Get in the Flow With Teresa Garcia-Bovenmyer

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re joined by OG guest Teresa Garcia-Bovenmyer, now a Manager of Trailhead Marketing Infrastructure at Salesforce, to talk about everything Flow. We’re kicking off a 10-day campaign to get in the Flow, supported by a series of posts and videos on admin.salesforce.com to help you quickly learn how to innovate and build really awesome solutions with Flow.

Join us as we talk about how she replaced a third-party with a Flow in Salesforce, how she manages her distributed team, and what learning Flows can do for you as an admin.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Teresa Garcia-Bovenmyer.

A dream come true.

“Right out of college the economy wasn’t great, and a lot of the job offers I’d had were doing support,” Teresa says. “In 2012 I got a call to work for Cognizant doing support for Salesforce, and I jumped at it because I was already interested in the technology,” she says. She immediately fell in love with the platform: “I could see so many possibilities for how to get things to work. If you can dream it you can build it.” She eventually transitioned to admin and development work, which brought her to team Trailhead.

“It really is a dream come true, I wanted to work for Team Trailhead and people like Gillian and Mike,” Teresa says. In her role, she works with a great team of developers to make everything happen for the whole team, including our projects on the Admin Evangelist team.

Moving into a role where she’s in charge of multiple developers was definitely intimidating at first, but “I have a wonderful manager who saw that I could do more than what I was doing at the time and he pushed me to do more.” Since she’s done work as both an admin and a developer, she can guide her team to build solutions that are not just viable but are able to leverage the new technology coming out on the platform all the time.

The Flow behind the #AwesomeAdmin Super Quiz.

Teresa has specific experience with Flow trying to solve a problem that came up building something for Dreamforce. They first tried a third-party solution, but eventually realized they had all the tools they needed right there. Quizz is an internal custom object they’ve built to, well, run quizzes, using Flow to take the user through a bunch of questions and give them a result. For Dreamforce, they made the #AwesomeAdmin Super Quiz in the Admin Meadow.

One of the coolest things about using Flows on this component is that they could see the answers people were giving in real time, and simultaneously automate emails to them using Marketing Cloud. Because the tool doesn’t require coding, it was easy to build something quickly from the objects they made and adjust it on the fly. Even as the results were coming in they were able to go in while it was running and make some quick fixes, straight from the Admin Meadow.

How Teresa works with a distributed team.

Teresa’s team is actually distributed, with several members based in Uruguay. They all speak Spanish as their first language, Teresa included. They have a basic Scrum daily call to check in. “I’m in the middle between the development team and the stakeholders, trying to make sure that we have the proper structure in place to facilitate the deliverables for a project,” she says.

“We work a lot of hours trying to make sure that our structure is correct,” Teresa says, which means spending time with stakeholders so that she’s able to translate their needs into functional requirements for her team. The important thing is keeping the ability to have frequent, honest conversations with the team in order to stay on track. “Having developers who have varied development skills,” she says, “really helps us find the happy medium when we come to the table.”

Go with the Flow.

“Flow is incredibly versatile,” Teresa, “because it doesn’t require development.” You can bridge the gap between admin work and coding work to take things to the next level. As far as how to learn Flows, Teresa recommends thinking about it like a ladder. The first step is using Workflows and understanding how they function. From there, you want to move on to Process Builder, “because you can immediately make it work just from the knowledge from Workflows.”

Flows take all of it further with its versatility, but it’s not as hard as it sounds. “As an admin, we always have to push ourselves to learn more about the platform that we work on but the more we know the easier building Flows is because you already have the basic understanding of how that data model works within the platform,” she says, “it’s just a matter of imaging what you want to happen and working within that Flow process to make it happen.”

Understanding Flows also helps you better understand how coding and development works if you ever want to make the jump. Even if you don’t, it helps you collaborate with your team better and build better solutions.

Resources

• Be An Innovator with Flow
• Discover your #AwesomeAdmin Superpower Quiz
• Trailhead:
  • Build Flows with Flow Builder Trail

Social

• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns
• Teresa: @tgarciab
• Gillian: @gilliankbruce

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Full Show Transcript