of their efforts. technical depth Go code quality is part of the picture. So we should be bringing some of that data from those platforms into the hub. So we have a core package that allows you to do a lot but then we have a lot of integrations that allow you to plug in all that information and to integrate your testing ways your DevOps, bring in information from different places. And then even recently with you know, all the fuss about AI and and I was I was I mean I thought of just quitting LinkedIn for a while and Twitter because it’s just these are the 10 different ways that you should do your prompts. And this is like it’s just annoying up to a point and but then I started thinking well, what’s the point? I know for these AI views and actually putting in inaction. So I started thinking, well, I want AI to take away the most boring things. Especially if I think about citizen testers or admins wanting testing. What are the barriers to start doing it? Sometimes is, well, I’m looking at a user story. Give me suggestions on how to test this. So I quickly integrated with open AI. And he’s no good. He’s just story. Can you give me five test cases?
Francis Pindar 40:36
Is it good? Is it coming up with results?
Samuel Arroyo 40:39
Well, it is. It is good. Sometimes you like you get the results. But sometimes, the answers are more clever than others. Right? Like, let’s try again. It okay, I prefer this ones because obviously, there’s not it’s not perfect. But yeah, it generates five test cases. And then somebody who may not be very used to testing say, well, at least is some inspiration.
Francis Pindar 41:06
Yeah. Lisa, where to start or understand some approach. It’s just I think it’s a challenge of like, it’s still cloud sourced content. Right. So it’s still Yeah, the maturity of what it’s found. Turn out it serves it up. But yeah, it’s interesting, though, is the other shit as I’m assuming. I’m just thinking maybe that actually the test cases that kind of, were actually more accurate or not more accurate, but give you more ideas for juniors than some some other kinds of types of I want this code written like this. And it just comes out with it workable, but just doesn’t scale. type code. But yeah, okay, interesting.
Samuel Arroyo 41:48
So yeah, that’s why I do, I’m only working on that, seeing how we can expand. And I think the main vision is to raise awareness about quality, to have a tool that anyone in the Salesforce ecosystem can say, if I get that tool, it will help me to get more serious about quality, provide a sort of framework that I can follow, it will allow me to connect to the tools I already have in my tech stack. And to make sure that I’m embedding quality into the other things I do however there
Francis Pindar 42:21
Yeah. And in like Provo has always been like that kind of gold standard of testing within the Salesforce ecosystem anyway, but yeah, I love it’s yeah, it’s a good approach. Good, good app, I think, to really kind of glue everything together. And yeah, kind of go a kind of quality first approach to everything. Cool. Well, thank you so much for being on the toss, the pot itself sort of quasi podcast talking about quality and testing. Hope you enjoyed it. It was good, fun. Cool. I look forward to seeing you soon. Thank you. Thanks for watching, or listening to the Salesforce posse podcast. Now please, please, please, if you like, or what you see or hear then please rate this podcast in your podcast player, as it tells me that there are people out there that actually are listening to this and that it’s useful to them. Also, it helps the podcast algorithms to kind of elevate the podcast in the different podcast directories which will be really helpful for me, as well. And finally, if you do have a question that you want to ask on the podcast, then head to Salesforce posse.com/message. And maybe you will appear in the next podcast, but apart from that, thanks for listening, and until next time,
Whether you are an experienced Tableau user or are just starting your data visualization journey, this episode will provide valuable insights and inspiration. So sit back, relax, and join us for an exciting conversation where we will discuss everything about Tableau with Sarah Bartlett and Zach Bowders. In this episode, we will dive into the Tableau ecosystem, explore the vibrant community surrounding the tool, and discover how to learn more about Tableau.
Sarah Bartlett is a Tableau Visionary with over 12 years of experience partnering with clients to deliver analytical solutions to solve complex data challenges. She is passionate about data community building, user enablement, data strategy, and helping organizations embrace a modern data culture. Sarah is a Tableau Public Ambassador, a Tableau Desktop Certified Professional, and has experience working with other BI tools. She is the founder of the famous #IronQuest community project and co-leads the London Tableau User Group. In 2020, she was recognized as a Tableau Visionary and served her fourth annual term.
Zach Bowders is a Business Intelligence Specialist at Jones Lang LaSalle, passionate about data visualization and storytelling. He has a background in data analysis and holds an MBA degree. He is particularly interested in understanding businesses and using data to drive change and improve processes. Zach is skilled in various data tools and technologies, including Tableau, SQL, and Excel, and is always looking for new ways to innovate with data.
Throughout today’s episode, Sarah and Zach converse about various topics related to Tableau and data analysis. They outline what Tableau is and share how they got into the Tableau world. They also emphasize the importance of Tableau Public, where users can download the tool and access the Viz Gallery, including the “VIZ of the Day” selection that highlights exciting and cool visualizations made by the community. Moreover, they suggest downloading Tableau Public is a great way to start learning and that sharing work on social media, such as LinkedIn or Twitter, can be valuable. Also, Sarah and Zach encourage users not to be afraid to share their work publicly, as the community is generally favourable. However, they mention that different social networks attract other people and reactions. Sharing work publicly and asking for feedback is crucial for growth and improvement.
Furthermore, we explore the importance of storytelling in creating visualizations, and they predict the future of Tableau and data science for the next few years. They recommend using Tableau Student Guide, Tableau Public, and Viz Gallery as starting points for learning Tableau and emphasize how working with Tableau can help in developing effective communication skills with data. Finally, Sarah and Zach reflect on their life lessons and share the one piece of advice they would give their younger selves if they could turn back time.
00:00 Introduction
03:50 What is Tableau?
10:51 What is Tableau Public?
14:14 Free Learning resources
18:24 Why is Storytelling in Data Important
21:50 The Future of Tableau and Data Science
29:31 How to start learning Tableau
30:35 Why you should Share Your Work
35:17 Tableau Communication Mastery
39:02 Turning Back Time – Reflecting on life lessons
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