Thu, 26 May 2022
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’ve got the Monthly Retro for May. Join us as we talk about the latest and greatest Salesforce content from May and reflect on an amazing, in-person TrailheaDX. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation from our Monthly Retro. TrailblazerDXThe April Retro dropped in the midst of TDX, so we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the amazing experience of being in person again. Many selfies were taken. We also launched the Salesforce Admins Skills Kit, a blueprint for the skills that help make a successful Salesforce Admin. It brings together all the skills beyond technical training that you need to succeed. There were so many great things going on at TDX so be sure to consult the wrap-up and listen to Mike and Gillian’s reflections on this episode. Blog highlights from MayAs we talk about all the skills that go into being an Admin that aren’t necessarily all about the technical side. This post highlights what goes into Business Analysis, and why it’s an essential skill for any Admin to cultivate. Video highlights from MayJennifer Lee has been a force of nature on the Admin Evangelist team. She’s doing a Youtube Live series where she uses automation and Flow to solve problems right in front of your very eyes. She stops and answers questions, too, so make sure to tune in and don’t miss this unique learning opportunity. Also, if you haven’t yet caught up on Release Readiness for Summer ‘22, make sure you get the low-down. Podcast highlights from MayGillian wanted to highlight two great pods from May. We got to meet Andrew Russo, a true Awesome Admin who broke down how he created a user management super app that does all that and a bag of chips. We also had Khushwant Singh on to demystify Experience Cloud. His team is up to all sorts of great work bringing dynamic forms to standard objects and improving performance all over the platform.
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Direct download: May_Monthly_Retro_with_Mike_and_Gillian.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PST |
Thu, 19 May 2022
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Khushwant Singh, SVP, Product Management at Salesforce.
Join us as we talk about his role heading up all things Experience—not just Experience Cloud but Experience Services, too.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Khushwant Singh. The Experience dream teamKhushwant, AKA “Khush”, heads up Experience at Salesforce. If that term is a little nebulous to you, you’re not alone, but Khush breaks it down for us. Experience Services brings a few teams together: the UI Platform team, the Experience Cloud team, the Mobile team, and the Mobify team. “We’re responsible for all things Experience, and it helps us build a common product strategy across the board,” Khush says, “whether you’re building an experience for an employee, a customer, or partner.”
Lightning Experience has really changed the game for Admins in terms of stepping up in their thinking about design, but Khush points out there’s also a bit of a divide there. “If you build a component for the App Builder, it may or may not work in the Experience Builder,” he says, “but as a Salesforce Admin or Developer, you want your investments to go across all of your various endpoints.” Re-architecting to improve scaling, performance, and customizabilityExperience Cloud is a very flexible tool that you should really look into if you haven’t yet. You can use it build out a simple marketing website, a self-service destination like a help center or account management site, or even a channel reselling portal or commerce storefront.
While Lightning and Aura have done a lot to enable Admins to build out things they never thought possible with low code and fast time to market, Khush admits we seem to have hit a wall from a performance, scale, and customizability point of view. To address that, they’ve been re-architecting to let you build new things more easily at a consumer-grade scale. What’s next for Experience CloudOne thing that will be going live soon (forward looking statement) is a major performance boost to public-facing apps and sites. They’ve revamped the out-of-the-box CDN (Content Delivery Network) to allow public aspects of your site and mobile apps to be cached at endpoints closer to the consumer, enabling much faster delivery. One other change is adding dynamic image resizing so the same image looks equally good on mobile, desktop, and tablet. The best part is these and many more improvements are enabled by default, so you get the performance boost without having to lift a finger.
Looking forward, Khush and his team are revamping the Salesforce Content Management System (CMS) to make it more robust, powerful, and responsive. They’re breaking down the barriers and rolling out the advanced version of Salesforce CMS to all customers for free, and you can get access to the new-and-improved JSON-based CMS 2.0 beta with an opt-in.
Khush also gives a preview into what he and his team are working on to make improvements to data to, for example, bring Dynamic Forms to all standard objects, and even more goodies for desktop, mobile, and everything in between. Make sure you listen to the full episode to hear what’s coming your way soon.
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Full show transcript Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce, and we have a really fun episode lined up for you. We are talking with Khushwant Singh, AKA Kush, who's SVP of Product Management here at Salesforce, in charge of all things experience. And I mean all things experience, not just experience cloud, but Experience Services. And if you're wondering what all that means, don't worry, he's going to answer that for you. So without further ado, let's get Kush on the pod. Kush, welcome to the podcast. Khushwant Singh: Thank you, Gillian. Gillian Bruce: It's wonderful to have you on. I am very much looking forward to our discussion because we are talking about something that might be a little nebulous to some of us, especially if you've been in the Salesforce ecosystem for a while. We have experience cloud, Experience Services, experience all the things. Kush, clarify for us what all of that means. Khushwant Singh: Well, Gillian, I wish I got that question, or rather I wish I had proactively answered that question at the recent TDX. So just a bit of a sidetrack, a little, for those of you who attended the recent TDX, we had a true to the call session where a few of us were up on stage and I introduced myself as, "My name's Kush, I'm a product manager and I work on all things experiences." Now, I honestly thought that I would be inundated with questions, but I realized that I actually got zero questions, and I realized that people just probably didn't get what all things experience means. So I'm going to learn from that, and be very clear in our conversation over here. So taking a step back, when we say, we just recently realigned some of our teams internally, and we've created this group internally called Experience Services. And what Experience Services is, is that it brings together a few teams together. Gillian Bruce: So that was really helpful, it helped me understand this because again, experience is one of those words that, especially as a Salesforce admin, we're always thinking about our end users experience. That's our whole goal is to make it seamless and make it really useful. But as you just described, experiences is so many things. And I really appreciate that you have explained how the teams are uniting under this umbrella, to really think about the holistic picture when it comes to these different experiences pieces. UI, designers' mindset, is one of the core admin skills that we have because it's always thinking about how is my user experience in this? How can I maximize that experience, make it more efficient? And when you talk about Lightning experience that, God, talk about something that changed the game for admins. Khushwant Singh: I know, it did. It did entirely. It changed the game, but it also in full transparency, we added a bit of a divide as well. So if you take examples where you build a component for the App Builder, it may or may not work in the Experience Builder. You have a set of record components that look gloriously well on Lex, but they may not surface all of the capabilities, the actions don't surface in the Experience Builder or vice versa, the branding, the themeing, the mobile web responsiveness aspect of things that show up on Experience Builder, don't show up in the App Builder side of things. And so we have introduced this divide, which actually has made our... Well, each team has done a phenomenal job in going deep in their use cases, it's been at an expense of a divide where, as a Salesforce admin, as a Salesforce developer, you want your investments to go across all of your various endpoints. You might be a Salesforce admin for a company that is using Salesforce for their employee experience. For example, the service agents. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I think as a company, for someone who's maybe been in the ecosystem for a long time, this is a familiar road, is that we develop something really close. One team goes down and develops this new way of doing something and then we have shadow examples of it happening all separately within the company. And then, hey, let's bring everybody together, let's make this a more cohesive, holistic experience for our admins, for our developers. And it's exciting to bring all those really smart brains together to work together versus everyone working in a silo. Khushwant Singh: Indeed. And I think it's also indicative of trying to complete what we start. I think we've heard from admins, just this recent TDX, I mean, and at every TDX or any Dreamforce we do, any through the core session or any feedback we get from our MVPs and our admins out there, developers. They'll give us feedback, which is actually quite true. We start something, but we don't complete it. We say something that we will deliver something, but we, at times, don't deliver it. And so I think by bringing all of our teams together, that manage experience, I think it really... Organizational differences should not be the reason why we are not able to complete what we start or deliver what we say we will deliver. And so we are really hopeful that we'll be able to actually address those two key areas. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I've always heard the joke. We don't want to let our org chart show. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. Across both desktop and mobile for that matter. Gillian Bruce: Totally. Yeah. So Kush, before we get a little bit further, I mean, clearly you've got a big undertaking that you and your teams are doing. Can you tell me a little bit about you and how you got here? How long have you been at Salesforce because all of these works have been in progress for a long time. You mentioned when we released Lightning experience. Tell me a little bit about your background. Khushwant Singh: Oh yeah, sure. So I've been at Salesforce, I think, May sometime this month is my seventh year anniversary. Gillian Bruce: Congratulations. Khushwant Singh: Thank you. And I have truly enjoyed every single day of my time here at Salesforce. If you look at my background, I rarely spend more than five to six years in a company. And the fact that I'm here for the seventh year and still super challenged, just speaks towards what Salesforce offers from a challenge, point of view. There's always something new, there's always a new challenge for us to work on. And I've actually spent probably six and a half or six and three quarters of that seven years working on Experience Cloud. And so most of my background is from a B2C side of things. I spend some time at eBay, at Microsoft, at a startup called Mozi, working on a number of B2C oriented products. And I wanted to build products in an enterprise setting for enterprise, but I didn't want to veer too far away from the consumer side of things, the B2C side of things. And Experience Cloud really helped me walk that fine line where you're building these digital experience products that are used by enterprises for their customers, for their partners. So it really gave me a good middle ground. Gillian Bruce: I love that, getting the band back together, that's good. Khushwant Singh: There you go. Gillian Bruce: Okay. So let's talk a little bit about what's currently going on in Experience Cloud. So I know there were some good announcements at Dreamforce last year, at DBX this year. Can you talk a little bit about where we're currently at with Experience Cloud and why maybe an admin who hasn't yet dabbled in Experience Cloud might consider it? Khushwant Singh: Sure. So again, just to level set, one more time, a customer uses Experience Cloud for a number of use cases. You could use Experience Cloud to build out a simple marketing website, corporate website. You could use Experience Cloud to build out a self-service destination, so that self-service destination could be a help center, where you want to surface your knowledge base articles, where you wish to surface chat bots, where you wish to, for example, give your customers the ability to log in and manage their account, manage their profile for that matter. Similarly, you could use Experience Cloud to build out a channel reseller portal, where you may not be selling direct or you may be selling direct, but you also sell through your various channels and you need a way to manage your channels. You could use Experience Cloud to build a commerce storefront, whether it's a B2B commerce storefront, a B2C commerce storefront, et cetera. Gillian Bruce: Yes. We know Phil very well. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And so I think many of you must have seen his post where he's actually tracking the number of features that Experience Cloud launches. And he showed this bar graph, that showed the decreasing number of features over the last 18 months. And I replied to him and again, huge respect for Phil. And the fact of the matter is that we've had to go under the hood and rebuild from ground up using Lightning Web Runtime, using Lightning Web Components, so that we can actually deliver this consumer grade scale and performance and customizability, whether it's a B2B, B2C or B2E type of use case. And so we've been "silent for a while" but I'm super excited at what's coming in this summer release, and what's going to go. A lot of it going to go generally available this winter release. So again, long story short, we have been re-architecting for consumer grade across the entire customer journey. Gillian Bruce: I mean, that's impressive. I mean, we talk, especially even as admins, we have our own technical that we accrue over many years of admining a specific org. And sometimes you do, you got to just go back, peel back the covers and go in and make sure everything, the foundations are updated and running better. And hey, if you got a system that's not working for you, you got to invest the time and pause on the new stuff for a minute. Let's make the core stuff really work and function so that we can continue to build. So I love that transparency. I think it's really useful to help our admins and everybody understand what all of the hard work that your team is doing. And yeah, I mean, hey, now that we talked about all the hard work that you've all been doing, let's talk about some of the shiny new fun things that you have coming down the page. Khushwant Singh: Yeah, of course. So now I think on that note, I do also want to underscore that we have so many, all of that adoption stats that I talked about, they're all visual force or mostly Aura investments. And I want to underscore that we're not just leaving Aura or VF behind. And so there are many aspects that customers on Aura or customers on VF would also be able to benefit from. So let's dive into those shiny aspects of things. So I think if we think of this as maybe a stack diagram, maybe we'll start at the lowest level of infrastructure. What are we doing from an infrastructure point of view to help deliver that consumer grade type of experiences? So, first and foremost, we've invested a fair amount of time and effort to deliver performance. And so, one of the things you'll start to notice is, our out of the box CDN, so behind the scenes we work with Akamai, and what that does is that it allows, it just provides customers an out of the box CDN that they can actually choose to use. Gillian Bruce: So Kush, before we go forward, what is a CDN? Let's break down that. Khushwant Singh: Sure. It's a content delivery network. What that does is it allows your public aspects of your site, of your mobile app to be cashed on these endpoints, which are closer to the consumer, and so that allows for faster delivery. And if it doesn't change, if that public information doesn't change very much, it's served out of cash versus another round hub back. So again, at the end of the day, it's about better delivery of, faster delivery of the experience. Now this used to be a bit of an opt in thing and so what we have done now is as of spring and summer and winter, what we're doing is behind the scenes, we are rolling out as part of the secure domains effort, as secure domains is being enabled across all net new sites and existing sites. We are just enabling the default CDN by default, so it's an opt out versus an opt in. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Everything's out of perspective. And you got to try and scroll weird ways. Yeah. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. So another thing that if you use the out of the box CDN, another thing that our customers can look forward to is dynamic image resizing. So when you are the same image renders well on a mobile, a tablet, a desktop, and similarly, if you are an admin, you may inadvertently upload a, I don't know what? 20 MB file, image, and then say, "Look, why is my site loading so slowly?" And so what we're trying to do is also correct that, where you may upload a 20MB file, please don't, but what we'll do on our side, on the CDN side of things, we'll resize that and ensure that we are delivering a more optimized image to the customer. So that's another thing that we are really excited about, from an infrastructure point of view. So lots of good work happening from a perf point of view. Gillian Bruce: Nice. Khushwant Singh: Now, as we move up the stack, we can talk about things like data and content. Now, let's start off with content Salesforce in general, has had a bit of a content management gap for a little while. And we have customers using third party content management systems, et cetera, to compliment the data investments that they have in Salesforce. Now, probably I would say 24 months back, we introduced Salesforce CMS, which was, for the very first time a content management system from Salesforce. Now, what we've come to realize over the 24 months is that boy, do we need a lot more improvements to it. And so over the last, I would say 18 months, we have been actually re-architecting the content management system from ground up. It is going to be JSON based. So very standard point of view. Gillian Bruce: That's great. I mean, I know admins are going to be very excited to be able to access that great capability without having to jump through any additional hoops to get it. So thank you. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. Now, let's talk about data. Now, when we think about the data side of things, this is where a lot of our investments, at least from an Experience services point of view is that we have teams that are experts in records, Dynamic Forms, lists, and they're doing a lot of good work to expand. For example, Dynamic Forms today it's only available in custom objects, why? It should go across all standard objects. That's something that the team is working on. I'm really glad that we are going to stay really true to the fact that when we start something, we are going to end it and we are going to go all the way, at the same time this team is also working to bring all of that goodness across to not just employee facing experiences in Lex but also to customer facing, partner facing experiences via Experience Cloud. Gillian Bruce: I mean, that's major stuff. I know that Dynamic Forms is one of the top favorite admin feature overall. And so being able to bring that to standard objects will be huge. So thank you. Thank you on behalf of all admins everywhere. Khushwant Singh: It's a shout out to all of the good teams that are working on that front. So we touched about infra, we touched about content, we touched about data. Now, let's touch about the UI run time itself, which is Lightning Web Runtime and Lightning Web Components. Clearly the degree of, out of the box components for Aura, there are a lot more out of the box components for Aura than they are for LWCs, no doubt about it. And so what we're trying to do is we are trying to catch up to a certain degree, but catch up in a way that is addressing the most important use cases from out the box component point of view, but at the same time, not sacrificing customizability. And so from an LWR point of view, a few things to call out. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. They don't know the differences between that, they just want to find what they need. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And so for them, this is complexity that we should abstract from them. And so again, this is something that our customers can expect to see in beta, in the summer timeframe. And all goes, well, we're going to take the hood off and generally make it available in the winter timeframe, starting with site meta information and CMS content as part of the index. And then we're going to expand that to CRM and to other objects for that matter. Gillian Bruce: All right. So just a reminder to all listeners, forward looking statement applies to everything that Kush just said, this is what happens when we get excited in product information. Yeah. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And that too, as well. Yes. So I think, again from an LWR point of view, there's just so much more maturity that customers can expect to see with LWR and Experience Cloud. Because whether it's out of the box components for content, for data, whether it's search, whether it is even the ability to deliver these dynamic experiences. So one of the things that our customers really appreciate in Aura is the ability to personalize the experience using CRM information. So show me this content, this data, if user.account equals to X, Y, Z, et cetera. And so the ability to deliver that type of personalization is key, but at the same time, they want to be able to do things like real time personalization. So using, for example, Evergage or interaction studio for that matter. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Lots coming. Well, Kush I so appreciate you taking the time to chat with us here on the podcast about all things, Experience Services, Experience Cloud. I know I got a lot of questions answered. I'm sure a lot of people listening are very happy to hear all of the things that you and your team are working on. And I'm sure they will have many more questions. So I'll include links to some of the great trailblazer community groups that you have set up for Lightning Experience and for Experience Cloud, for people to submit feedback. And thanks again for all of the work that you and your team do. And I look forward to checking back in with you after a couple releases here and coming back to what you all have done and hearing about what is even next from then on. Khushwant Singh: For sure Gillian. I mean, I truly appreciate the opportunity. And again, to all our Salesforce admins, you are our eyes and ears out there. Feedback is a gift, please keep it coming. And we're so appreciative of all that you do for us. Gillian Bruce: Huge, thanks to coach for taking the time to chat with us. He and his team have been so busy working on really important foundational improvements to both Experience Cloud and Experience Services. And it's so great to now understand what Experience Services mean because for us admins, it means a lot of the stuff that we use every day. So, hey, I don't know about you, but I'm excited about Dynamic Lightning pages coming for standard objects. Woo, woo. Again, forward looking statement, but I look forward to getting Kush back on the podcast to ask him about that once it has been released in a few releases. So if you want to learn more or you have more feedback about anything, Experience Cloud or Experience Services, Kush, and his team pay close attention to the trailblazer community. So go to the Lightning Experience group or the Experience Cloud group on the trailblazer community and put your feedback in there, put your questions in there. He's got an amazing team of very talented people.
Direct download: Experience_Cloud_with_Khushwant_Singh.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PST |
Thu, 19 May 2022
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Khushwant Singh, SVP, Product Management at Salesforce.
Join us as we talk about his role heading up all things Experience—not just Experience Cloud but Experience Services, too.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Khushwant Singh. The Experience dream teamKhushwant, AKA “Khush”, heads up Experience at Salesforce. If that term is a little nebulous to you, you’re not alone, but Khush breaks it down for us. Experience Services brings a few teams together: the UI Platform team, the Experience Cloud team, the Mobile team, and the Mobify team. “We’re responsible for all things Experience, and it helps us build a common product strategy across the board,” Khush says, “whether you’re building an experience for an employee, a customer, or partner.”
Lightning Experience has really changed the game for Admins in terms of stepping up in their thinking about design, but Khush points out there’s also a bit of a divide there. “If you build a component for the App Builder, it may or may not work in the Experience Builder,” he says, “but as a Salesforce Admin or Developer, you want your investments to go across all of your various endpoints.” Re-architecting to improve scaling, performance, and customizabilityExperience Cloud is a very flexible tool that you should really look into if you haven’t yet. You can use it build out a simple marketing website, a self-service destination like a help center or account management site, or even a channel reselling portal or commerce storefront.
While Lightning and Aura have done a lot to enable Admins to build out things they never thought possible with low code and fast time to market, Khush admits we seem to have hit a wall from a performance, scale, and customizability point of view. To address that, they’ve been re-architecting to let you build new things more easily at a consumer-grade scale. What’s next for Experience CloudOne thing that will be going live soon (forward looking statement) is a major performance boost to public-facing apps and sites. They’ve revamped the out-of-the-box CDN (Content Delivery Network) to allow public aspects of your site and mobile apps to be cached at endpoints closer to the consumer, enabling much faster delivery. One other change is adding dynamic image resizing so the same image looks equally good on mobile, desktop, and tablet. The best part is these and many more improvements are enabled by default, so you get the performance boost without having to lift a finger.
Looking forward, Khush and his team are revamping the Salesforce Content Management System (CMS) to make it more robust, powerful, and responsive. They’re breaking down the barriers and rolling out the advanced version of Salesforce CMS to all customers for free, and you can get access to the new-and-improved JSON-based CMS 2.0 beta with an opt-in.
Khush also gives a preview into what he and his team are working on to make improvements to data to, for example, bring Dynamic Forms to all standard objects, and even more goodies for desktop, mobile, and everything in between. Make sure you listen to the full episode to hear what’s coming your way soon.
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Full show transcript Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce, and we have a really fun episode lined up for you. We are talking with Khushwant Singh, AKA Kush, who's SVP of Product Management here at Salesforce, in charge of all things experience. And I mean all things experience, not just experience cloud, but Experience Services. And if you're wondering what all that means, don't worry, he's going to answer that for you. So without further ado, let's get Kush on the pod. Kush, welcome to the podcast. Khushwant Singh: Thank you, Gillian. Gillian Bruce: It's wonderful to have you on. I am very much looking forward to our discussion because we are talking about something that might be a little nebulous to some of us, especially if you've been in the Salesforce ecosystem for a while. We have experience cloud, Experience Services, experience all the things. Kush, clarify for us what all of that means. Khushwant Singh: Well, Gillian, I wish I got that question, or rather I wish I had proactively answered that question at the recent TDX. So just a bit of a sidetrack, a little, for those of you who attended the recent TDX, we had a true to the call session where a few of us were up on stage and I introduced myself as, "My name's Kush, I'm a product manager and I work on all things experiences." Now, I honestly thought that I would be inundated with questions, but I realized that I actually got zero questions, and I realized that people just probably didn't get what all things experience means. So I'm going to learn from that, and be very clear in our conversation over here. So taking a step back, when we say, we just recently realigned some of our teams internally, and we've created this group internally called Experience Services. And what Experience Services is, is that it brings together a few teams together. Gillian Bruce: So that was really helpful, it helped me understand this because again, experience is one of those words that, especially as a Salesforce admin, we're always thinking about our end users experience. That's our whole goal is to make it seamless and make it really useful. But as you just described, experiences is so many things. And I really appreciate that you have explained how the teams are uniting under this umbrella, to really think about the holistic picture when it comes to these different experiences pieces. UI, designers' mindset, is one of the core admin skills that we have because it's always thinking about how is my user experience in this? How can I maximize that experience, make it more efficient? And when you talk about Lightning experience that, God, talk about something that changed the game for admins. Khushwant Singh: I know, it did. It did entirely. It changed the game, but it also in full transparency, we added a bit of a divide as well. So if you take examples where you build a component for the App Builder, it may or may not work in the Experience Builder. You have a set of record components that look gloriously well on Lex, but they may not surface all of the capabilities, the actions don't surface in the Experience Builder or vice versa, the branding, the themeing, the mobile web responsiveness aspect of things that show up on Experience Builder, don't show up in the App Builder side of things. And so we have introduced this divide, which actually has made our... Well, each team has done a phenomenal job in going deep in their use cases, it's been at an expense of a divide where, as a Salesforce admin, as a Salesforce developer, you want your investments to go across all of your various endpoints. You might be a Salesforce admin for a company that is using Salesforce for their employee experience. For example, the service agents. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I think as a company, for someone who's maybe been in the ecosystem for a long time, this is a familiar road, is that we develop something really close. One team goes down and develops this new way of doing something and then we have shadow examples of it happening all separately within the company. And then, hey, let's bring everybody together, let's make this a more cohesive, holistic experience for our admins, for our developers. And it's exciting to bring all those really smart brains together to work together versus everyone working in a silo. Khushwant Singh: Indeed. And I think it's also indicative of trying to complete what we start. I think we've heard from admins, just this recent TDX, I mean, and at every TDX or any Dreamforce we do, any through the core session or any feedback we get from our MVPs and our admins out there, developers. They'll give us feedback, which is actually quite true. We start something, but we don't complete it. We say something that we will deliver something, but we, at times, don't deliver it. And so I think by bringing all of our teams together, that manage experience, I think it really... Organizational differences should not be the reason why we are not able to complete what we start or deliver what we say we will deliver. And so we are really hopeful that we'll be able to actually address those two key areas. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I've always heard the joke. We don't want to let our org chart show. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. Across both desktop and mobile for that matter. Gillian Bruce: Totally. Yeah. So Kush, before we get a little bit further, I mean, clearly you've got a big undertaking that you and your teams are doing. Can you tell me a little bit about you and how you got here? How long have you been at Salesforce because all of these works have been in progress for a long time. You mentioned when we released Lightning experience. Tell me a little bit about your background. Khushwant Singh: Oh yeah, sure. So I've been at Salesforce, I think, May sometime this month is my seventh year anniversary. Gillian Bruce: Congratulations. Khushwant Singh: Thank you. And I have truly enjoyed every single day of my time here at Salesforce. If you look at my background, I rarely spend more than five to six years in a company. And the fact that I'm here for the seventh year and still super challenged, just speaks towards what Salesforce offers from a challenge, point of view. There's always something new, there's always a new challenge for us to work on. And I've actually spent probably six and a half or six and three quarters of that seven years working on Experience Cloud. And so most of my background is from a B2C side of things. I spend some time at eBay, at Microsoft, at a startup called Mozi, working on a number of B2C oriented products. And I wanted to build products in an enterprise setting for enterprise, but I didn't want to veer too far away from the consumer side of things, the B2C side of things. And Experience Cloud really helped me walk that fine line where you're building these digital experience products that are used by enterprises for their customers, for their partners. So it really gave me a good middle ground. Gillian Bruce: I love that, getting the band back together, that's good. Khushwant Singh: There you go. Gillian Bruce: Okay. So let's talk a little bit about what's currently going on in Experience Cloud. So I know there were some good announcements at Dreamforce last year, at DBX this year. Can you talk a little bit about where we're currently at with Experience Cloud and why maybe an admin who hasn't yet dabbled in Experience Cloud might consider it? Khushwant Singh: Sure. So again, just to level set, one more time, a customer uses Experience Cloud for a number of use cases. You could use Experience Cloud to build out a simple marketing website, corporate website. You could use Experience Cloud to build out a self-service destination, so that self-service destination could be a help center, where you want to surface your knowledge base articles, where you wish to surface chat bots, where you wish to, for example, give your customers the ability to log in and manage their account, manage their profile for that matter. Similarly, you could use Experience Cloud to build out a channel reseller portal, where you may not be selling direct or you may be selling direct, but you also sell through your various channels and you need a way to manage your channels. You could use Experience Cloud to build a commerce storefront, whether it's a B2B commerce storefront, a B2C commerce storefront, et cetera. Gillian Bruce: Yes. We know Phil very well. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And so I think many of you must have seen his post where he's actually tracking the number of features that Experience Cloud launches. And he showed this bar graph, that showed the decreasing number of features over the last 18 months. And I replied to him and again, huge respect for Phil. And the fact of the matter is that we've had to go under the hood and rebuild from ground up using Lightning Web Runtime, using Lightning Web Components, so that we can actually deliver this consumer grade scale and performance and customizability, whether it's a B2B, B2C or B2E type of use case. And so we've been "silent for a while" but I'm super excited at what's coming in this summer release, and what's going to go. A lot of it going to go generally available this winter release. So again, long story short, we have been re-architecting for consumer grade across the entire customer journey. Gillian Bruce: I mean, that's impressive. I mean, we talk, especially even as admins, we have our own technical that we accrue over many years of admining a specific org. And sometimes you do, you got to just go back, peel back the covers and go in and make sure everything, the foundations are updated and running better. And hey, if you got a system that's not working for you, you got to invest the time and pause on the new stuff for a minute. Let's make the core stuff really work and function so that we can continue to build. So I love that transparency. I think it's really useful to help our admins and everybody understand what all of the hard work that your team is doing. And yeah, I mean, hey, now that we talked about all the hard work that you've all been doing, let's talk about some of the shiny new fun things that you have coming down the page. Khushwant Singh: Yeah, of course. So now I think on that note, I do also want to underscore that we have so many, all of that adoption stats that I talked about, they're all visual force or mostly Aura investments. And I want to underscore that we're not just leaving Aura or VF behind. And so there are many aspects that customers on Aura or customers on VF would also be able to benefit from. So let's dive into those shiny aspects of things. So I think if we think of this as maybe a stack diagram, maybe we'll start at the lowest level of infrastructure. What are we doing from an infrastructure point of view to help deliver that consumer grade type of experiences? So, first and foremost, we've invested a fair amount of time and effort to deliver performance. And so, one of the things you'll start to notice is, our out of the box CDN, so behind the scenes we work with Akamai, and what that does is that it allows, it just provides customers an out of the box CDN that they can actually choose to use. Gillian Bruce: So Kush, before we go forward, what is a CDN? Let's break down that. Khushwant Singh: Sure. It's a content delivery network. What that does is it allows your public aspects of your site, of your mobile app to be cashed on these endpoints, which are closer to the consumer, and so that allows for faster delivery. And if it doesn't change, if that public information doesn't change very much, it's served out of cash versus another round hub back. So again, at the end of the day, it's about better delivery of, faster delivery of the experience. Now this used to be a bit of an opt in thing and so what we have done now is as of spring and summer and winter, what we're doing is behind the scenes, we are rolling out as part of the secure domains effort, as secure domains is being enabled across all net new sites and existing sites. We are just enabling the default CDN by default, so it's an opt out versus an opt in. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Everything's out of perspective. And you got to try and scroll weird ways. Yeah. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. So another thing that if you use the out of the box CDN, another thing that our customers can look forward to is dynamic image resizing. So when you are the same image renders well on a mobile, a tablet, a desktop, and similarly, if you are an admin, you may inadvertently upload a, I don't know what? 20 MB file, image, and then say, "Look, why is my site loading so slowly?" And so what we're trying to do is also correct that, where you may upload a 20MB file, please don't, but what we'll do on our side, on the CDN side of things, we'll resize that and ensure that we are delivering a more optimized image to the customer. So that's another thing that we are really excited about, from an infrastructure point of view. So lots of good work happening from a perf point of view. Gillian Bruce: Nice. Khushwant Singh: Now, as we move up the stack, we can talk about things like data and content. Now, let's start off with content Salesforce in general, has had a bit of a content management gap for a little while. And we have customers using third party content management systems, et cetera, to compliment the data investments that they have in Salesforce. Now, probably I would say 24 months back, we introduced Salesforce CMS, which was, for the very first time a content management system from Salesforce. Now, what we've come to realize over the 24 months is that boy, do we need a lot more improvements to it. And so over the last, I would say 18 months, we have been actually re-architecting the content management system from ground up. It is going to be JSON based. So very standard point of view. Gillian Bruce: That's great. I mean, I know admins are going to be very excited to be able to access that great capability without having to jump through any additional hoops to get it. So thank you. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. Now, let's talk about data. Now, when we think about the data side of things, this is where a lot of our investments, at least from an Experience services point of view is that we have teams that are experts in records, Dynamic Forms, lists, and they're doing a lot of good work to expand. For example, Dynamic Forms today it's only available in custom objects, why? It should go across all standard objects. That's something that the team is working on. I'm really glad that we are going to stay really true to the fact that when we start something, we are going to end it and we are going to go all the way, at the same time this team is also working to bring all of that goodness across to not just employee facing experiences in Lex but also to customer facing, partner facing experiences via Experience Cloud. Gillian Bruce: I mean, that's major stuff. I know that Dynamic Forms is one of the top favorite admin feature overall. And so being able to bring that to standard objects will be huge. So thank you. Thank you on behalf of all admins everywhere. Khushwant Singh: It's a shout out to all of the good teams that are working on that front. So we touched about infra, we touched about content, we touched about data. Now, let's touch about the UI run time itself, which is Lightning Web Runtime and Lightning Web Components. Clearly the degree of, out of the box components for Aura, there are a lot more out of the box components for Aura than they are for LWCs, no doubt about it. And so what we're trying to do is we are trying to catch up to a certain degree, but catch up in a way that is addressing the most important use cases from out the box component point of view, but at the same time, not sacrificing customizability. And so from an LWR point of view, a few things to call out. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. They don't know the differences between that, they just want to find what they need. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And so for them, this is complexity that we should abstract from them. And so again, this is something that our customers can expect to see in beta, in the summer timeframe. And all goes, well, we're going to take the hood off and generally make it available in the winter timeframe, starting with site meta information and CMS content as part of the index. And then we're going to expand that to CRM and to other objects for that matter. Gillian Bruce: All right. So just a reminder to all listeners, forward looking statement applies to everything that Kush just said, this is what happens when we get excited in product information. Yeah. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And that too, as well. Yes. So I think, again from an LWR point of view, there's just so much more maturity that customers can expect to see with LWR and Experience Cloud. Because whether it's out of the box components for content, for data, whether it's search, whether it is even the ability to deliver these dynamic experiences. So one of the things that our customers really appreciate in Aura is the ability to personalize the experience using CRM information. So show me this content, this data, if user.account equals to X, Y, Z, et cetera. And so the ability to deliver that type of personalization is key, but at the same time, they want to be able to do things like real time personalization. So using, for example, Evergage or interaction studio for that matter. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Lots coming. Well, Kush I so appreciate you taking the time to chat with us here on the podcast about all things, Experience Services, Experience Cloud. I know I got a lot of questions answered. I'm sure a lot of people listening are very happy to hear all of the things that you and your team are working on. And I'm sure they will have many more questions. So I'll include links to some of the great trailblazer community groups that you have set up for Lightning Experience and for Experience Cloud, for people to submit feedback. And thanks again for all of the work that you and your team do. And I look forward to checking back in with you after a couple releases here and coming back to what you all have done and hearing about what is even next from then on. Khushwant Singh: For sure Gillian. I mean, I truly appreciate the opportunity. And again, to all our Salesforce admins, you are our eyes and ears out there. Feedback is a gift, please keep it coming. And we're so appreciative of all that you do for us. Gillian Bruce: Huge, thanks to coach for taking the time to chat with us. He and his team have been so busy working on really important foundational improvements to both Experience Cloud and Experience Services. And it's so great to now understand what Experience Services mean because for us admins, it means a lot of the stuff that we use every day. So, hey, I don't know about you, but I'm excited about Dynamic Lightning pages coming for standard objects. Woo, woo. Again, forward looking statement, but I look forward to getting Kush back on the podcast to ask him about that once it has been released in a few releases. So if you want to learn more or you have more feedback about anything, Experience Cloud or Experience Services, Kush, and his team pay close attention to the trailblazer community. So go to the Lightning Experience group or the Experience Cloud group on the trailblazer community and put your feedback in there, put your questions in there. He's got an amazing team of very talented people.
Direct download: Experience_Cloud_with_Khushwant_Singh.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PST |
Thu, 19 May 2022
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Khushwant Singh, SVP, Product Management at Salesforce.
Join us as we talk about his role heading up all things Experience—not just Experience Cloud but Experience Services, too.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Khushwant Singh. The Experience dream teamKhushwant, AKA “Khush”, heads up Experience at Salesforce. If that term is a little nebulous to you, you’re not alone, but Khush breaks it down for us. Experience Services brings a few teams together: the UI Platform team, the Experience Cloud team, the Mobile team, and the Mobify team. “We’re responsible for all things Experience, and it helps us build a common product strategy across the board,” Khush says, “whether you’re building an experience for an employee, a customer, or partner.”
Lightning Experience has really changed the game for Admins in terms of stepping up in their thinking about design, but Khush points out there’s also a bit of a divide there. “If you build a component for the App Builder, it may or may not work in the Experience Builder,” he says, “but as a Salesforce Admin or Developer, you want your investments to go across all of your various endpoints.” Re-architecting to improve scaling, performance, and customizabilityExperience Cloud is a very flexible tool that you should really look into if you haven’t yet. You can use it build out a simple marketing website, a self-service destination like a help center or account management site, or even a channel reselling portal or commerce storefront.
While Lightning and Aura have done a lot to enable Admins to build out things they never thought possible with low code and fast time to market, Khush admits we seem to have hit a wall from a performance, scale, and customizability point of view. To address that, they’ve been re-architecting to let you build new things more easily at a consumer-grade scale. What’s next for Experience CloudOne thing that will be going live soon (forward looking statement) is a major performance boost to public-facing apps and sites. They’ve revamped the out-of-the-box CDN (Content Delivery Network) to allow public aspects of your site and mobile apps to be cached at endpoints closer to the consumer, enabling much faster delivery. One other change is adding dynamic image resizing so the same image looks equally good on mobile, desktop, and tablet. The best part is these and many more improvements are enabled by default, so you get the performance boost without having to lift a finger.
Looking forward, Khush and his team are revamping the Salesforce Content Management System (CMS) to make it more robust, powerful, and responsive. They’re breaking down the barriers and rolling out the advanced version of Salesforce CMS to all customers for free, and you can get access to the new-and-improved JSON-based CMS 2.0 beta with an opt-in.
Khush also gives a preview into what he and his team are working on to make improvements to data to, for example, bring Dynamic Forms to all standard objects, and even more goodies for desktop, mobile, and everything in between. Make sure you listen to the full episode to hear what’s coming your way soon.
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Full show transcript Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce, and we have a really fun episode lined up for you. We are talking with Khushwant Singh, AKA Kush, who's SVP of Product Management here at Salesforce, in charge of all things experience. And I mean all things experience, not just experience cloud, but Experience Services. And if you're wondering what all that means, don't worry, he's going to answer that for you. So without further ado, let's get Kush on the pod. Kush, welcome to the podcast. Khushwant Singh: Thank you, Gillian. Gillian Bruce: It's wonderful to have you on. I am very much looking forward to our discussion because we are talking about something that might be a little nebulous to some of us, especially if you've been in the Salesforce ecosystem for a while. We have experience cloud, Experience Services, experience all the things. Kush, clarify for us what all of that means. Khushwant Singh: Well, Gillian, I wish I got that question, or rather I wish I had proactively answered that question at the recent TDX. So just a bit of a sidetrack, a little, for those of you who attended the recent TDX, we had a true to the call session where a few of us were up on stage and I introduced myself as, "My name's Kush, I'm a product manager and I work on all things experiences." Now, I honestly thought that I would be inundated with questions, but I realized that I actually got zero questions, and I realized that people just probably didn't get what all things experience means. So I'm going to learn from that, and be very clear in our conversation over here. So taking a step back, when we say, we just recently realigned some of our teams internally, and we've created this group internally called Experience Services. And what Experience Services is, is that it brings together a few teams together. Gillian Bruce: So that was really helpful, it helped me understand this because again, experience is one of those words that, especially as a Salesforce admin, we're always thinking about our end users experience. That's our whole goal is to make it seamless and make it really useful. But as you just described, experiences is so many things. And I really appreciate that you have explained how the teams are uniting under this umbrella, to really think about the holistic picture when it comes to these different experiences pieces. UI, designers' mindset, is one of the core admin skills that we have because it's always thinking about how is my user experience in this? How can I maximize that experience, make it more efficient? And when you talk about Lightning experience that, God, talk about something that changed the game for admins. Khushwant Singh: I know, it did. It did entirely. It changed the game, but it also in full transparency, we added a bit of a divide as well. So if you take examples where you build a component for the App Builder, it may or may not work in the Experience Builder. You have a set of record components that look gloriously well on Lex, but they may not surface all of the capabilities, the actions don't surface in the Experience Builder or vice versa, the branding, the themeing, the mobile web responsiveness aspect of things that show up on Experience Builder, don't show up in the App Builder side of things. And so we have introduced this divide, which actually has made our... Well, each team has done a phenomenal job in going deep in their use cases, it's been at an expense of a divide where, as a Salesforce admin, as a Salesforce developer, you want your investments to go across all of your various endpoints. You might be a Salesforce admin for a company that is using Salesforce for their employee experience. For example, the service agents. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I think as a company, for someone who's maybe been in the ecosystem for a long time, this is a familiar road, is that we develop something really close. One team goes down and develops this new way of doing something and then we have shadow examples of it happening all separately within the company. And then, hey, let's bring everybody together, let's make this a more cohesive, holistic experience for our admins, for our developers. And it's exciting to bring all those really smart brains together to work together versus everyone working in a silo. Khushwant Singh: Indeed. And I think it's also indicative of trying to complete what we start. I think we've heard from admins, just this recent TDX, I mean, and at every TDX or any Dreamforce we do, any through the core session or any feedback we get from our MVPs and our admins out there, developers. They'll give us feedback, which is actually quite true. We start something, but we don't complete it. We say something that we will deliver something, but we, at times, don't deliver it. And so I think by bringing all of our teams together, that manage experience, I think it really... Organizational differences should not be the reason why we are not able to complete what we start or deliver what we say we will deliver. And so we are really hopeful that we'll be able to actually address those two key areas. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I've always heard the joke. We don't want to let our org chart show. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. Across both desktop and mobile for that matter. Gillian Bruce: Totally. Yeah. So Kush, before we get a little bit further, I mean, clearly you've got a big undertaking that you and your teams are doing. Can you tell me a little bit about you and how you got here? How long have you been at Salesforce because all of these works have been in progress for a long time. You mentioned when we released Lightning experience. Tell me a little bit about your background. Khushwant Singh: Oh yeah, sure. So I've been at Salesforce, I think, May sometime this month is my seventh year anniversary. Gillian Bruce: Congratulations. Khushwant Singh: Thank you. And I have truly enjoyed every single day of my time here at Salesforce. If you look at my background, I rarely spend more than five to six years in a company. And the fact that I'm here for the seventh year and still super challenged, just speaks towards what Salesforce offers from a challenge, point of view. There's always something new, there's always a new challenge for us to work on. And I've actually spent probably six and a half or six and three quarters of that seven years working on Experience Cloud. And so most of my background is from a B2C side of things. I spend some time at eBay, at Microsoft, at a startup called Mozi, working on a number of B2C oriented products. And I wanted to build products in an enterprise setting for enterprise, but I didn't want to veer too far away from the consumer side of things, the B2C side of things. And Experience Cloud really helped me walk that fine line where you're building these digital experience products that are used by enterprises for their customers, for their partners. So it really gave me a good middle ground. Gillian Bruce: I love that, getting the band back together, that's good. Khushwant Singh: There you go. Gillian Bruce: Okay. So let's talk a little bit about what's currently going on in Experience Cloud. So I know there were some good announcements at Dreamforce last year, at DBX this year. Can you talk a little bit about where we're currently at with Experience Cloud and why maybe an admin who hasn't yet dabbled in Experience Cloud might consider it? Khushwant Singh: Sure. So again, just to level set, one more time, a customer uses Experience Cloud for a number of use cases. You could use Experience Cloud to build out a simple marketing website, corporate website. You could use Experience Cloud to build out a self-service destination, so that self-service destination could be a help center, where you want to surface your knowledge base articles, where you wish to surface chat bots, where you wish to, for example, give your customers the ability to log in and manage their account, manage their profile for that matter. Similarly, you could use Experience Cloud to build out a channel reseller portal, where you may not be selling direct or you may be selling direct, but you also sell through your various channels and you need a way to manage your channels. You could use Experience Cloud to build a commerce storefront, whether it's a B2B commerce storefront, a B2C commerce storefront, et cetera. Gillian Bruce: Yes. We know Phil very well. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And so I think many of you must have seen his post where he's actually tracking the number of features that Experience Cloud launches. And he showed this bar graph, that showed the decreasing number of features over the last 18 months. And I replied to him and again, huge respect for Phil. And the fact of the matter is that we've had to go under the hood and rebuild from ground up using Lightning Web Runtime, using Lightning Web Components, so that we can actually deliver this consumer grade scale and performance and customizability, whether it's a B2B, B2C or B2E type of use case. And so we've been "silent for a while" but I'm super excited at what's coming in this summer release, and what's going to go. A lot of it going to go generally available this winter release. So again, long story short, we have been re-architecting for consumer grade across the entire customer journey. Gillian Bruce: I mean, that's impressive. I mean, we talk, especially even as admins, we have our own technical that we accrue over many years of admining a specific org. And sometimes you do, you got to just go back, peel back the covers and go in and make sure everything, the foundations are updated and running better. And hey, if you got a system that's not working for you, you got to invest the time and pause on the new stuff for a minute. Let's make the core stuff really work and function so that we can continue to build. So I love that transparency. I think it's really useful to help our admins and everybody understand what all of the hard work that your team is doing. And yeah, I mean, hey, now that we talked about all the hard work that you've all been doing, let's talk about some of the shiny new fun things that you have coming down the page. Khushwant Singh: Yeah, of course. So now I think on that note, I do also want to underscore that we have so many, all of that adoption stats that I talked about, they're all visual force or mostly Aura investments. And I want to underscore that we're not just leaving Aura or VF behind. And so there are many aspects that customers on Aura or customers on VF would also be able to benefit from. So let's dive into those shiny aspects of things. So I think if we think of this as maybe a stack diagram, maybe we'll start at the lowest level of infrastructure. What are we doing from an infrastructure point of view to help deliver that consumer grade type of experiences? So, first and foremost, we've invested a fair amount of time and effort to deliver performance. And so, one of the things you'll start to notice is, our out of the box CDN, so behind the scenes we work with Akamai, and what that does is that it allows, it just provides customers an out of the box CDN that they can actually choose to use. Gillian Bruce: So Kush, before we go forward, what is a CDN? Let's break down that. Khushwant Singh: Sure. It's a content delivery network. What that does is it allows your public aspects of your site, of your mobile app to be cashed on these endpoints, which are closer to the consumer, and so that allows for faster delivery. And if it doesn't change, if that public information doesn't change very much, it's served out of cash versus another round hub back. So again, at the end of the day, it's about better delivery of, faster delivery of the experience. Now this used to be a bit of an opt in thing and so what we have done now is as of spring and summer and winter, what we're doing is behind the scenes, we are rolling out as part of the secure domains effort, as secure domains is being enabled across all net new sites and existing sites. We are just enabling the default CDN by default, so it's an opt out versus an opt in. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Everything's out of perspective. And you got to try and scroll weird ways. Yeah. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. So another thing that if you use the out of the box CDN, another thing that our customers can look forward to is dynamic image resizing. So when you are the same image renders well on a mobile, a tablet, a desktop, and similarly, if you are an admin, you may inadvertently upload a, I don't know what? 20 MB file, image, and then say, "Look, why is my site loading so slowly?" And so what we're trying to do is also correct that, where you may upload a 20MB file, please don't, but what we'll do on our side, on the CDN side of things, we'll resize that and ensure that we are delivering a more optimized image to the customer. So that's another thing that we are really excited about, from an infrastructure point of view. So lots of good work happening from a perf point of view. Gillian Bruce: Nice. Khushwant Singh: Now, as we move up the stack, we can talk about things like data and content. Now, let's start off with content Salesforce in general, has had a bit of a content management gap for a little while. And we have customers using third party content management systems, et cetera, to compliment the data investments that they have in Salesforce. Now, probably I would say 24 months back, we introduced Salesforce CMS, which was, for the very first time a content management system from Salesforce. Now, what we've come to realize over the 24 months is that boy, do we need a lot more improvements to it. And so over the last, I would say 18 months, we have been actually re-architecting the content management system from ground up. It is going to be JSON based. So very standard point of view. Gillian Bruce: That's great. I mean, I know admins are going to be very excited to be able to access that great capability without having to jump through any additional hoops to get it. So thank you. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. Now, let's talk about data. Now, when we think about the data side of things, this is where a lot of our investments, at least from an Experience services point of view is that we have teams that are experts in records, Dynamic Forms, lists, and they're doing a lot of good work to expand. For example, Dynamic Forms today it's only available in custom objects, why? It should go across all standard objects. That's something that the team is working on. I'm really glad that we are going to stay really true to the fact that when we start something, we are going to end it and we are going to go all the way, at the same time this team is also working to bring all of that goodness across to not just employee facing experiences in Lex but also to customer facing, partner facing experiences via Experience Cloud. Gillian Bruce: I mean, that's major stuff. I know that Dynamic Forms is one of the top favorite admin feature overall. And so being able to bring that to standard objects will be huge. So thank you. Thank you on behalf of all admins everywhere. Khushwant Singh: It's a shout out to all of the good teams that are working on that front. So we touched about infra, we touched about content, we touched about data. Now, let's touch about the UI run time itself, which is Lightning Web Runtime and Lightning Web Components. Clearly the degree of, out of the box components for Aura, there are a lot more out of the box components for Aura than they are for LWCs, no doubt about it. And so what we're trying to do is we are trying to catch up to a certain degree, but catch up in a way that is addressing the most important use cases from out the box component point of view, but at the same time, not sacrificing customizability. And so from an LWR point of view, a few things to call out. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. They don't know the differences between that, they just want to find what they need. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And so for them, this is complexity that we should abstract from them. And so again, this is something that our customers can expect to see in beta, in the summer timeframe. And all goes, well, we're going to take the hood off and generally make it available in the winter timeframe, starting with site meta information and CMS content as part of the index. And then we're going to expand that to CRM and to other objects for that matter. Gillian Bruce: All right. So just a reminder to all listeners, forward looking statement applies to everything that Kush just said, this is what happens when we get excited in product information. Yeah. Khushwant Singh: Exactly. And that too, as well. Yes. So I think, again from an LWR point of view, there's just so much more maturity that customers can expect to see with LWR and Experience Cloud. Because whether it's out of the box components for content, for data, whether it's search, whether it is even the ability to deliver these dynamic experiences. So one of the things that our customers really appreciate in Aura is the ability to personalize the experience using CRM information. So show me this content, this data, if user.account equals to X, Y, Z, et cetera. And so the ability to deliver that type of personalization is key, but at the same time, they want to be able to do things like real time personalization. So using, for example, Evergage or interaction studio for that matter. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Lots coming. Well, Kush I so appreciate you taking the time to chat with us here on the podcast about all things, Experience Services, Experience Cloud. I know I got a lot of questions answered. I'm sure a lot of people listening are very happy to hear all of the things that you and your team are working on. And I'm sure they will have many more questions. So I'll include links to some of the great trailblazer community groups that you have set up for Lightning Experience and for Experience Cloud, for people to submit feedback. And thanks again for all of the work that you and your team do. And I look forward to checking back in with you after a couple releases here and coming back to what you all have done and hearing about what is even next from then on. Khushwant Singh: For sure Gillian. I mean, I truly appreciate the opportunity. And again, to all our Salesforce admins, you are our eyes and ears out there. Feedback is a gift, please keep it coming. And we're so appreciative of all that you do for us. Gillian Bruce: Huge, thanks to coach for taking the time to chat with us. He and his team have been so busy working on really important foundational improvements to both Experience Cloud and Experience Services. And it's so great to now understand what Experience Services mean because for us admins, it means a lot of the stuff that we use every day. So, hey, I don't know about you, but I'm excited about Dynamic Lightning pages coming for standard objects. Woo, woo. Again, forward looking statement, but I look forward to getting Kush back on the podcast to ask him about that once it has been released in a few releases. So if you want to learn more or you have more feedback about anything, Experience Cloud or Experience Services, Kush, and his team pay close attention to the trailblazer community. So go to the Lightning Experience group or the Experience Cloud group on the trailblazer community and put your feedback in there, put your questions in there. He's got an amazing team of very talented people.
Direct download: Experience_Cloud_with_Khushwant_Singh.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PST |
Thu, 12 May 2022
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Andrew Russo, Salesforce Architect at BACA Systems.
Join us as we talk about the amazing app user management super app he built and how you can approach building apps to be an even more awesome Admin.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Andrew Russo. Ramping up a Salesforce orgAndrew, like so many people we interview on the show, started out as an accidental Admin. He started out needing to pull more and more things from Salesforce to support his company’s email marketing efforts, which put him in the position to get his Admin cert when they wanted to roll out Service Cloud. Now, the entire business is run on a massive org, and Andrew’s main challenge is making sure it’s scalable to handle everything that might come down the pipe.
Now that they’ve brought their entire manufacturing department onto Salesforce, they needed to take a second look at how they handle user requests. “Before it was as simple as sending an email or a text and we could have a quick chat,” Andrew says, “now, we have to manage a lot of users and also document it so people can do their jobs well and also make requests for features to help them do their jobs even better.” Managing user requests and scaling upWhen the user requests started flooding in, they knew they needed a plan to handle the large increase in volume. The first step was switching over to cases, but they needed to do a lot of customization to account for the different ways they handle internal vs. external cases. The biggest bottleneck they identified was when they had to ask for more details, so creating a structure for both the person filling out the request and the team member looking at it helped immensely.
Specificity around requests is really important because you need to understand the business need that’s driving it. For example, they could be asking for a checkbox because they want to run a report when there’s an easier way to do that. Instead, Andrew and his team send users a link to fill out a user story. “Then when we go back in a year and are trying to figure out why we made something, we have a record of why it was created,” Andrew says, so they’ve built in their documentation process.
At the end of every Flow they build there’s a sub-flow that runs at the end. It tracks every time the Flow runs and compares it to how long it took them to build and how long the previous process took. What they end up with is a lot of specificity around how their team is saving everyone time throughout the organization which is a powerful and effective way to prove RoI. Andrew’s tips for user managementAndrew’s main tips for improving user management in your org are pretty simple to understand but hard to master. For one thing, learn when to say no. Some user requests are going to be unreasonable and learning how to work with them to uncover the real business need can help you find a solution that fits.
For another, if you can find core Salesforce functionality that gets you 90% of the way to a solution, it’s far better than building everything from scratch. “Custom equals it’s yours and you own it,” Andrew explains, “not only do you own the development of it—you own the problems could have in the future with it that you can’t foresee.” Less is more.
Finally, keep curious. Always keep learning and follow your curiosity because you never know where it will lead you. Salesforce has so many amazing resources and you never know when something you were browsing or an issue you helped someone with will suddenly give you your next great idea.
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Full show transcript Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you be an awesome admin. I'm your host today, Gillian Bruce, and we are going to talk about how to create a user management super app. Andrew Russo: Yeah. I'm happy to be here. I think this will be awesome, to be able to talk about some of the stuff we've built for our company and see how other admins can learn from what we've done. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about you first, before we get into some of the app building advice and great strategy that you have to share. Tell us a little bit about what you do and a little bit about your Salesforce journey. Andrew Russo: Yeah, so I started doing Salesforce stuff as an accidental admin. So in college I was working for a company and I started helping with some of the website stuff. And then that transitioned into email marketing, which involved getting email lists from Salesforce. And it slowly kind of climbed into working more and more on Salesforce stuff. So that was about 2016. And then in 2017 and '18, we started looking at rolling out Service Cloud, which is really when I started to go into learning a lot more about Salesforce. Gillian Bruce: So, how many users do you support? Andrew Russo: Right now, we have about 70 users inside of our Salesforce org. If you asked that same question in Fall of last year, we had about 30. So we brought on our entire manufacturing, which is really where we started to have to look at, how do we handle user requests? Because before it was as simple as an email or just sending a text and we could have a quick chat. Now we have to manage a lot of users and also document stuff properly so people can do it, do their jobs and make requests for features to help them do their jobs easier. Gillian Bruce: Well, okay. So, clearly you are an awesome admin plus. I think it's really interesting that you only got your first start a couple years ago, I guess three years ago, 2019 seems like forever ago, but it's not, and how you've been able to grow so much in your knowledge and your abilities within Salesforce. I mean it sounds like a lot of it was kind of hands-on experience, any other external sources or what kind of things really helped you hone that skill so that you can really build, I mean the massive growth that your organization has had just within the last six months? Andrew Russo: Yeah. I think that really where the big thing, and it's really weird to say, but I think becoming a Master Googler has really helped. And I think that's a skill that's almost vital because there's so many resources out there. You've got the Trailhead community, which there's a lot of questions that get answered on there. There's a lot of information with even guides. There's thousands of different admins who have blogs that have stuff generally who joined the Salesforce team with all of her flow blogs. There's all the different resources out there. So becoming a Master Googler to think, "Okay, how do I want a Google link to get the response of what I'm looking for?" And you can get a lot of different resources, that really helped. Gillian Bruce: Okay. Well, that's great. We want everyone to use sandboxes. So let's talk a little bit more about specifically some of the solutions that you've built. Now, I know you, thankfully, helped me out with a blog post we did not too long ago about how to build a kick ass management app, which you demoed some of what you've built and shared some of that in our blog post. Can you talk to us a little bit about your approach to building that app and how you think about how to best structure it? Because you got a lot going on there. There's a lot of complexity and clearly, I mean it kind of blew my mind when you were sharing all of the details that you had involved in that, but it also sounds like it is incredibly helpful to you and your team as you're building. So talk to us a little bit about an overview of that app and then how you approached building it. Andrew Russo: Yeah. So it was something that we had thought about earlier this year of, we need a better way to handle internal user requests because they started off as emails and then we would lose track of emails. If it doesn't hit your inbox for the day, you kind of forget about the request, even though you might have needed to do something. So that started throughout the year and we're like, "We really want to look at cases." And then I posted on the Trailhead screen, has anyone done... Actually it was on Reddit I posted and I just asked if anyone's done cases internally, just to get an idea of it. People responded, "Okay. Think about record types." And I was like, "Okay." Gillian Bruce: So, let's pause right there for a second. So you said putting some structure around the ask. What do you mean by that? Because a lot of people will be like, "Oh, can you just add a checkbox to this page?" And I'm sure you have a little bit more structure to help coach them out of that kind of ask. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Andrew Russo: Yeah. So we used the case initially to gather the, "Hey, I want a check box," because a user just looks as it as, "I want a check box to record this," because they got some type of request from their boss and they need to show something, but then once we are able to review it, it might be, "Oh, that's already there." Or, "Oh no, that's something that's new. We need to gather the requirements. What is the business case supporting it? Why are we trying to do this?" To make sure it's not overlapping with something else or it's not a one-time thing where they want to go make a check box on records and then run a report of the check boxes, because seen that recently a few times where it's like, "Oh, we want to see all accounts with this so let's add a check box," which is not the right way for us to handle that. Gillian Bruce: You built in the documentation. Yeah. Andrew Russo: Exactly. So we have documentation gathered right away while we're building, which is super helpful. Gillian Bruce: That's awesome. So I mean, what I really like about this is you built it so that it helps you be successful as things are being built, right? You built documentation into the process, you built the coaching of like, "Hey, this is how you properly make a request. This is what a user story is." And I love the promotion of Trailhead in there, I think that's great. But what are some of the other things that you've built into the app that help you and your team be successful? I know one of the things that you had mentioned to me before is having some metrics of the impact of some of the apps and some of the features that you've built. Can you talk to us a little bit more about that? Andrew Russo: Yes. There's actually two really awesome things that we have done with it. So one of which is for measuring the impact of automations, we have a couple different objects that run. So inside of any of the flows that we build, we add a sub flow that runs at the end and what it does, it tracks every time that the flow runs and then there's a master record that's created that we're able to see, "Okay, this is how many times it ran." We can put in how many hours it took us to build and how many minutes the previous process that was getting used is, so it actually calculates how many hours and minutes are saved by users running it. So if it used to take 10 minutes to do a process and it took us three hours to build it, we can see at what point has the breakeven been met that, "Hey, we've actually just saved the company time?" And then in the future we can say, "This is how much time we've saved with the automation on an ongoing basis." Gillian Bruce: Okay. So those two ideas are amazing and I feel like every admin is going to want to implement those in their own org. I mean the fact that you have real, tangible hard metrics on the ROI that you bring to the organization in terms of time saved, I mean you can directly link that to basically money saved. That's awesome. And then the second one about like, "Hey, a lot of people track how long it takes to resolve a case, but it's not always on us." It's actually, "Hey, you make this request, we're waiting for you most of the time on this." So I think that's really, really amazing tips for how to break down and really put hard data and metrics behind the work that you do as an admin or building apps. Andrew Russo: Yeah. I think that really, it's a couple things. One of the things that I think is really important and some people really have a hard time doing is learning to say no, because there's some requests that you get that you just have to say no, and put your foot in the sand and say, "I'm not going to do this. This does not make sense. It's not best practice." Really implementing a strong governance. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. So those are three great tips. The ability to say no and hold the line. And then less is more, I think that architect mindset is super important. And then I think that last one you talked about, researching and just basically playing with Salesforce is really important. And it's that learner's mindset idea, right? Is that there's always something to learn. And so, "Hey, if you're curious, go try it out, go build it, go build an app for some one-off use case that isn't necessarily part of your job." Andrew Russo: Yeah. Building on that too, one of the things that I think is super helpful is because in my org, I see what I see. We don't use, for example, CPQ at all. We don't use other... We don't use Marketing Cloud. We have Pardot, but we don't have full Marketing Cloud, so thinking about some of these different areas that we don't really use, but understanding them is really helpful. So one thing that I think really helped open my eyes to see different areas is going on the answers and actually helping other users because it exposes you and you can look at a question someone else has that could come to you in the future and you can help answer their question. You might even have to research. You might not know the answer, but being able to see different use cases in other orgs from other people, answering their questions helps to expose you to new ideas and things that you've never looked at, but now when you come across it in the future, you already have an idea of it. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Okay. I mean, so now I'm also going to out you for something you told me that you were doing and I know that you are in the midst of it, you had a goal of becoming one of the top answerers in the answers community, I believe. And tell me a little bit more about that. Clearly, I understand why, you've learned about things that then you're putting into your own org, but what is it about doing that that drives you? Or why do you want to do that? Andrew Russo: I think it's just fun, honestly. So during COVID I got bored and I started answering stuff when I was working from home doing it. And that was 2020 March and I did a good amount of questions and answer stuff, and it was kind of fun doing it. And then two weeks ago I just got bored and I just was like, "You know what? I'm going to go answer them." And then it's kind of addicting because people reply to them and then it draws you back, you go and you help while you answer the questions. The amount of things that... It's a satisfaction you get. Gillian Bruce: That's awesome, Andrew. Okay. So that's the vibe that I love about the admin communities. Everyone just loves to give back and help each other. And here's the thing, clearly you are passionate about solving problems and helping other people solve problems, both in your actual day job, and then clearly this is just part of who you are, because you're doing it externally out of your normal day job for the broader community as well, which is so great, so awesome. You're inspiring me. I'm like, "Maybe I should go try and answer some questions." Don't worry, I'm not going to threaten your leaderboard status, I promise. I have a long ways to go, but that's great. Andrew Russo: Yeah, I think that really some of it, I think there's two different parts of it. There's that new admin and then there's that current accidental admin who works at a company that became the accidental admin. For a new admin, I think really Trailhead is a really great place to start, and then moving over to trying to apply to jobs where they might be a small org with Salesforce that doesn't really have an admin and come in as not an admin, but become the accidental admin. Because I think the accidental admin is a really great place to start because you start to learn a lot of little different things that help you grow. Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Oh gosh, Andrew, this is great. I so appreciate your time. I think it's so cool that you are so generous with sharing what you know and what you've built. I will, for sure, put a link in the show notes to that great blog post that you contributed a lot to and showing some of the different elements of the part of your user management app. And I really appreciate you imparting your wisdom with the admin community and answering so many questions. I can't wait to see you on the top of the leaderboard. Let's just be clear, we'll have a little celebratory "Andrew made it" and then the next person will try and dethrone you. It'll be great. Andrew Russo: It'll be Steve Mo who comes to dethrone. We already know it. Gillian Bruce: I mean he does have a very long history of answering most of the questions. Andrew Russo: The second that it's a formula question, I'm always hesitant because I know that he's going to step in and he's going to have a better formula way. And it's also cool to see, "Okay, this is how I would've answered and done it. Oh, this is what Steve Mo thinks about it." And generally Steve Mo comes with pretty clean formulas that are really well thought out and work super well, so... Gillian Bruce: Well, and that's the advantage of participating in the community, right? Is you see all these different ways of attacking the same problem. So I love that. That's great. Well, Andrew, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and I appreciate everything you do to give back and thank you again for sharing all of these amazing pieces of wisdom with the community. Andrew Russo: Yeah. Thank you. I think this was really fun. Gillian Bruce: Well, huge thanks to Andrew for taking the time to chat with me. I don't know about you, but I am definitely inspired to go tinker a little bit more and maybe go answer some questions of my own on the answers community. Now, some of the top takeaways from my chat with Andrew, I hope that you heard these as well, but first of all, it's always good to say no, have some kind of governance strategy when you are building apps. You got to set some boundaries, you got to set up some structures that enable you to actually build something that is effective instead of just building everything that people ask you for.
Direct download: Create_a_User_Management_Super_App_with_Andrew_Russo.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PST |
Thu, 5 May 2022
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we take the show on the road, live from TrailblazerDX. Join us as we talk about how we put on events like these, what it’s like to go to a live event for the first time, and tips from a vet about why networking is so important. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversations. The man behind the Trailblazer magicFirst, we caught up with Kavindra Patel, VP, Trailblazer Events & Digital Experiences at Salesforce. In short, he runs the show, putting together TrailblazerDX as well as Trailblazer events at Dreamforce and all the World Tours. If you spot someone at an event sporting a cool ranger hat, come say hi to KP. An admin’s first time at TDXNext, Mike bumped into Grace Villier, an Admin and sales and marketing specialist at her very first TrailblazerDX. One takeaway she has from the event is to make sure to block out time each week to re-up on your knowledge and keep up with all the content coming out on Trailhead. While she looked at the schedule ahead of time, Grace urges you to really focus in on what will maximize value because these events are always shorter than you think they are going into them. Tips from a Salesforce veteranThe great thing about a live event like TrailblazerDX is that you have a chance to talk to folks with a wide range of experience and backgrounds. Mike went from talking to a first-time attendee to a real vet when he met up with Lauren Dunne Bolopue, Lead Salesforce Evangelist at DocuSign. She’s super psyched for the upcoming Slack integrations and how that will transform the way we work. She also emphasized just how important the networking you do at events is, and how the people you meet can help you grow and get through roadblocks you might run into along the way.
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Full show transcript Speaker 1: Welcome to the Salesforce Admin's podcast. And we are live, here today, at TrailblazerDX. So, I'm going to walk around the event and get some audio snippets, in case the audio's a little bit different. But I want to kick off our TrailblazerDX special episode with Kavindra Patel or KP, as I know. Kavindra is, kind of, my go-to person for the events. KP, what do you do at Salesforce? Speaker 2: Well, I run Trailblazer events for Salesforce. We do TrailblazerDX. Trailblazer is a Dream Force, as well as, Trailblazers, and all the world tours. Speaker 1: So, trailblazers are your thing. Speaker 2: They are my thing, and I love trailblazers. Speaker 1: So, let's talk about TrailblazerDX. What is an exciting thing that you brought this week, or that you got to plan, or be a part of? Speaker 2: So, the exciting part is bringing the Slack, Tableau, Mulesoft, as well as all the Salesforce developers, Admins and architects, all together under one umbrella. So, they can learn from each other, connect with each other, and take themselves to another level. Speaker 1: Cool. If somebody were to see you at an event, you're kind of hard to miss. Where did the hat come from? Speaker 2: Yeah, I try to hide myself, but it doesn't work really. I've got my signature hat from the old days of Trailhead, when we really brought Trailhead experience, which is the vibe we have, the fun outdoor vibe, and bringing that into events. And at that time, I bought myself an amazing hat, and you will see me on Twitter all the time, with my hat on. And so, that's where it came from. And it has a ranger, a pin, because I am a ranger. Speaker 1: Because you're a ranger. Speaker 2: Because I earned it. And so, that's where it comes from. And people find me, and I love talking to the Trailblazers, and just seeing how I can help them. Speaker 1: So Kavindra, you're on Twitter, people can see your picture. What's your Twitter handle? Speaker 2: My Twitter handle is @kavindrapatel. Speaker 1: Perfect. I'll put a link in the show notes. So, we're going to walk the floor and see who else I can run into. Kavindra, thank you for being our first guest. Speaker 2: You're welcome. Have a nice day, Mike. Speaker 1: All right. So, we just finished up our interview with Kavindra. We found out cool things that are happening at the event, but I am standing here with Grace, who's a first-time attendee. Grace, can you introduce yourself? Speaker 3: Yes, my name's Grace Villier. I work for a Construction Aggregate company, and I am our Sales and Marketing Specialist. Speaker 1: And Grace, I think this is your first TrailblazerDX. Speaker 3: It is, yes. Speaker 1: Okay, so tell me what you're taking notes on, because you've been in a ton of sessions. Speaker 3: So I, like you said, I've been in quite a few sessions. I've been trying to go to as many Admin sessions that I can go to, as well. Because that is my focus, at my job, is being the best Admin I can be for our users, but I've also gone to a couple sessions on the developer side. So, learning more about Apex, just because, as an Admin, we are involved with Flows, and automation. So, I thought the apex could be helpful too. So, trying to get in as many different areas, and sessions, that I can learn about, throughout these couple of days. Speaker 1: So, you're on your second day, how many notes pages have you filled? Speaker 3: I actually counted, and it is up to about eight now. Speaker 1: Wow, eight. Speaker 3: They're all the sessions. Speaker 1: That's a lot. That's a lot. What session stood out to you, as like, "Wow. I had no idea I was going to learn that." Speaker 3: I think the Admin Best Practices, because one of the things I learned about, was this podcast. Because I didn't realize that it had existed before. Speaker 1: And now you're on it. Speaker 3: Exactly. So, I think, little things like that, and learning about best practices, and what you can do on a routine basis, as far as getting feedback from your users. What's working, what's not, because I do ride-along's with our users, every so often. So, just to reinforce that... And it was talked about, coffee hours. So, I think, kind of, combining those because when I do my ride-alongs, it's a whole day, which is awesome. But also combining that with coffee sessions, and just reaching out to people on a more regular basis, I think could be good too. Speaker 1: So, how long have you been in Admin? Speaker 3: So, I started my Salesforce journey, let's see, January 2020. So, about- Speaker 1: That whole time period is a little fuzzy for all of us. Speaker 3: Yes, or excuse me, 21. About a year and a half ago. Speaker 1: Oh, good. Speaker 3: Excuse me. Yes. Speaker 1: In the pandemic. Speaker 3: '21, yes. Yes, so, and I went through a training program in sales, and then the opportunity, got to be our Project Lead for implementing Salesforce in December 2020, and then actually started with that in January 2021. So, hadn't seen Salesforce before. And I actually got my Admin certification last October. So I've learned a lot, in that period of time. Speaker 1: Congrats. Congrats. Speaker 3: Thank you. Speaker 1: What is one thing you're going to do different, when you get back to your desk? Speaker 3: I think getting back to my desk, specifically, I think adding blocks to my calendar, and because I think it's always important to keep learning. And as I was studying for my Admin certification, I was so focused on Trailhead, and doing modules, and realizing that those modules, more and more come out, and they're updated. For example, with Flows, that's the way things are going now with automation. So, just to continue those modules, I think we'll be good in blocking out an hour or two each week, just to stay up-to-date on things throughout Trailhead. Speaker 1: Now, one of the cool things is, since yesterday, when I saw you in a session, you've also built your entourage, which I think is very cool. So, you've also networked with other people at this event. What was the common factor, for you finding someone else to hang out with at TrailblazerDX? Speaker 3: So, we're actually in the same general area of the country. Within the Southeast, which was cool. And- Speaker 1: Oh, you're not from England. I thought I heard an accent there. I was going to say Wales, maybe. Speaker 3: I know, I sound very, very British, yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. New Zealand maybe, right? Speaker 3: Yes. Yes. So, that was a common factor. And just, having been fairly new to Salesforce, within the past year and a half, it was good to meet somebody new. Like you said, make those connections. Speaker 1: Okay. So, what is one thing, as we kind of wrap up, what is one thing you'll do different the next time you go to a Salesforce event? Speaker 3: That's a good question. Because I did look through all the sessions before, and kind of, factored in what will bring the most value. And I think, honing in more on that, just because it is only a two day conference. Really looking into what sessions are going to bring the most value. What can I learn the most from? So like I said, I try to combine some of the Admin sessions, and developer sessions, to learn more about that, too. So, I think, just continuing to do that. And then also, networking more, just because there are so many people here. Working on networking, even more next time, to grow my Salesforce community, people that I know. Speaker 1: Your eco-system, yeah. Well, you have one now, you have two more with us. Thank you, Grace, for being on the podcast. Speaker 3: Thank you, I appreciate it. Speaker 1: Best of luck. I'm sure we'll connect, maybe at Dreamforce. Speaker 3: Yes. Thank you very much. Speaker 1: Okay. So, we just came off that fun interview with Grace, who is a first time event TDX. And I happened to run into... You walk around TDX, and you run into friends and family you know. So, I found a veteran, we'll say veteran. Speaker 4: Oh, I like that term better. Speaker 1: Okay, veteran, TDX attendee Lauren, can you introduce yourself? Speaker 4: I'm Lauren Dunvalvue. I'm lead Salesforce Evangelist at DocuSign. And this is my second TDX, but my eighth Salesforce big conference. Speaker 1: Wow. You keep track of the big conference. Okay. Speaker 4: I do, like my life depends on it. Speaker 1: But first back, it feels like we're starting all over again. Speaker 4: Yeah, I've missed people. I'm a people person. And just being able to see people that I see, on a tiny little screen, every week, or every month, at Meetups, and stuff like that, it's just, I'm like, "Oh my God, you're tall." Like people I've met for the first time in the lockdown. And now they're... I'm meeting them in person. I'm like, "I didn't think you were not tall. Okay, I feel really short now." It's just nice to be able to have that, in-person connection. That is something I have definitely missed, definitely missed. Speaker 1: Yeah. So, now that we're back in person, what was something that surprised you at TDX this year? Speaker 4: I am loving the Slack API Integration thing. My ears, straight away went off, as soon as it was announced in the keynote. And I was like, "I need to know more." So, as soon as I was able to get to the Slack area, I was like talking to people. I was like, "Tell me more, how do I get involved? How do I get information?" And I was like a little too excited, I think I scared them just a little. But I was like, "I have these people now, in front of me, that can't run away or you know, mute me." I'm like, "I get to talk to people and tell me all this stuff." So, that's something I'm definitely excited to play with, is that API connection. Because Slack is... We all live and work on Slack, like there's the Ohana Slack, just- Speaker 1: Or we will. Speaker 4: Well, yeah, true. Speaker 1: If you're not already. Speaker 4: Well, if you're not already, there's Ohana Slack, there's the Ohana Coffee Slack, there obviously Work Slack. There's so many different Slack channels now, for the community. And it's just, I'm looking at it in terms of being able to implement it into work, and how I can boost more productivity. And even for the DocuSign side of things, being able to have that product evolve. Because we have an integration, but I'm like, as soon as I saw it, I was like messaging. I was Slack messaging, believe or not, our Product Manager. And I was like, "We need to get on this. We need to do this. Here's our information we need." He is like, "Okay, you need to calm down." I'm just so super excited about it. Speaker 1: So, it's interesting you bring up connections. It seems to be a theme. Kind of, this podcast, because we just talked with Grace, who made a connection with somebody that was attending first time solo, just like her solo. She was solo, person she met was solo. And we were just talking, before I pressed record, about how you were taking pictures of people's badges, and connecting with somebody. Can you go more into that? Speaker 4: Sure, there's so many people that are like, "I'm new to the ecosystem, or I don't know where to start." Or, "I've been here, I started Salesforce a couple years ago and I just... What should I do? Should I take my certification exam? Where should I go?" And on a personal level, people brought me into the Ohana and nurtured me, and grew me, and helped me. And I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to connect with you on LinkedIn. I'm going to follow you on Twitter." I'm like, "I want to help you. If I can't help you, I know people who can." And that's the whole point of the community, is helping people grow, and I've missed it. I've done it throughout the lockdown, but having this, like seeing people and go, "Oh my God, thank you so much." And it's, I just... I can't explain it. Having the in-person has really meant so much more than being on a screen. Speaker 1: So, I'll ask the question I think everybody's thinking about. I didn't make it to TrailblazerDX. Besides the in-person, and oh, by the way, your feet hurting. Speaker 4: Oh yeah. Speaker 1: Your feet. Speaker 4: I forgot. Speaker 1: That's a new thing. I haven't stood for more than, a little bit of time. I walk my dog, I do stuff, but standing on hard concrete floors. What is something you're surprised that you didn't realize you were missing, by showing up? Speaker 4: Well, I'm going to do you one better, actually wearing jeans. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Speaker 4: I lived in pajama pants for two years. Speaker 1: Yeah, I did those athletic, slicky things. Speaker 4: No, the jeans, I'm like, "I might need jeans." Speaker 1: I need jeans. Yeah. We all had to buy different sizes, by the way. Speaker 4: Yeah, same here. Speaker 1: None of the jeans fit. Speaker 4: Yeah. And like, I haven't walked around, the last two days. I think my jeans might be a little loose now, I'm hoping. Speaker 1: Yeah. Good. Good. Speaker 4: But one thing about... It's the Trail. Just seeing the excitement of people, and the learning, and you forget, because when you're doing the online stuff, you're not seeing all different areas. I saw the Flow Matics thing and I was like, "That looks really interesting." Whereas if I saw it on an agenda, I would've have been like, "Oh." Whereas I go over, and I'm learning more about that. I'm like, "That's cool." I've never touched Flow. My role, I don't get to play very much with Salesforce. But you know, I'm like, "Okay, I need to learn Flow. This is something I have to..." I'm feeling really encouraged, and inspired, to learn more. And I'm super excited to watch back stuff on Salesforce Plus, as well. Because, obviously, I can't clone myself. I haven't been to everything. Speaker 1: It could be everywhere. Speaker 4: I wish I could, but I couldn't. But being able to watch stuff back, that's what I'm excited for, to go back and learn even more. Speaker 1: So, as a veteran, long-time attendee of TDX. Speaker 4: That's me, yes. Speaker 1: As somebody looking ahead at future events, we've got some World Tours coming up, we have a Dreamforce coming up. What would you advise people to, kind of... How should they approach some of these online events, attending. I just talked to my boss. What should I set? Why should I go? Speaker 4: One thing is, I always tell people, Salesforce is constantly evolving, and you'll never know everything. And that's why having a network is so important. So, going to these events and I'm not a part of specialist, I'm now getting into the marketing cloud side of things, and I don't know where to start. So, I've actually put it out on Twitter and I bumped it to a few people and I'm like, "Where do I start?" And being able to have that person go, "Oh yeah, I was in the same boat. Here's what you need to know." Speaker 1: Tell me about it. Speaker 4: If you have, that's the only session. If I couldn't do any others, I was so glad I did True to the Core. Speaker 1: Why? If I'm new to the platform, why, what is True to the Core? Speaker 4: I don't want to say it, but it's all the Product Manager's and Parker Harris, are held hostage. They can't squirm out of, "Oh, I'll get back to you on that." They're sitting on a platform, and it's not rehearsed. It's random people coming up from the audience, and asking them pointed questions. And it's like, they're in the hot seat. And, there's nothing terrible. It's like, "Hey, we need accountability for this, and we need this." And it's nice to have that access to Product Managers, to executives, to people who work in Salesforce. That's another selling point for going to these events is having someone... Being able to walk up to someone in the Trailblazer Certification Program and go, "Here's where I'm at, where should I go? Should I go down the developer route? Should I go down the consultant route? I don't know where I want to..." Speaker 1: So, maybe you've already answered it, but I've been to all this stuff. I can just watch it on Salesforce Plus. Speaker 4: No, it's a different experience. Speaker 1: You've been to a bunch of these events. Why do you still keep coming? Speaker 4: People. The learning, as I said, it's constantly evolving. You don't know what you don't know, until you walk around. And you're like, "Oh, that looks kind of cool." Or, "Oh, I know nothing about this subject, so I'm going to sit there and listen." And having developers who are giving presentations, like in the Parker Harris keynote, there was Stephan Garcia-Chandler. He was demoing his stuff. And then I got to sit at one of his talks and I'm like, "This is a guy who is demoing at a Salesforce keynote. Teaching me his stuff, his knowledge." And I'm like, "This is amazing." Being able to see the experts, and learn from the experts. So, that's what keeps me coming back, is seeing the people, learning from the people, and the excitement, you recharge your batteries when you're talking to the people. Sorry. I'm all about the people. I love people. Speaker 1: That's good. It's good. Speaker 4: I miss the people, the last couple years. Speaker 1: Speaking of people, if people want to follow you on the Twitters. Speaker 4: Yup. On the Twitter verse, I'm @laurendon__c. Yeah. You get it. Speaker 1: Double underscore. Speaker 4: Double underscore. Yeah. Speaker 1: Because you're a custom object, gotcha. Speaker 4: Oh, I'm very custom. I'm unique. Speaker 1: I like that. Thank you Lauren, for being on the podcast. Speaker 4: Thanks you very much. Very, very, very welcome. Thank you for including me. Speaker 1: So, we just heard from Lauren on, what it's like to be at TrailblazerDX, as an expert, or a long-time attendee. To wrap up our podcast, I got Gillian, the co-host, back, because she had so many hosting duties at TrailblazerDX. Gillian, why don't you, kind of, put a bow on this episode, in the event for us? Speaker 5: Sure. So, this was really special. This is our seventh ever TDX. And it's amazing that the first one was back in 2016, both our product and our community have exponentially grown and changed in so many ways. It's been amazing to reconnect in-person for the first time, and meet so many new people. I would say almost everyone that I met at this event was a brand new Salesforce person. Has first event, first time exposed to Salesforce, or very earlier in their Admin career. So all of you who are listening, who are wondering, 'Hey, what should I do to amplify my career, grow your career?" Connect with your local community group, go to a local Dream In event, try and come to Dreamforce, if you can. Speaker 1: No, it's good. Because when we talked with KP, the goal of this was to make people connect, get people back together. We talked with Grace and she had tons of notes, tons of notes, eight pages. And found a new friend, and Lauren said the same thing, too. And we saw this when we did a ton of sessions too, it's cool to just present, and see people get excited for something. Speaker 5: Oh, my gosh. Speaker 1: And clap. Speaker 5: Yeah. And to get the actual instantaneous feedback of, "That was useful, or, 'I've used that," or, "Hey, I can see how that could be used." Or "Hey, have you thought about this?" I mean, it's so invaluable. Speaker 1: And I love the... So, one thing Lauren said, was just the unintentionality. Just walking around, seeing vendor booths, running into people, and being like, "Oh, I never would've stopped here if it was on my schedule, but I'm here now. And maybe I can explore this." So, another reason to come back. Speaker 5: Learning about a new product, a new cloud. Maybe you're like, "Oh, you'll stop Composer. There's somebody right here I could talk to about that. That's great." Speaker 1: I have a question. Speaker 5: Yeah, what is this? And how can I use it? Speaker 1: Exactly. Well, this was a fun TrailblazerDX. We tried to do some kind of different episodes. So, we won't do this all the time, but hopefully we caught some of the energy, and some of the reason, for coming to an event like this. Of course, if you want to learn more about all things Salesforce Admin, go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources, including any of the links that I mentioned. I don't think I mentioned any links. Speaker 5: I think salesforce.com is a link. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll mention that link. How's that? We'll also have a full transcript there, too. Of course, you can say up-to-date with us on social. I'm sure you've seen some of the picks from TrailblazerDX. We are @SalesforceAdmns, no I, on Twitter. Gillian is @gilliankbruce. And of course, I am @MikeGerholdt on Twitter. So with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We'll see you in the cloud.
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