December Monthly Retro with Mike and Gillian

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’ve got the Monthly Retro for December. Join us as we review the top product, community, and careers content for December, and hear about Gillian’s visit to French Touch Dreamin.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation from our Monthly Retro.

Go to an event!

Gillian just got back from delivering the keynote address at French Touch Dreamin. If you’ve never been to a Dreamin event, there’s probably one near you or even remote options available. They’re organized by the community and have a very different feel from the official Salesforce events like World Tour, though you should also give those a try.

• World Tour NYC

Blog highlights from December

The weather outside is frightful, the fire’s so delightful, and you know what that means: it’s time to get ready for the Spring ‘23 Release. Ella Marks put together a great blog post laying out the major milestones you need to have on your calendar to get ready.

• Admin Release Countdown: Get Ready for Spring ’23

Video highlights from December

If you haven’t checked out the official Salesforce Admins YouTube channel, you’re missing out. Jennifer Lee is rocking some great live streams—Automate This! is must-see TV. You get to watch Jennifer and some amazing Trailblazers solve problems, live, right in front of your eyes, and if you miss anything you can always go back and watch the replay.

• Salesforce Admins YouTube channel

Podcast highlights from December

We really think you should take a listen to Brenda Glasser’s episode if you missed it the first time. She’s currently a Salesforce Architect, but the story of her career goes hand-in-hand with how she was able to champion the Salesforce platform at her organization, and she has a lot to say about how to do that effectively.

• Propel Your Career by Being a Salesforce Advocate with Brenda Glasser

Just for fun

Mike and Gillian check in on their feelings about candy canes and ask the hard questions, like why are there fruit-flavored candy canes and who actually enjoys them?

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Social

• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns 
• Gillian: @GillianKBruce
• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Full show transcript

Mike: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast in the December Monthly Retro. Oh, the last one for 2022. I'm your host and in this episode, we will review the top product community careers for December plus anything else we can think of that's top of mind. I don't know. You never know what's going to come to our minds, but also joining me is Gillian Bruce. Hey, Gillian.

Gillian: Hi, Mike Gerholdt. How you doing?

Mike: Good so far.

Gillian: Happy December.

Mike: I know. Can you believe it's already? It happened just like boop. Oh, 2022 is over.

Gillian: Yeah. It felt like this year went a lot quicker than the two years prior.

Mike: Right. Yes. Well, maybe we're catching back up.

Gillian: It's a good thing.

Mike: You fast forward the VHS tape. Because everything is digital now, you don't fast forward. We did some things. You did a thing. You went over to France and did French Touch Dreamin.

Gillian: I did.

Mike: Let's kick off there because that was fun.

Gillian: I got on an airplane. I got to go to Paris. I got to hang out with our amazing EMEA Trailblazer community. Let me tell you, this event, so French Touch Dreamin, it's got to be the biggest, or if not, along with maybe London's Calling, one of the biggest community events outside of the US. Jean Michelle has been running this for a while. It is such a cool event. They had an overwhelming response this year, so they had a lot more people attend than they had planned. But it was wonderful. It was just really a great opportunity again to see folks I have not seen in many years, to meet a bunch of new trailblazers in the EMEA community. It was also pretty sweet because the Salesforce office, for those of you don't know, is literally right next to the Eiffel Tower.
   It was just a wonderful time to be away from the family for a little bit, but also to really get connected with the French Touch Dreamin community. I was honored to be able to keynote the event, so I got to close out the event with a keynote all about how to really find ways to amplify the impact of the work that you do and focusing on values and all that. It was really fun. I had a lot of tremendous metaphors, analogies in there. It was great. There was so many amazing sessions I got to sit in on and it's really fun. I love Dreamin events. I've talked about it before. I know you've talked about it before, Mike, but the chance to really participate versus being a host at an official Salesforce event where we're running around like crazy people trying to manage all the things.
   To just sit and take in the content and really connect with people and have really deep conversations, get feedback, get ideas. It was an invaluable, so huge shout out to the whole team that put together French Touch Dreamin. If you, listener, are at all interested in attending French Touch Dreamin in the future, I highly encourage you to do so. They will be hosting it again next year. I think it's always in early December, so good time to maybe go to Paris and do a little holiday shopping. That's a fun place to do that. You can get in some big trouble. Not that I did at all.

Mike: Well, it is the holidays. Or I would add, Gillian, really any community event, because there's a lot of community events across the US. You don't have to fly all the way to France.

Gillian: Yeah, there's community events everywhere. There was a community event in Morocco, North Africa Dreamin just a month ago. No matter where you are, really, hey, if you have not attended a Dreamin event, I guarantee you there's one within a reasonable distance of where you live, so check it out. There's also a lot of virtual ones, too, which is pretty fun. Definitely a lot more of a program than a typical user group meeting. It's very different from going to a Salesforce sponsored event because these are all put on by the community. Salesforce has nothing to do with the programming and sometimes they invite people who work at Salesforce like myself to participate, which is really cool.

Mike: Speaking of Salesforce sponsored.

Gillian: Good segue.

Mike: We also did World Tour New York early part of December, it was December 8th. I want to say. For some reason that sticks in my head.

Gillian: I think you're right. Yeah.

Mike: That looked like a packed event. We had Lisa there and Jennifer and Ella from our team. That was a really cool event and a ton of community people. Holy cow.

Gillian: The Twitter thread was unending of all of the selfies and the photos. Michelle Hansen, our golden hoodie winner from our keynote at Dreamforce was there giving a session. Michael [inaudible] won the golden hoodie in the main keynote. It was very, very cool. Just from what I heard, what Lisa and Ella and Jen said is it was packed. There was so many people.

Mike: It looked packed. Did you see that? The pictures, it looked packed. It reminded me of London World Tour that one year that was just like...

Gillian: That's right. It was like 10,000 people.

Mike: Let me just wiggle through people.

Gillian: Yeah. Javits Center was going off with a lot of Salesforce content and some fun. If you missed it, you could actually, I think watch the broadcast that happened during the event. Check that out. I know they definitely got a version of Mark's keynote on there, which is interesting to always check out and see what's top of mind for him. Definitely had even a new framework that he's playing with about playing on the seven habits of highly effective people, the seven habits of highly effective companies. Check it out. An interesting approach.

Mike: Yeah. Wonder if we've done that. Anyway, let's talk about the cool content we had for December, at least the three things we think you should pay attention to. I'll kick off. Wouldn't be December if it wasn't talking about spring, because the second, a little flurry flies, we immediately start thinking about the next season. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the spring '23 release dates countdown blog that we put up, because you probably already have those dates on your calendar as an admin. If not, you will.

Gillian: Yeah. Get them, because guess what? It's right around the corner. It's a season of giving gifts and we're giving you the gift of another release coming very soon.

Mike: Yeah, it feels like. Okay, you do the holiday stuff. Yay. New Year's. Okay, now it's the release time.

Gillian: Yeah, it's release time this year. Trailblazer DX time, too.

Mike: Oh yeah, we have that coming up. We'll save that for our next Retro.

Gillian: Okay. I thought it'd be more of a January topic anyway.

Mike: Right. One thing at a time.

Gillian: I know, I know. I think [inaudible], what are we working on all the time every day right now? Oh, right. That's not actually for everyone else for a few months.

Mike: Right. Yeah. It's 90 days out. That's a long time in the real world.

Gillian: Yeah. In the real world. Well, in Salesforce timeline, that's was yesterday.

Mike: Right. Gillian, you did a great podcast with Brenda on propelling your career.

Gillian: Yeah. Brenda Glasser, she's actually an architect, but she came in as an awesome admin and has really worked in her career to build her skillset and grow into now, she manages a team of Salesforce professionals. She's working at a really cool innovative startup company, but she has been around on the ecosystem almost as long as I have. I think we've both been in around like 12, 13 years, which sounds crazy to say that, but she has really found that the way that she's been able to propel her career is by being an internal advocate for Salesforce. By being the person who keeps pushing the idea that, hey, could do this with Salesforce, we can build this out with Salesforce has really enabled her to grow her career and help her make the moves that she's been able to make to now be a really seasoned professional leading a team.
   I thought it was interesting to get her on the podcast and she talks through what it means to be an advocate for Salesforce within your organization, how to do it, how to speak to executives, how to build that momentum. Good, good. It was a fun podcast. Brenda is great.

Mike: I enjoyed it. And then of course, we always point out video and I'm wanting to point out something a little different in not a specific video, but kind of a specific video, in that we do what I think is super cool, the royal we, Jennifer does live streams on our YouTube channel. I'll include the link in the show notes, but Automate This, it's just this really cool live thing that she does that I feel is, man, it's up there in terms of fun stuff to watch that you can just chime into and if you miss it, you can go back and watch it, but you also know when the next one is coming. I don't know, I find stuff like that really neat.

Gillian: Well, it's really innovative. Really, nobody else is doing what Jennifer is doing. It's highlighting trailblazers who are doing really interesting things and really going through it live. You are a part of it. This is not pre-recorded. It's a really fun way to really get involved, to feel connected, to learn. If you missed anything, you can then go back and watch the replay. But she does these quite often, so if you've never tuned into one, please go investigate.

Mike: Seriously. I feel like I'm constantly looking over at my Twitter feed and being like, oh, Jennifer is live on YouTube again.

Gillian: Yeah. And then everyone is like, oh my gosh, did you see this? Did you see this? I didn't know you could do this. Yeah. Very fun. Check it out.

Mike: Cool. Well, last Retro of 2022. I'll pull from an internal question that we asked the team. Gillian, do you have a preference on candy canes? Do you like the peppermint or do you like the fruit?

Gillian: Fruit candy canes are what? Why?

Mike: I know, right?

Gillian: I like the pretty colors, the rainbow colors are...

Mike: I think they're sweet.

Gillian: I see what you did there.

Mike: I try.

Gillian: I like a good peppermint candy cane in my hot cocoa. Mm-hmm. Just a little minty.

Mike: Oh, yeah. This is that time of year when everything becomes candy cane flavored.

Gillian: I will say my three-year-old son Jack just had his first candy cane the other day and it blew his mind. He also didn't understand the thing that you're just supposed to leave it in your mouth. He kept taking it out and touching it and getting all sticky and getting everything else all sticky. At some point, I just made it disappear. Candy canes. Mike, what about you? Fruit candy cane?

Mike: No, I'm team peppermint. There's one reason it should be striped like that. I also would buy candy canes if they were peppermint flavored, but had the beauty of the fruit candy cane. If I want a piece of fruit, I'm going to get a Jolly Rancher or something. That to me doesn't say holidays. This is the one time a year you can walk around with a candy cane in your mouth and not look like a weirdo.

Gillian: I guess that's a good point.

Mike: Why waste it on a fruit candy cane?

Gillian: You know what else I really like to do with candy canes? I like to make peppermint bark.

Mike: Oh, I just like the regular bark, the almond bark. Do you like chocolate bark or almond bark? I like almond.

Gillian: I don't really discriminate, but a good peppermint bark is really hard to beat. The William Sonoma Peppermint bark, that's the bar to meet. But making your own peppermint bark, I like milk chocolate with the candy canes.

Mike: Oh. I think I pepperminted myself out too much one year. They had a peppermint coffee and I drank too much of it and now I'm just a little, it's like pumpkin spice.

Gillian: Well, I wonder if we're going to start another feud here because we're both big peppermint proponents, but what are the other holiday flavors? There's eggnog, hot cocoa.

Mike: In a candy cane? Here's an eggnog candy cane. Oh, that sounds horrible.

Gillian: Eggnog is just not my thing anyway.

Mike: No, no.

Gillian: Well, mulled wine is a thing that people get into at the holidays, which is quite delicious and so boozy. It's so dangerous.

Mike: I thought we were talking about candy canes.

Gillian: Yeah, sorry. I just took it another direction. I apologize. I don't know of candy cane things.

Mike: Would you like a mulled wine candy cane, an eggnog candy cane, or a no thank you, we're good candy cane?

Gillian: Yeah. Other than the fruit version. I don't know of any other non-peppermint candy cane.

Mike: Right, because it's a waste of time.

Gillian: Yeah. Well, now everyone is going to want to eat a candy cane.

Mike: I know. Well, 'tis the season. All right, well, if you want to learn more about all things admin and anything that we just talked about in this episode, minus fruit flavored candy canes, please go to admin.salesforce.com to find those links and resources. You can stay up to date with us for all things social. We are @SalesforceAdmns, no I, on Twitter. I'm of course @MikeGerholdt on Twitter and Gillian is @gilliankbruce. With that, stay safe, stay awesome, have a great holiday season, and we will see you in the cloud.