Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Ben Sklar, Director of Product Management at Salesforce.

 

Join us as we chat about how he’s making setup into a better, more consistent experience.

 

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Ben Sklar.

The problems with Salesforce setup

If there’s one thing Salesforce Admins know a lot about, it’s setup. It’s time-consuming, complicated, and varies wildly depending on what you’re looking at. Answering a simple question like what objects does this user have access to and why turns into an arduous process.

 

That’s why I was so excited to bring Ben Sklar on the pod to talk about how his team is fixing setup in Salesforce. We’ll find out how they’re laying the groundwork for faster updates and creating a more consistent user experience.

Gradual improvements to setup

A big question I had for Ben was how the changes he’s making to setup will show up for those of us who use it every day. “All these amazing enhancements we’re making to the setup platform are really behind the scenes,” he says, “if we do this right way you don’t really even need to know that it’s there.”

 

However, you might notice a few improvements here or there. For example, there are new user summaries that allow you to see all the permission sets that a user has, all in one place. They’re also working with the Sales Cloud Go team to make sure that you can turn on features, discover new ones, and assign permissions, all in one place.

Creating a consistent experience

At the end of the day, the goal is to make things easier for the people who use it the most (that’s you!). “We’ve heard our admins often complain about inconsistent experiences,” Ben says, “and by being able to reuse components across setup you’ll be able to see more consistency.”

 

As Ben says, setup was turning into the “Wild West” and it would feel different across experiences. His team has done a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure that setup always has a consistent look and feel, and they’ve established a setup design council to create guidelines that make sense. The future of Salesforce Setup is bright, and a whole lot easier.

 

You should listen to the full episode for more from Ben, including what’s next for setup and why he loves ultimate frisbee. And subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

 

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Full show transcript

Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're talking about Setup, and I joked before I pressed record with Ben Sklar, Admins live in Setup. We probably could pay a mortgage based on the amount of time that we spend in Setup. And the reason I talk about Setup and Ben Sklar is Ben is one of the product managers who's tackling Setup and fixing Setup, and he's working very close with another product major that you may have heard of, Cheryl Feldman. And so that's how Ben came to the podcast. He was a suggestion from Cheryl. Hey, you got to talk about all the cool stuff that Ben's working on with Setup on the podcast. And so we cover that and I'm sure many of you probably have seen some of the very cool stuff that Ben and his team are working on in Setup, but at Dreamforce last week, and so we're going to talk about that.
But of course, before we get into it with Ben, just a quick reminder, wherever you're listening to the Salesforce podcast, if it's in app, go ahead and hit that subscribe or follow button. That allows you to get new downloads anytime a podcast drops, and every time a new podcast drops, you what time that is? It's Thursday mornings, so that way new pod right on your phone. If you're listening on the website, you don't have to worry about it. You should sign up for our Admin newsletter though, because we highlight podcasts in the newsletter. But enough about that, let's talk about the exciting world of Setup. It's really where all of us Admins live, and all of the cool stuff that Ben and his team are doing. So let's get Ben on the podcast. So Ben, welcome to the podcast.

Ben Sklar:
Hey, Mike. Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Mike:
Yeah, well, when Cheryl comes knocking at the proverbial podcast door and recommends a guest, I can't turn her down, because every time Cheryl Feldman gets on stage to talk about the future of something in Salesforce, Admins flock to those sessions. So she recommended that we have a discussion. I'm very excited for this, but before we get into that, why don't we learn a little bit about you? So tell us briefly how you got the journey to becoming a PM at Salesforce.

Ben Sklar:
Yeah, absolutely. So I started at Salesforce a few years ago. I joined as a product manager in our backend data services area. I became the product manager for our UI API, or user interface API, and I also launched our GraphQL API. And the reason I mention these things, I've been working on improving Setup, and it all starts at improving the way that we can pull in the right data and metadata inside of Setup. And so I'm really excited to talk more about how we're going to be fixing Setup.

Mike:
You said the magical words, Setup. Now we're all excited. I've been in Setup, I think Admins live most of their work days in Setup. What are some of the challenges that we have with Setup right now?

Ben Sklar:
Absolutely. We've heard a lot from our Admins and our customers. We've heard it can feel like when you're inside of Setup, it's really like being stuck on a deserted island.

Mike:
Oh.

Ben Sklar:
You're using these primitive tools and you really need a survivalist guide just to use it. So there's a lot of challenges we've heard. We've heard that it's very time-consuming and it takes forever to find out, what does a user have access to? Why do they have access to this object but not this other object? So we've heard a lot of challenges so far inside of Setup.

Mike:
So to be clear, are you working on all of Setup or just Setup around users?

Ben Sklar:
That's a great question. So we are working on all of Setup, but we needed to start somewhere. Where we started was around user access and user management, and as we've started building up, what we're calling, the Setup platform, and by the way, the Setup platform really allows us and will allow us to build features in Setup much faster than we ever have before. It's also allowing us to move experiences that are broken in Classic into Lightning.

Mike:
Gotcha. Fun thing we should try out is naming this platform, because I can't envision Salesforce is going to go with the Setup Platform. That doesn't feel like us.

Ben Sklar:
That's right.

Mike:
We have Hyperforce and we have a lot of things, something force, we should... Is this like Benforce, Cherylforce, the Ben and Cherylforce? I don't know, Ben and-

Ben Sklar:
Setupforce.

Mike:
Setupforce. Yeah, people should share their ideas for the name of it. Setup1, there's a cadence of things. We got to have a one, and then that won't work for a while, and then we got to have a Thingforce, right?

Ben Sklar:
That's right. What I will say is, all of these amazing enhancements we're making that we're calling the Setup platform, it's really behind the scenes. It's really just to let you all know that we're making amazing foundational changes to Setup, but if we do this the right way, you don't really even need to know that it's there.

Mike:
So does this mean that as releases come out, the Setup menu's going to change for me? Or is this going to be a gradual thing that maybe I might not even notice because it's so seamless in the background?

Ben Sklar:
That's a great question. This is more of a gradual change that you shouldn't notice at all, really, if we do our job the right way. What you will see are new features. You'll start seeing more consistency inside of Setup, where it looks like features are being developed by the same Salesforce and not disjointed experiences. And there's a lot of cool new things that are going to come every release because we can finally start moving, like I said before, these broken Classic experiences into Lightning?

Mike:
What's one example that you think, well, that's top of your list to move, that you know Admins are running into?

Ben Sklar:
Yeah, so if you were able to catch Dreamforce last week, you probably saw that the user list view, which was for some of our customers, a completely broken experience, we have finally moved that over into Lightning. And we're going to be expanding the functionality in that new Lightning Experience, release over release.

Mike:
Wow, and you mentioned, so you called it the Setup platform. Platform implies a lot. Allowing Setup to become a platform, what is that going to give us in terms of an advantage in the future?

Ben Sklar:
Absolutely. I think it really goes back to time to market for new features. As we build new features inside of Setup, like I said before, we can really build these features faster than we ever have before. Just to give you a little bit more context and information, when we're building features inside of Setup, in order to really populate that page with the components and all of the data that you see, we need to get it somewhere. And so we've really enhanced the way that we retrieve this data and put it on the page. And all of this is allowing us to really build the features much faster. And we've heard our Admins often complain about inconsistent experiences, and by being able to reuse components across Setup, that's when you're going to start seeing that consistency, and that similar look and feel for all these new features that are to come inside of Setup.

Mike:
Can you share with me an example of that? Because I know when we went to Lightning Page Builder, I think we just call it Page Builder now, but I also noticed that as we launched some of the Agentforce Prompt Builder and Copilot stuff, that the configuration looks very similar. Is that what you're referring to in Setup?

Ben Sklar:
Yeah, there's a few things to call out here. So the first is, I'm not sure if you've already seen the new summaries that we've built inside of Setup. So a good example would be if you go inside for a particular user, and you're trying to understand, okay, what permissions does this user have? What permission sets are they a part of? We can now see a summary of all that information in one place. We built one component, one summary component, but we're reusing that, not just for user but also now for objects, and for permission sets, and permission set groups.
So this Setup platform really allows us to build once and use all over the place. And so the next thing that we are focusing on are list views, and so you will now see that new user list view. You're going to see list views being built across Setup, us moving from Classic to Lightning. And one last example, the Sales Cloud team has developed a framework inside of Setup, called Sales Cloud Go. And this allows Admins really to turn new features on, faster. It puts it all in one place. And we've been partnering with that team, and in that same experience that you go to turn on your features and discover new features, you'll also be able to assign permissions in that same place.

Mike:
So I've seen the release notes on Sales Cloud Go, there was some stuff that came out in our most recent release about that. Is that an example where now we have a standard template and framework for all of the other teams to use? Was that one of the reasons that Setup had so many different experiences, is when somebody would put an item into the Setup menu, they really controlled the experience and there was no real, I guess, you're a UI guy, there was no real UI dictation for what it had to look like or act like?

Ben Sklar:
That's right. Exactly. So in the past, it often felt like Setup was starting to turn into the Wild West, where teams who were building inside of Setup could really do so many different things, and make it look and feel so different across experiences. What we're trying to do now is really templatize this so that we have a similar look and feel for all new features, and we've even established a Setup design council, which helps teams.

Mike:
Ooh.

Ben Sklar:
Yeah, it helps teams who are building in Setup, understand how should this look and feel? How do I get started using these new features and templates that have been created? It's really exciting, all the things that are coming out for Setup.

Mike:
To think of the amount of time that I've spent presenting and talking about even deployment best practices, and user acceptance testing, and feedback, you're always thinking of the frontend of the app, where the user will use the app. And it's just neat to think of, wow, we actually have a design council for the people that, when they click Setup, they click the gear, there's people that that's their world to think about, because for a lot of us, that's the world we live in. You think of, too often, there's so much emphasis put on the outside design of a car, but you know somewhere, at one of the manufacturing plants, somebody's job has to be, yeah, but what happens when you pop the hood? How much of a mess does that engine have to be and what's that like for the mechanic to work on it? And I feel like that's what you're telling me. No, we're actually thinking about it. What happens when you have to live under the hood of the car all day in Setup, what that experience looks like? So that's really neat to hear.

Ben Sklar:
Absolutely.

Mike:
So you mentioned platform. I'd be remiss for some of our very experienced Admins, when I hear platform, I think, "Well, maybe there's an API that I can tap into." Is there going to be any kind of developer experience for this new Setup platform?

Ben Sklar:
That's a great question. We often are asked by our Admins and ISPs, "All of these amazing new enhancements that you're making to Setup and changes to existing APIs, or may be new APIs that are being created, can we have access to these?" And what I would say is, we are really enhancing the same APIs that some of you already use, know and love today, including our UI API or user interface API and our GraphQL API. We are enhancing these APIs to improve the experience and the ease of bringing data and metadata directly into Setup. And so for all of you ISPs and Admins out there, again, those are the same services that we already make available externally. We are just improving the ability for us to tap into these APIs directly from Setup. We're reducing the barrier that we had before in accessing these APIs, and we're making it a lot easier for us to develop inside of Setup.

Mike:
Hmm, well, that's really cool. Can it envision how much farther we'll be, maybe a year from now when we've got all the user stuff tackled?

Ben Sklar:
That's right, and that leads me to say, we really started with user access and user management, really is the first customer or consumer of these new Setup platform enhancements we're making. That was really just the start, and we're now really talking to and partnering across our clouds, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, Industries, Commerce, you name it, so that they too can make sure to take advantage of all these new things we're doing inside of Setup, to build better features for all of you Admins.

Mike:
Yeah. That way it feels more unified, like everybody's building from the same playbook, right?

Ben Sklar:
That's right.

Mike:
Yeah. So Ben, when you're not fixing Setup, which I feel like is a 24/7, 365 thing, is there anything fun you like to do on the side? I know I've talked to product managers and some of them have smelted metals, and some run marathons and play board games, and they have all kinds of fun hobbies. Do you have any fun, tangible hobby you'd care to share with us?

Ben Sklar:
I do. During the summer, I'm a big Ultimate frisbee player.

Mike:
Oh, what's Ultimate frisbee? Tell us.

Ben Sklar:
It's like a combination between football and soccer, and maybe some other sports, it's-

Mike:
But with frisbees.

Ben Sklar:
But with frisbees. It's a non-contact sport. But once you catch the frisbee, you become the quarterback, like in football, and everyone on your team becomes a wide receiver that you can throw to. And when you're on defense, everyone, including you on your team, is like a cornerback in football. So you're trying to intercept the frisbee from the other team when you're on defense. And when you're on offense, you're trying to either throw the frisbee into the end zone for a touchdown like football, or catch it in the end zone like a touchdown in football.

Mike:
Wow. Do you have flags on the side since it's no contact, or you got to get that frisbee, that's the only way to stop the... is be to play good D.

Ben Sklar:
That's right. So once you catch the frisbee, you cannot move. So there's no flag that you're trying to-

Mike:
Oh, oh, you didn't say that before.

Ben Sklar:
Yeah. Yep.

Mike:
See, I didn't know that.

Ben Sklar:
So as soon as you catch it, you have to stop, and then the only way you can continue to move the frisbee forward is by throwing it to someone on your team.

Mike:
Okay. Okay. All right. I was envisioning people running and throwing, and I've never played this frisbee before, clearly. This sounds awesome. I fell into a rabbit hole of frisbee golf on YouTube for a while, and I live by a big, there's a big recreational dam by me that's like a, 10 minutes away, and they have a huge frisbee golf course, and it's through woods, and streams, and stuff. I played it once and I was like, "Wow, this is really cool." And I totally banged my friend's frisbees against the trees a lot. Are they like the same frisbees used with frisbee golf? Are they harder? Some of them that I would use had the hole in the middle.

Ben Sklar:
Interesting. So the weight is definitely different between a frisbee you use for Ultimate frisbee versus frisbee golf, and the shape can be a little bit different too. Like you mentioned, there's could be a hole in the middle for frisbee golf. Ultimate frisbee, it's a standard size and weight. There is no change to that, unlike frisbee golf where-

Mike:
Right. Yeah.

Ben Sklar:
... you can use different types of frisbees.

Mike:
Yeah, I know there was a driver and he had a putting frisbee.

Ben Sklar:
That's right, a driver frisbee, putter frisbee, et cetera.

Mike:
Well, how many is on a team?

Ben Sklar:
Typically, you go up to seven people out in the line. Depending on if you're on a serious team or not, you might have an O line of seven and then maybe you switch out for a D line of seven. But typically, for the most part, I really just play pickup.

Mike:
[inaudible 00:19:55].

Ben Sklar:
And so just seven of us get together onto one team, seven of us onto another team.

Mike:
Wow, that's a lot of people.

Ben Sklar:
Yeah.

Mike:
I don't know, for a pickup game.

Ben Sklar:
Yeah, we often get maybe over 20 people who will show up, so we'll sub out and allow other people to come in and have fun too.

Mike:
Sure. Wow, that sounds cool. I'm going to have to check that out. See, there's always stuff that people that work in technology do that's very tangible, because at the end of the day when you turn the monitor off, where did the Setup go? Well, it's off because there's no power, right? But extreme frisbee, and frisbee golf, and stuff, it still exists when you turn the monitor off because the frisbee's in the corner. So-

Ben Sklar:
That's right.

Mike:
That's awesome. Well, Ben, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. I'm sure I will do my best if the recordings are up, post-Dreamforce, to link them in the show. Otherwise, I know our social team will share them out, and I look forward to seeing all of the updates and new things coming to the Setup menu for all of us.

Ben Sklar:
Thanks, Mike. Again, thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Mike:
Okay. How much fun was that? Oh, by the way, Ben's into extreme frisbee playing golf tournament rugby. It sounds cool and it's a hundred percent not anything I could play, but I promise you this, I would sign up to watch that if some sports network put that on a television because that looks like fun to me. I don't know. Have you ever frisbee golfed? I frisbee golfed. Have you ever extreme frisbee'd? It sounds like fun. I can't throw very well, so maybe that's why I didn't do it. But anyway, how about all that stuff coming to Setup? I'm excited for it.
I know that jumping around in Setup has felt a little different, and there's a lot of things to work on, and it's just cool that somebody's tackling... Also, there's a whole group of people that sit around and think about what the Setup experience should be like in UI, that is just like a warm glass of cocoa next to a crackling fire on a snowy winter's day, for me. That's what that makes me feel like. And a teddy bear. Let's throw that in for fun because it's fall, so I'm sure you got to have something pumpkin spiced. Anyway, I appreciate Ben coming on the podcast. I appreciate you listening to the podcast and being this far into the episode. We've got a lot of really cool guests lined up, and working on getting even more. So with that, be sure to join us next week, and until then, I'll see you in the cloud.

 

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Douane James, Salesforce Application Product Manager.

Join us as we chat about his Dreamforce presentation about how reducing profiles in your org can enable faster deployments.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Douane James.

How permission sets can help you reduce Salesforce profiles in your org

Douane’s giving a talk at Dreamforce this year so I was excited to get him on the pod and hear more. He recently went through the process of reducing the number of profiles in his org from 11 down to only 2, so his talk is centered around why you can and should do the same.

I know I don’t need to tell you this, but Salesforce best practices change over time. Most Salesforce orgs are built to work right now, which is how you can wind up with technical debt. For example, permission sets have become a much more elegant solution to the problems we used to solve with profiles. Sounds like a big project, but Douane’s here to tell you that reducing the number of profiles in your org is not as hard as you might think.

Profile footprint reduction speeds up deployment

A few years ago, Douane’s organization started using a new dev ops process. And while this made it easier to identify what needed to be built and do it quickly, he couldn’t help but notice how long the deployments were taking. More often than not, the delays were related to configuring profiles. He realized they needed to do an overhaul and reduce the number of profiles in their org.

The first step was to get buy in. For Douane, the key was to emphasize how much quicker his team would be able to respond to requests if they spent time on cleaning up profiles. It also helped that they were committed to gradual improvements over time. Profile footprint reduction isn’t something that happens overnight, but it takes less time than you might think if go step by step.

How to move from profiles to permission set groups

Douane and his team set out to move everything they could from profiles into permission set groups. They identified a representative for each user role they could interview to make sure everything was still working as intended throughout the process.

When you’re looking at your existing profiles, you need to find out:

1. What are the permissions in the profiles?

2. What permissions are common to each job function?

3. Are there any special cases?

For users that need a lot of special access, Douane recommends creating a “heavy” permission set that allows you to give them exactly what they need.

If Douane has one message for you, it’s that the hardest part of reducing their Salesforce profiles was getting started. And the impact was felt immediately in terms of much quicker deployments and better security.

Make sure to catch Douane at Dreamforce and subscribe to the Salesforce Admisn Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag

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Learn more

• Trailhead Module: Permission Set Groups

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Full show transcript

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jason Atwood, CEO and Co-Founder of Arkus.

Join us as we chat about how to land your first Salesforce Admin role, from where to find good opportunities to how to prep for the job interview and more.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jason Atwood.

How Salesforce Admins should split their learning time

We’re talking with Jason because he spends a lot of time interviewing and hiring people for Salesforce roles. So if you want to be a Salesforce Admin, how should you split up your learning time?

Jason recommends following the 20/30/50 rule. Spend 20% of your time on Trailhead, 30% on acquiring certifications, and 50% on finding some way to gain experience. This split corresponds to how important they are on your resume.

Trailhead: Becoming a Ranger is priority one, followed by getting some Superbadges. Take the time to set up your profile with a photo, a description of yourself, and a custom URL so that you look like you’re an active member of the community.

Certifications: When is the best time to take a Salesforce certification test? As soon as possible! If you don’t get it this time, you can use your results to help you prep for the next exam. And if you do pass, you can get the next cert sooner.

Gain Experience: Volunteering isn’t the only way to get experience. You can enroll in a program where you build mock projects in Salesforce, or just build something on your own. The important thing is to have projects you’ve built in Salesforce that you can demo in your job interview.

Interview preparation and skill assessments

When you’re going for your first Salesforce job interview be ready for some sort of skill assessment. Time pressure is usually a factor in these tests, so Jason recommends doing a practice run.

Talk to a friend, find out what kind of data they collect, and then give yourself a day to build them an app. It could track the books they’ve read or the distance they’ve run, the important thing is that you don’t know what it’s going to be before you talk to them. 

All admins are consultants

It’s also important to realize that an interview isn’t just about showing your skills—it’s about showing who you are. It’s a chance to listen and empathize with the person on the other side of the table. It’s a chance to share something that stood out to you in your research about the company. And most importantly, to show who you are by asking questions.

Why does Jason place such an emphasis on soft skills in a Salesforce Admin job interview? Because, at the end of the day, every admin is a Salesforce consultant for their organization. You talk to people about their problems to get requirements, come up with a solution, and then iterate on that solution.

We touch on a lot more in this conversation about how to look for Salesforce jobs, developing listening skills, and what it’s like to be a Salesforce consultant, so be sure to listen to the full episode and subscribe so you don’t miss out.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Pei Mun Lim on the Skills of a Business Analyst

• Salesforce Admins Blog: Develop Your Communication Skills as a Salesforce Admin

 

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Social

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• Mike on X

Full show transcript 

Mike Gerholdt:

I got an idea. How about we tackle the hardest question on the Salesforce Trailblazer community? That's right. This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're going to look for advice on finding your first admin job and doing the interview, getting experience, and more. And we're going to do all that with CEO and co-founder of Arkus, Jason Atwood. Jason and I chatted at TrailblazerDX and really wanted to dive into this topic. Now, before we bring Jason on, I just want to make sure that you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or Spotify. That way, when new episodes like this one come out, they're automatically downloaded to your phone. But enough about that. Let's talk about finding that first job or even finding your next job as a Salesforce administrator. Oh, I almost forgot to mention we tackle the myth of "but it's just an admin job." So with that, let's get Jason on the podcast. So, Jason, welcome to the podcast.

Jason Atwood:

Thank you for having me. It's been a long time since we've podcast together.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know. I was thinking back; well, we were just reminiscing of the days at the Marriott Marquis and the Arkus podcast.

Jason Atwood:

Yep. You were on an episode of CloudFocus Weekly. We had it as part of our trivia once there was only four or five guests ever on the podcast, and you were one of them.

Mike Gerholdt:

Snuck in, only proximity. I'm going to say. So catch people up. What have you been up to?

Jason Atwood:

Well, since then, whatever that was, 10 years ago. Yeah. So I am now the current CEO and co-founder of Arkus. We're a Salesforce consulting firm. We deal mostly in the nonprofit space, and we've grown from that little company back then. We're almost up to 75 people. And now I run around between putting out fires, talking on podcasts, and trying to educate myself on the whole changing landscape of technology.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, it does feel like in the last decade, it's gone from everything we know to a brand new world.

Jason Atwood:

It certainly is. And I just spent three hours at a Heroku dev meetup and could hang there mentally for a bit, but they lost me at a little point. So it's both fun, interesting, and challenging to stay up with all this stuff.

Mike Gerholdt:

So one of the things that everyone's trying to stay up with is the ever-changing job market and hiring. We see a lot of the questions in the Trailblazer community from new admins, people getting into the ecosystem that want to become Salesforce admins, people in the ecosystem that are looking for jobs, or maybe have kind of hit a career plateau. And you and I were chatting, and boy, I think it'd be fun to kind of delve into that topic with you.

Jason Atwood:

Let's do it. I have some experience in hiring people over the last 15 years, so I can certainly talk about it.

Mike Gerholdt:

A little bit more than me. More than me.

Well, let's get started. So let's start fresh. There's a lot of new people. As we were talking about in the intro, there's a lot of new people coming into the ecosystem that maybe don't have tech advice. They are doing Trailhead modules, completing challenges, getting a lot of badges, trying to round out their resumes, and they don't know A, what to look for, or B, what to put on their resumes. So somebody that's hired a bunch of people and been around for a long time, let's start there with some of your advice and where they should go.

Jason Atwood:

Sure. This is a very common thing, and the first thing I would tell everybody is relax. It's going to be okay. I know it feels daunting, and you see these triple all-star rangers and you see all these, the hoodies, and you see the people with the 15 certifications and 10 years of experience, and you feel like, "How am I ever going to get there?" You will; you'll get there. So the first thing is just to take it easy and not to get too worked up on it. It does feel like a lot. It's a very big community and filled with lots of hungry people for jobs, a lot of recruiters, a lot of activity. When I talk to people about getting started in the ecosystem, and certainly on the admin track, and we can talk about other tracks if you want, but on the admin track, I kind of say all those things matter.

So when it comes to certifications, when it comes to Trailhead, when it comes to experience, they all matter. And usually the question I get is, "But what should I focus on?" And so I came up with something, I maybe made it up years and years ago. I call it the 30, 20, 50 rule, or 20, 30, 50. It doesn't matter; you can break it up anyway. And if you're going to take your time, right, you're in the hunt for a job, and you need to do the education, you need to get enabled, you need to build your experience level. I break it down into those percentages. So 20% of the time, I'd focus on Trailhead. And the trick for Trailhead is A, you just have to be a ranger. We don't even look at people who aren't rangers. I had an intern apply the other day, and I said, "No, you're not even on Trailhead. Go get a ranger before I even talk to you."

So that, to me, is just a minimum bar. Just go be a ranger, and then if you can go up from there, that's great. And then, if you're still in your Trailhead worlds, the thing that we then look for besides looking at their profile, is it filled out? Have they thought about it? Have they created it like LinkedIn? So second advice on the Trailhead side is treat your profile like LinkedIn: fill it out, put your picture, put your description, do all the things. It'll probably take you no more than a half an hour. Make your URL; you can make your customized URL so people can find you; do all the things so it looks like you're part of the community, right? Make sure that your profile is rich and full. And then the third thing on the Trailhead side of things is to go for super badges.

So I can look at double ranger, triple ranger all day long, but if I don't see some super badges and I speak from someone who doesn't have any super badges.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, no.

Jason Atwood:

I know, I know, it's on my hit list for this year. I know, I know, I mean, I have 15 certs, and so I have some experience, but I'd say, get some super badges. We see that when we look at that as a higher level of dedication and of expertise, because, as you know and as I've been doing them, they're difficult. They show that you have really dug in, and they're more than just answering some questions or watching videos, or getting fun ones. I love badges, but the super badges really show that kind of a deeper level of education and sort of just being in the Trailhead world. So that's the 20%. Then the 30% is certifications.

You need to have both. You can't have one without the other. I don't know what that commercial was, peanut butter and chocolate or something, but-

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I think so, yeah.

Jason Atwood:

-You might be [inaudible 00:07:08]. Certifications are important; you should focus on them. What I tell people is you need to get them, but you can't stall. Most people, I think, when we talk to them and we'll find in the ecosystem, say, "Oh, I'm thinking about getting that, or I'm planning to get that one next year." And our advice is, "Nope, go get it. Go get it now. Go take it. Go take the test a couple of times." Do whatever it is you can do to start your certification journey; don't put it off; don't procrastinate on it. You don't have to be perfect; just go get some. And obviously there's a path of which ones you should get, blah, blah, blah.

It depends on where you're going in your world, but having at least one or two certs is kind of a bare minimum. So if you're starting off and you're trying to get into the ecosystem, that's your 20 and your 30, and then the 50 is the hardest part. And it's just hard to tell people because it's the experience. The third thing we look for is experience. I want to see that you've done something obviously new to the ecosystem, harder to have the experience, but that's where I say spend 50% of your time trying to gain that experience. There's the old adage: try to go work with a non-profit. Although there's some pushback on that nowadays because of the complexity of the platform, you don't want to hurt a non-profit.

There's definitely... Get in in a way, there's programs, there's tons of programs out there that will help you do mock projects and things where you can just get your hands dirty. And even if you have to build your own thing that you're going to demo, you got to get experience because I've not hired people with 22 certifications, and because it didn't add up to any experience, and I've seen people with tons and tons of experience with zero certs, and I would hire anyway, just from the experience. But for me, that's how I tell spend your time: 20% trailhead, 30% certifications, and 50% getting that experience.

Mike Gerholdt:

I think that 50%, that part that you're talking about is always the part that feels like the hardest to get into. Because if you're not in tech and you don't have any experience and you're trying to land that first job, that can feel like, "If I could get this job, then I could get the experience." And so, part of that lends to my next question is, so you're new, we've checked all the boxes on filling out our profiles and done that part. What should I get ready for when I interview?

Jason Atwood:

So every interview's going to be different, obviously, but a lot of places are using assessments now. So I would say be prepared for an assessment. That means functionally, they're going to ask you to do something; they're going to ask you to build something or take something they've done and turn it into something on the platform, using Salesforce as the platform. So I would just be ready for that, be prepared, be okay with it. Even do mock versions of it, go have a friend, and I have to given this advice to some people, but go have a friend, sit down with them, talk to them about what they do, and you'll uncover something that they're collecting data.

And as soon as you can figure out what the data they're collecting, whether it's books or they collect comic books, or they're a skier or they're a runner, anything you do, you can just come up with, "Ooh, what if I built you an app to track that?" So be prepared to have an assessment of your skills and be able to show that in a short period of time. Meaning it might be a take-home. Sometimes it's a take-home. Like, "Hey, go do this over the weekend." Other times it's, "You have an hour; come back and show us what you did."

Mike Gerholdt:

Ooh!

Jason Atwood:

So I'd say... Ooh! Yeah, I know. I've been doing that for 15 years to people. Trust me. I've seen a lot of, oohs.

Mike Gerholdt:

I would imagine.

Jason Atwood:

Even had one person pass out in the...

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, my. Oh, goodness.

Jason Atwood:

It happens.

Mike Gerholdt:

You get an extra hour now.

Jason Atwood:

Yeah. So I think that it's coming more and more in the ecosystem, because again, when you look at a resume, when you look at LinkedIn, a lot of it's just you can't tell whether they know what they're doing. If you actually do an assessment, you can then assess, "Okay, you know, you functionally know how to do things." So I'd be prepared for that. The other thing is, I think when you're really, especially in the new, just be honest about what you do and do not know. That's really, really key. Don't fluff up your resume; don't put things that you don't know; don't put clouds, don't throw in data cloud if you don't know what data cloud is and haven't used it or can't really explain it. Just because you took a Trailhead on something doesn't mean that platform or know that cloud. So I'd really say be honest with what you know and the clouds, and the products, because that's going to be super important in the interview process.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow. How much... In prep work for resumes, there's a lot of AI tools out there, so I'd love to know your perspective on both sides of this one: how much do you, as somebody hiring, kind of look for, "Oh, they used AI to generate most of this resume?" And on the flip side, how much should somebody building their resume that could really benefit from an AI tool? How much should they lean into it?

Jason Atwood:

So I'm going to be the strange answer on this one, or...

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, good.

Jason Atwood:

Yeah, because I'm going to say, resumes don't matter.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay.

Jason Atwood:

They're just checking a box. When people get to me in the interview process, they're beyond the resume. So yes, you need to have a resume; you need it because that's the part. It's like you have to have the internet; you have to have a way to fill out the form. So you need to have a resume, and it should have your accomplishments and stuff on it. But I don't look at resumes because they're just lies. They're just you telling me all these things, and sometimes I don't know if any of that's really true or not true. So to me, it's like it's just a checking the box. "Yes, you have to have a resume. Yes, it should be okay." Honestly, your LinkedIn profile should be your resume, right? Because that's real; it's on the web. And if you're lying, someone might actually call you out for it.

"Hey, you didn't work at that company for 10 years." So I would say focus more on the LinkedIn. Because I'll look at that. If you gave me 10 minutes, I'd look at your LinkedIn first. I would not look at your resume, what you've put on, rather than what your actual history has been. That being said, you want to throw all this stuff on there for this ecosystem. So I do think showing work that you've done and really pointing to problems you've solved, if you really think about any job, especially as an administrator, you're a Salesforce admin, you're basically solving problems all day all.

And you're communicating. So two things that I tell people about the resume and the process is how do you show that you've solved problems in the past in your resume, and then how do you show that you are a great communicator? Because great communication, it doesn't matter what, I mean, well, not what job, but certainly in this world, you are basically talking to people, helping them out, doing stuff, re-communicating with them, getting what they need to do, building it, whatever. You might work with different groups or whatever. But that communication skill is something we deeply look at. So again, if you're going to focus on stuff, don't so much focus on your resume as focus on how to be a great communicator.

Mike Gerholdt:

That's really good advice because I have been at that level where people show up and the resume looked good, but they couldn't facilitate the conversation or articulate any kind of answer in the interview.

Jason Atwood:

It is a skill that not a lot of people have, but it's a skill, you can learn it. So a couple of things to put into that communication bucket. We'll go down a little rathole here.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, let's do.

Jason Atwood:

One is empathy.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay.

Jason Atwood:

Have the ability to show empathy, and that means sort of having a conversation with somebody and throwing in stuff that's like listening to them, talking to them, obviously pulling out information about them, but having the empathy when they say something's not going to happen or whatever, they could say, "It's a rainy day." I look for it in every interview that I do. Now this is going to be on the podcast; everybody's going to know this, but I will actually throw things into my talk track or as just the warm-up when you're sort of, "How are you and what's going on?" I will always throw in something to test empathy.

I'll say, "Oh, I'm okay, but I didn't sleep well last night. Or I had a bad egg sandwich this morning, or I've tripped over the dog when I came into the room." And I just listened to hear what they react. If they go, "Oh, that's terrible. Oh, yeah, I know dogs can be really difficult. Or you know what? I get my egg sandwiches from downstairs, whatever." But hearing that back of that empathy, super important. Second is actually listening, so I will listen to people, how they listen to me. Are they interrupting me? Are they talking over me? Are they going? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, as I speak, I listen for their real intent and true conversational skills. And so the ability to actually listen, pause, and then answer is a really big; it's a great skill to have. And so the people who can do that, I know that they can do almost any job better because they've intently done that listening skill and they've got it working. So those are two that I throw out to most people when they're trying to build their conversational habits.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I'm listening to you answer that, and I'm playing devil's advocate in my head and saying, "Maybe people are hearing Jason say this because he's hiring consultants." So why do you think this also translates over to people that are embedded in different work groups, or teams, or have stakeholders within an organization and aren't consultants, like for your organization?

Jason Atwood:

Because basically, being an admin is being a consultant in one organization. You are a consultant. What are you doing? You're talking to people; they're coming to you with their problems; you are getting their requirements; you're satisfying their needs; you're working with them; you're iterating; you're changing it; you're updating things, and then you're presenting it back to them. The thing that changes when you become a consultant is you're paying for someone's time, which then becomes a whole other thing. But also, you might be working with other organizations, and the level of expectation of how you do that and your expertise goes way up. And this is something I tell, I warn people about moving into consulting is that when you're an admin, you have the ability to take some time. Someone says, "Hey, can you build me these three dashboards that I want to track my sales forecasting?"

You go, "Sure," and you can go Google it, and you spend a week, and you come back, and you're like, "Here's your three dashboards." They're ecstatic; they're like, "Great, thank you." They don't care that it took you three weeks or whatever, and then you had to ask your friend and Google it or ask ChatGPT to do it for you. In the consulting space, it's different. They don't ask, "Could you build this for me?" They say, A, "What are the options to build it? How long is it going to take you, and can you get it to me by next Tuesday?" So the expectation level of what you're doing goes way up, and they expect you to be expert. They don't expect you to ever say, "I don't know, but I'll figure it out." As an admin, I said, "I don't know. I'll figure it out."

"Oh, you want to build some tracker for your feedback form? Sure, let go figure it out." Go away for a week, and I'll come back and show you something. So I think that's part of it, but as an admin, you're still doing all this stuff. It's the same stuff inside the organization. You're just not working with external companies or people; you work with internal people. So you still have Mary from accounting coming over and wants to synchronize with the QuickBooks, and you still have the CEO come over and they want an update to some dashboard because they can't figure it out, and you're doing the same stuff; it's more internal, more ad hoc, generally.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, I couldn't agree more. Also, Mary from accounting, they always want to, for some reason, can't seem to get opportunities flowing through your sales org, but let's integrate finance.

Jason Atwood:

So true, so true.

Mike Gerholdt:

But you kind of led into that. So what are the different jobs, or different tasks, types of jobs that admins would tackle within an organization?

Jason Atwood:

Yeah, I mean, we kind of started in there. You do become an internal consultant, but I think you first off just think of what, especially when you're applying for it, and this goes back to sort of the applying and getting the jobs' thing. When you're looking at the organization, you obviously want to know what their Salesforce landscape is. So if I were in the interview process, what I would do is come loaded with a bunch of really good questions, and I would pepper that person with tons of questions about their Salesforce instance, or, as we call it in the biz, we call it their org.

But I would come in with, "What kind of licenses? How old is it? What kind of integrations? What kind of applications do you have? When's the last time you did a health tech? Do you use permission sets or permission set groups? Or did you flip the lightning yet?" I mean, I would be peppering them showing my expertise to get that admin job. So that's just on the interview side; I just want to throw that in. But coming back to what you do, again, it really depends on the organization, and this is actually a myth that is out there in the ecosystem, is that admins get bored and admins don't get to play with lots of different clouds, and admins don't do a lot of diverse things. That's completely not true because it depends on what organization you're with. I was with a company who had 375,000 people.

I had a team; I had five people, or five, including me; we were all admins; that's what we did. And we had 12 different production orgs, 12 orgs with production, and I think nine different applications running in them with thousands and thousands and thousands of users. We were not bored; we had plenty to do; we were playing with great, big, unlimited licensing and integrations and projects, but we were admins. At the end of the day, we were admins. Same thing: you go work for a small company that's four... I don't think anyone would hire a full-time admin with four people. But the smaller the organization who's just using Salesforce for one thing and has no chance of expanding it or doing it, or going anywhere.

Yeah. You're going to get bored, right? You come in, you're going to help out Mary in accounting, you get that one project done, and then they're going to be like, "Can you reset passwords all day?" So I think as part of the interview process to pulling it back in to that, and when your job seeking, you should be really interested in what their, especially if you want to be a Salesforce admin and you really want to do it full time, what's their Salesforce roadmap? Are they just solid? They have it, and they have had it up and running for five years, and that's it? Or do they have things that they want to do? New stuff you can build? Do you want to do the integration with that? We want to bring in marketing cloud next year. We're looking at how to do predictive AI, whatever.

So if I were bringing more questions as the trying to get the job, I would bring in that to the organization. I'd say, "What do you guys, where's your roadmap? Or do you not have one?" And I think that would show as a hiring person; I'd be like, "Oh, they're forward-looking." And it'll also give you the idea of: "Are you going to get bored in six months?" Because you don't want to get bored in six months.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. Although maybe a smaller footprint would be really good if you're looking to get that first admin job.

Jason Atwood:

Exactly. Exactly right. But then you have the counter, right? You have a smaller footprint, but they have 40 users, and they only use it for service. So you get in, you do some work, you do all the stuff, and then you're like, "Now what?"

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. So you brought up myths of admins, and one is, well, "I don't get exposed to enough clouds," and I've heard that at various events. "Well, we only use data cloud, or I just don't get to see it." And I feel like, and this still exists, all of these articles on admin to something else, as though admin is just the front door; all you got to do is get in and do that for a few months. But the real money and the real challenge is elsewhere. What would you say to that myth of just an admin?

Jason Atwood:

I think it is a bit of a myth, and it makes admins and being an administrator, Salesforce administrators feel like this... It's like you're the fry person in the back at McDonald's. It's like, "Well, I don't ever go back and cook the hamburgers." I don't know. And it's not true.

Mike Gerholdt:

Although the fries are kind of the best part.

Jason Atwood:

That's true. I actually worked at McDonald's, and I was the fry person, so that's why I brought it up.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Jason Atwood:

But yes, at some organizations, you could be the one admin, and that could be your role for a long period of time. And you could get bored, and it could just be a starter. At other organizations, you could run an entire group of admins. You could have six or seven admins, you could be part of a team of people supporting a lot of different Salesforce instances, and it could go anywhere from just administrative down to sort of more the solution architect type of stuff, or more towards the BA towards so stuff or more towards the development.

One of the things you and I have been in this ecosystem for a long time, what we were able to do 10 years ago on the platform with our clicks and what we're able to do with clicks now, we're programming. Let's be clear: when we're building flows, we're programming; we're just programming with a user interface. But that's programming, and the stuff you can do is stunning, that you just couldn't do with any of the tools unless you're writing Apex. So I think even the idea that admins who are getting that technical acumen and are going into the more programmatic type of world of admin that could go long, there's lots of paths you can go down for that. So that's where I think some of the myths should go away because you're not just the admin who's building a report, adding a field to a page way out, and assigning a permission set. There's many, many different pieces of that platform. And that's before you even talk about the clouds; before you'd say there's now, I don't know how many clouds. There's a lot of clouds.

Mike Gerholdt:

There is a lot.

Jason Atwood:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I mean, you brought up flow. I think back to the days of, "Boy, if I could just stand up like a window pane that a screen that people could input the data into as opposed to just editing raw right on the record." And now we can do that, and you can do that just using the interface. You don't have to try a single line of code, which is...

Jason Atwood:

It is stunning what you can do with that tool. And it's one of the things that has left me a little bit behind because I'm old school admin. I'm a work-for-rule person. And for that, I would've gone wrote in a user story and had someone written up a Visualforce, and with Apex in the background, and now it's... The stuff that we can produce with flows, screen flows, and even the call-outs. I was watching the call-out today, a flow that made a call-out to a Heroku Dyno that did a hookup to a Postgres database that pulled in AI predictions. I was like, "What?" So yeah, the world of an admin is becoming very, very broad in some ways.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, I agree. And you can also now trigger flows through prompts and have it call AI. And I mean, in a year from now, this is all going to sound like super, "Wow, they were impressed they could do that. Now look at where we are." kind of stuff. One thing we didn't touch on is there's a lot of job places to look at and career stuff. Often, when looking for a developer architect, I think those are a little more defined also, especially with developer, they've got experience in writing developer job titles for other platforms. So it's very easy to translate that over to Salesforce. What are things that an admin should look for in job descriptions? That maybe if the title or description doesn't say Salesforce admin, that will be the role?

Jason Atwood:

Yeah, it's a tough one because, I mean, the easiest thing to say is look for the keyword Salesforce. Obviously, there's going to be some sort of piece of that. I think you'd have to go a little old-school and think of the platform and what it's doing. So I would start to look for things that were based on what Salesforce, the platform's doing? Is it sales, right? Is it marketing? Is it service? Is it nonprofit? Especially in the nonprofit space, which is for me. So we would look at grant writing, fundraising, and all that stuff, which could be keywords for, we're using Salesforce in the background, but we're using it to do all these things. So I guess the meta hint without giving you the keywords is: What is this organization doing? What is the output of their world? And then looking at what the tool set they're using.

They might not be Salesforce, right? There are other ways of saying the word. They might say something like health cloud and a health cloud administrator, and you're like, "Well, that's Salesforce." Or they might say, "net-zero cloud." Or they might say, "nonprofit cloud." Again, not saying Salesforce, but that's what it's based on. So sometimes, as an administrator and as part of this ecosystem, you have to know that there are products that are sitting on top of the platform that don't necessarily say the word in it. Remember when they named everything Force? Everything was Force something Force, this Force, that Force.

Mike Gerholdt:

We had everything named Lightning for a while, too.

Jason Atwood:

That too. That was fun.

Mike Gerholdt:

We like to do that a lot. I think everything's named Einstein now.

Jason Atwood:

Pretty much.

Mike Gerholdt:

I'll probably get in trouble for saying that.

Jason Atwood:

Yes, you will.

Mike Gerholdt:

But you could do the bingo card of name everything, Einstein, Lightning, Force, and then you're covered.

Jason Atwood:

I'm going to win that Bingo.

Mike Gerholdt:

Einstein, Lightning, Force, and then the actual product. Then you're covered.

Jason Atwood:

Totally.

Mike Gerholdt:

I was looking through all my notes, roles and descriptions and interviewing and challenges, and certifications, and I feel we touched on a lot. What is something that you feel we missed, that you talk about, that you bring up that maybe people aren't thinking about when they're looking to interview or get an admin position?

Jason Atwood:

Sure. I think there's a couple of things. A couple more things I would, if I were giving advice, which I happen to do all the time.

Mike Gerholdt:

You're full of advice.

Jason Atwood:

I'm full of advice, maybe too much. So one thing, and this is just generic to not Salesforce, but as anybody looking for a job, cultural fit, I think, is becoming more and more of a need. And I think, as people applying for jobs, you should be looking at it both ways. Do I fit that culture, and does that culture fit me? And that's do my values and the company's values or the organization's values align together. And asking a lot of questions around culture is going to become more and more important, especially because we go do remote work and all that. So I think what we used to think of, like, "Oh, we had coffee breaks and pizza parties for every quarter," is now a much bigger discussion. So I would say bring culture into the conversation. Another tip that I hadn't given yet is just preparedness.

It seems silly to say you have to be prepared for an interview, but I can tell you the amount of people who show up who are not prepared, they're just not prepared; they don't know their resume; they don't have good questions; they don't know how to talk to their experiences. And I'm stunned when it happens, but it happens a lot. And one of my little pet peeves, I'm giving away all my hints, boy, anybody interviewing is going to be able to nail the interview the next time they get to me.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, you say that, but I bet not.

Jason Atwood:

Probably not, right? No one's even going to pay attention. But having really good questions is something that I look for. Again, we work in an industry where being able to ask your users what they want and question them, and being insightful is a great skill. So if I get to the end of one of my diatribe speeches and I say, "Do you have any questions?" And they're like, "No, I'm good." I immediately go, "Okay." And then I'm not good because I... So have questions ready at the go; have them sitting in front of you on a piece of paper, on a sticky note in a NeverNote, wherever. It's super important, and don't be generic. Don't say, "Where do you see yourself?" Don't interview the interviewee.

Ask really stuff that's based on homework you did. And that's sort of the prepared thing too. When people come in and they say, "Oh, I read your blog post last week about blah, blah, blah. I was really interested about this key point." Immediately, I'm like, "They did their homework; they know what they're talking about, and they're asking me something interesting." Don't say, "How do you guys do raises?" That's not going to be; you need to have the questions about the culture or the stuff. I mean, I've had some really good in the past, but I've had some really terrible questions. And then two more, I'll give you two more tips. This is like the hundred tips for interviewing the Salesforce Ecosystem Podcast.

Mike Gerholdt:

We'll call it 98.

Jason Atwood:

There you go.

Mike Gerholdt:

So there's two.

Jason Atwood:

Two more is you can never, if you want to get two skills. If I told someone to go get two skills before they get any job to be super useful on day one, two things they should be focusing on: data and documentation. Your ability to understand data is like you need to have it, you have to have it as a skill; you need to know data; you need to know how data interconnects with other data, you need to know how to report on it. It's getting more and more and more important. So I look for data skills, even data nerds, people who say, "I love data." So if you're not that type of person, I would say these jobs are going to be tough. Because I don't know anywhere in the ecosystem that we are not just really crazed about and or dealing with lots of data.

It is sort of what Salesforce is, in the back of all of it. So understanding data, taking courses on it, go learn SQL, go learn regular databases, go learn third normal form, learn it, and understand it because any of your skill sets that you have that are based in data will make you better at any job in this ecosystem. So data. Second is documentation, because one of the things you can do very quickly in any role is document things. You need to be able to document; you need to be able to take what people say, summarize it, put it into something, and spit it back out for people to take in. If you're an admin, you've got to come up with a training plan or a training agenda. You are an admin; you have to come up with a user story; you hand it off to a developer or someone to build something.

Documenting is, and it's, I know there's Trailheads on it, and you can go to those, but really learning how to document even so much prove that skill when you talk to somebody and you follow up with an email. Follow up with an email that proved that you listened and that you're following up with documentation skills, coming back with key points or things that you wanted or questions, all great ways to show. But I would say two things you could just learn to show up on day one to start working and doing things is know data very well and know how to document things.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, that was a really good point. I would hammer on that cultural fit and question part a lot because I always feel like you and I are of a certain generation that we kind of almost interviewed in the hopes that they chose us, right? The best of the survivor, we get picked. But the part that really dawned on me as I moved through my career was I also need to interview that person to see, is this the type of person that I'm comfortable... Would I be excited to get on a call with them every day? Does this feel like the type of company that I'm going to be excited to go to work at? Or do I just want to get in to get in? And I've made the mistakes of going to work for companies and then realizing I didn't ask enough cultural questions. The way things operate here and my expectations for this job are very different than what I had in my head, and it's my fault because I didn't talk about it.

Jason Atwood:

Yeah. And again, I think it's different. Even again, culture was, I hate to say it, but it wasn't really that much. It wasn't that important. 20 years ago, I wasn't worried about culture; now I think it's above compensation.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Jason Atwood:

I think it really is. And I've seen people go to places for less compensation because of a better culture. I've seen people leave terrible cultures that were highly paid. So really bringing that in, and that means how do they work? How do people collaborate? And you can ask these questions in the interview. You can say, "What are the three things you're doing this year to help your culture be better or to improve your culture at your company?" If someone asked me that, I'd be like, "Ooh, wow. Okay."

Mike Gerholdt:

That's a good question.

Jason Atwood:

That's a great question, right? You're then learning A; are they doing anything to make it better.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right.

Jason Atwood:

Or ask about... One of the things that we take at Arkus as very important is when I was doing my key goals for the next five years, and I was doing some presentations and talking to the staff about it. I had culture as a fifth thing, and then after doing it, I thought, "Wait, no, that's wrong. It's got to be number one." So for me, you ask a company, you say, "What are the main things you're thinking about doing for the next five years? What are the five key things that you're doing? What are your pillars?" Or whatever. And if they don't say culture, then you'd be like, "Oh, why isn't culture there?" And then you'll probably catch someone off guard; maybe they won't hire you there, but they should be thinking that keeping the company culture and embracing it, and making sure that it is... Culture isn't something that you set up and then walk away from.

It's not a database system. You don't just go, "Oh, it's set up, and it's running in the corner." It's something that needs to be cultivated; it's something that needs to be put into; it's something that needs to be fed and loved, and thought of, and changed as the ecosystem and the world changes. Our culture changed when COVID happened, right? We had to adapt; we adapted to that; it wasn't the same culture as before. When we were three people, now 75, but the culture's different, but we're adapting to that. So again, it is a really, really big point. It is something you can catch people on, you can ask, and everybody likes to talk about their culture. Everybody will tell you that they have a great culture, but that's how, as an interviewer or interviewee, you should be questioning it and really ask the deep questions. So when they say they have a great culture, "Say, can you give me three examples from last week where you prove that or that you know that it is a great culture?"

Mike Gerholdt:

That's a good question. Thanks for coming by, Jason, and sharing your wisdom with us. You said you present some of this. Are you going to be presenting any of this at upcoming Dreamin' events after?

Jason Atwood:

I am. Well, you're catching me on my road tour. I don't know if this podcast...

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, there's a road tour.

Jason Atwood:

There's a road tour.

Mike Gerholdt:

Are you going to have shirts made up?

Jason Atwood:

I might. So yeah, I actually-

Mike Gerholdt:

Have dates on the back.

Jason Atwood:

-I go to a lot... A lot of things, I will be at World Tour this year. World Tour New York in two days, but I don't think this podcast will be out by then. But you can catch me at Texas Dreamin', I'm doing this year. You can catch me at WITness Success, you can catch me at Mile High Dreamin', you can catch me at Dreamforce, you can catch me at Northeast Dreamin'. And is that it? I think that's it.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, Northeast Dreamin' is kind of the tail end of the year for us.

Jason Atwood:

Yeah, it is. It's the last one. So I'll be at all those. I don't know if I'll always be presenting this, but you can at least find me if you wanted to.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. I appreciate you coming by.

Jason Atwood:

Thank you. It's been great talking to you. Let's do it in another 10 years.

Mike Gerholdt:

Or sooner.

Jason Atwood:

Or a little sooner.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I thought that episode turned out phenomenal. I'm so glad I got to have Jason back, and he is going to be on a road tour presenting and helping admins at different Dreamin' events. So hopefully, you can get to some of those that he mentioned. I think that'd be really neat, and some really solid tips on interviewing, and even I couldn't agree more on building experience when you've never had a job in the tech industry. So thanks, Jason, for coming on and sharing everything. And speaking of sharing, if you love this episode and you've got friends, or maybe you're going to a user group and you'd love to say, "Hey, I've got a podcast for you to listen to on finding that first job or getting your next Salesforce admin's job," here's how you do it. You click the three dots in the corner; most of these apps, podcast apps, have this now.

And you can click share episode and you can post it to social; you could send it as an email to somebody, and then they get a link and they can listen to the podcast right on their phone, maybe as they're walking their dog, and even more. Now, if you wanted to look for any links or any resources, everything, everything I'm telling you, start your day admin.salesforce.com; everything is there for you. And of course, we also include a link to the Admin Trailblazer community, which is the admin group in the Trailblazer community, which is a great place and also the place I went to get all of these questions. Now, we'll also include a transcript if there's something you need to go back and read through; that is all going to be in the show notes. So, of course, until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.

 

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Rangsk, a Wordle and Sudoku educational YouTuber.

Join us as we chat about how solving puzzles every day can help you sharpen your critical thinking skills.

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

The role of puzzles in critical thinking development

I’m addicted to word games. They give me a chance to practice my problem solving skills and, hopefully, get better. That’s why I was so excited for this week’s guest, Rangsk, because he makes some of the best educational content out there on how to get better at solving puzzles.

For Rangsk, puzzles are a way to develop your critical thinking skills. They give you an opportunity to think about how you think. “Overthinking has a negative connotation,” he says, “all I’m doing is thinking, and there’s nothing wrong with thinking when you’re solving a puzzle.”

Practicing your problem solving skills in a low-stakes environment like a puzzle gives you the experience to fall back on in high-pressure situations.

The process over the result

A key part of using puzzles to develop critical thinking skills is taking the time to reflect on your thought process. When you solve a problem, don’t just move on to the next one. Instead, Rangsk encourages you to do a postmortem so you can learn something about how you think.

Look through each step of a solve and analyze your decision-making. Where did you get stuck or tricked and why? What could you have done differently? And where did you make good choices that got you closer to the solution? If you take the time to internalize what worked and what didn’t work you’ll improve your critical thinking skills over time.

How to know when to ask for help

When I’m solving puzzles, one thing I always struggle with is when to hit that hint button. Rangsk’s advice is to make an honest assessment of your mindset. Are you well and truly stuck? Or have you hit a snag but are still enjoying the process of working through it?

In puzzles and the workplace, we might not be able to solve every problem we encounter on our own. Maybe there’s some trick that we don’t know about or some key piece of information we don’t have. Puzzles help you teach your brain how to learn, and that’s something Salesforce Admins need to do every day.

Listen to the full episode for more from Rangsk on his approach to teaching and some other word puzzles you might like if you’re already hooked on Wordle. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Connections and Wordle games from the New York Times are wildly popular. Can they improve cognitive function as you age?

• Follow Rangsk on YouTube

• Cracking the Cryptic on YouTube

Other word puzzles

• Cell Tower

• Squardle

• Squaredle

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• @Rangsk_YT on TikTok

• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn

• Salesforce Admins on X

• Mike on Threads

• Mike on Tiktok

• Mike on X

 

Full show transcript

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Wordle, Strands, Connections, not just random words, but word games. And I am addicted to them. So, this week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I had to get arguably the best word and logic solver I can find from TikTok and YouTube on the podcast. He goes by Rangsk on TikTok, and I'll put a link below.

But David and I are talking about critical thinking and problem-solving using word games. Also, just how that applies to life. This is a phenomenal conversation. Don't be scared about the time because this is such a fun discussion. Also, how looking for answers and the journey of problem solving really applies to just everything that we do, not only as Salesforce admins, but in our learning journeys and as we navigate life.

So, this is fun. Let's get David on the podcast. So, David, welcome to the podcast.

 

Rangsk:

Well, thank you.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

I'm glad to have you on. I feel this is one of those times where I'm way more the super fanboy because I have seen a ton of your TikTok videos and your New York Times solves. But without tipping too much, how did you get into word gaming and solving word games online?

 

Rangsk:

Well, it's a long story, but I can give the short version. Basically, YouTube likes to give random recommendations, and one day it recommended me a Sudoku video by Cracking the Cryptic. And I was familiar with Sudoku because it was a huge craze in the early 2000s. Do you remember that?

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

 

Rangsk:

Everyone was doing Sudoku.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

On the planes, there were books. Every airport had a Sudoku book.

 

Rangsk:

Yeah. And so, I got into that craze back then, but then I burned out of it. And now, I realize it's because of the way I was solving it. It's because of the way everyone was solving it, it burned out quickly. But I was like, "You know what? Sudoku, I'm familiar with that." I clicked the video and I just immediately got hooked because this was not the Sudoku that I used to do.

And I just really got hooked on watching Cracking the Cryptic on YouTube and the various different kinds of logic puzzles that they solve. And then, I actually started creating my own Sudoku puzzles. I crafted them myself. And I would do things like... I would submit them to Cracking the Cryptic. They actually have solved a few of my puzzles in the past.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow.

 

Rangsk:

Featured in front of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, which is great. And what I wanted to do is I wanted to document how I intended those puzzles to be solved and walk through the logic of them. Because I've always been... I had sort of an instructor mindset. I've always liked teaching. I've never been a teacher, but I've always liked teaching anyway.

And so, I decided to make my own videos where I walked through how to solve my own puzzles and I just uploaded them to my YouTube channel, which had nothing otherwise. And one day, Cracking the Cryptic featured one of my puzzles, and I commented saying, "Hey, I've got a walkthrough solve of this on my channel if anyone's interested." And I instantly gained 200, 300 subscribers.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, wow.

 

Rangsk:

And at that point, I was like, "Well, I better start making content." So, I decided, "Hey, maybe I'll start solving Sudoku's on there, not just my own, and see if I can grow that audience." And I was really enjoying the feedback I was getting from that. Flash forward to Wordle becoming popular, I was very much entrenched at that point within the logic puzzle community.

And Wordle, of course, really became popular within that community. And so, I decided, "Well, I'm already making Sudoku content. Why don't I make YouTube shorts where I solve Wordle?" And so, that's really where I get started on that. And then, I went from... it had taken me two years to reach a thousand subscribers where I could finally monetize on YouTube. And then, within two months, my Wordle shorts had brought me to 10,000 subscribers.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow.

 

Rangsk:

And so, that was like, wow, Wordle's my thing, I guess. And so, I decided just to... in addition to my Sudoku content, I started making word game content as well.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I definitely was on the sideline for the Wordle wave. I remember it kind of crashing through. And I feel like for me, it was, "Oh, everybody's playing it, so I'm not going to play it." I also was afraid that I would never get a word. "Oh, man." Because my Facebook feed was filled with all of the little Wordle squares that everybody would post. I'm like, "Oh, I know so-and-so."

I know some book editors and I know some people that are in the education space, and they were struggling with Wordle. And I was like, "I have no shot. Maybe I just shouldn't play this." But now that I've played it, I confess, today is my 40th day playing Wordle.

 

Rangsk:

Okay. I hope you're enjoying it.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

I am. I also have come now to the realization that I will never get it in one word. So, I have purposely looked ahead to see what words haven't been used as solutions, and then picked my beginning word now pending, the solution hasn't happened. My beginning word now is spoil because it has two vowels in it and it hasn't been used as a solution.

 

Rangsk:

Got you. Yeah. So, for me, getting word in one, of course, it would be exciting, but I would also feel a bit cheated because I didn't get to play that day.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Yes.

 

Rangsk:

And to me, Wordle... I'm very much a logic puzzle guy. I approach even word games as if they were logic puzzles. And I think that's why I like Wordle so much is because you can treat it like a logic puzzle, where you're given information and then you want to come up with the best possible guess to utilize that information and get as much information as you can more.

And you think about patterns in the words, not just, "Here's all the words I know," but "Okay, E likes to be at the end. R likes to be second. These letters like to be near each other. These letters don't like to be near each other." And so, you can kind of think about the patterns that you notice within words. And of course, every once in a while, you get tripped up by a weird word that comes from French or something and doesn't follow any of the rules.

But even then, you get there by logically eliminating, it's not a regular word. So, I now have to investigate, is it one of those weird esoteric ones that came from French, for example, or came from a different language? So, yeah, I like to approach it as a logic problem, and I think that's why people enjoy watching me solve it. I constantly get feedback, "I'm better at the game after watching you play it."

That warms my heart. That's exactly what I want. I'm not out here trying to impress people. I'm not trying to be a magician. I'm trying to be an instructor, and I'm trying to get people to understand that these games can be approached from a logical perspective. You can learn to get better at it without just going and memorizing a bunch of words.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. Perfect segue to exactly why I'm having you on the podcast, because I ran across one of your TikTok videos on Connections, and I'd never played Connections. And the tone and the manner, now that you say instructor, I joked with a colleague that I called you the Bob Ross of Connections. But your tone was very calming.

"And let's work through this, and here's all the words. We have to come up with four groups of four. Let me walk you through the way I'm going to think through this," which your logic or your critical thinking. And it wasn't just, "Well, these four have to go together. Why don't those go together?" And it's like, "No, but let's think about every possible meaning of this one word."

Or I love when you, especially on some of the Connections, "What is the, not weirdest, but what is the farthest outlying word? And let's pick that and see how it can connect to other things."

 

Rangsk:

Yeah, I'm glad you recognized both my logical approach, but also the demeanor that I try to give to my content. I've been called Bob Ross by more than just yourself, also Mr. Rogers. Just having that calming presence is really important to me because people have so much going on in their lives. They have stress coming from everywhere, and then they try to escape that with the free time that they have.

They're scrolling TikTok or they're scrolling YouTube or whatever it is. And when you do that, you're just getting people yelling at you. You're getting people trying to make you afraid, trying to make you angry. And I want to counter that. I want to be a place where I come up on your feed and you feel like, "Okay, this is a setting where I can understand what's going on. I'm not being yelled at."

"Things are calm, things are straightforward and I'm learning, but I don't feel like I'm being talked at." I don't know the best way to put that.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Or chastise. I mean really, because I think that's one thing, how this kind of carries over to software is critical thinking, but also when you're building applications or you're building programs, it's change that you're going to introduce to somebody. And I've always told people, when you roll out something, nobody wants to show up to work and feel stupid.

And the easiest way to feel stupid is by showing them something they don't understand. And you can walk into some of these games and be like, "I don't understand. It doesn't make sense." And then, it makes you feel stupid when actually if you just sit and look at it.

To me, I use a few of these games in the morning when I have a cup of coffee to kind of warm my brain up, kind of get me thinking through the day and sitting there thinking, "Okay," so this word for example, and maybe Connections is coat. Okay. So, coat and I started, "Well, how would David describe this?" Well, coat could be a jacket. Coat could be a heavy coat.

Coat could also, you coat something with paint. I try to use some of the stuff that you teach to like, how would I talk through this and not just take it as the first thing that comes to mind?

 

Rangsk:

Right. And I get a lot of feedback, which I honestly don't appreciate very much because it's counter to what I'm trying to put across, which means I'm not communicating that effectively enough. But a lot of feedback is like "You're overthinking it. If you'd just gone with your instinct, it would've been correct." And they're ignoring all the times, probably the majority of the times, where had I gone with my instinct, it would've been wrong.

Because these puzzles are designed to trick you. They are logic puzzles. And it's not much of a puzzle if it's just find four things that go together and that will be right. And so, the game is all about... I just made a comment today where someone was like, "Overthinking the easy ones is detrimental, but overthinking the hard ones is actually useful."

And my response to that was, "Well, overthinking has a negative connotation to it, by definition. All I'm doing is thinking. And there's nothing wrong with thinking when you're solving a puzzle." So, yeah, the game is trying to get you to think. And you can either let it get you to think and follow along with the human creator of this puzzle and what they were trying to achieve in getting you to think about, or you can bash your head against it and try to get lucky, which to me isn't fun.

And sometimes I have to resort to that and I feel bad about it. But most of the time, I try to logically approach the problem and also try to see what did the creator of this puzzle intend me to think about? And that's going to be fun and that's going to give longevity to the gameplay.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Overthinking also comes from a position of I know the answer and you don't. At one point, they didn't know the answer. So, how can I overthink something if I don't know the answer? In hindsight, yes, I can look back at a solution, "Oh, I way overthought that. But I only know that because I went down that path and then I came back."

Much like thinking through different situations or different, we talked about software debugging before I pressed record. Can you overthink software debugging? Well, yeah, I suppose. But you only know that once you go down that entire path and then come back.

 

Rangsk:

And I will say there's kind of a corollary to that where you said in hindsight, and I think that's another aspect of my content that you don't see a lot, and I think it's a really important aspect, which is after I've solved it, go and do a post-mortem basically, to use the industry term. Go and look back and say, "What is it that I did right? What is it that I did wrong?"

"How could I have thought about this differently to have succeeded when I failed? Or why did I succeed at this? What did I do that I liked that I should try to do more of?" And I think that's a really important aspect of after you've solved a puzzle, or if you're working on debugging software, if you're working on any problem that you're trying to solve, don't just say, "Oh, I solved it. Let me throw that out."

You say, "I solved it. Let me now internalize what worked and didn't work so that when I have a problem again in the future, I can utilize that and gain wisdom and gain experience."

 

Mike Gerholdt:

I'll be honest, one of the coolest things, I'll get off Connections. One of the coolest things that you added to your Wordle solutions is you go into a website that somebody create a bot and you kind of, "Okay, so here's the word I put in and we got orange, yellow, and green here. What is the bot say is the next one? What did I guess? Here's what I guessed. Here's this, that. Here's what I guessed. Okay."

And oftentimes you're either... it helps you do that post-mortem because with Connections, you have a little bit different, you can see your categories, but with Wordle, you're like, "Was this the next best thing for me to guess to try and get to the solution?" And I love that you kind of walk through that with that bot and the bot's like, "Oh, yeah, so you basically had two choices after this word and you went to this one, which no harm, no foul, it was the other word." I need that bot for everything.

 

Rangsk:

Yeah. And what's nice about Wordle is a bot like that can exist because it's pretty easy to write a perfect solver. I wouldn't say it's easy, but it's viable to write a perfect solver for Wordle. And there's not a perfect solver for every problem you're going to encounter, but you can at least go back and analyze that.

And I think an aspect that I thought about while you were describing what I do with that Wordle bot that I'd like to touch on is the question is, did I get lucky? Because a lot of times in problem-solving, there is a luck factor. Did I look at the right thing first or did I look at the right thing after struggling for three days on this problem? And the Wordle bot will answer that question for you.

It'll say, "Oh, yeah, you totally got lucky. There were 60 possible words and you picked out the right one." So, what I learned from that is maybe it was a lucky decision, but maybe it wasn't the optimal decision, even though the optimal decision would've had a worse outcome in this situation. And recognize because... I guess to put it this way, if you can't separate what was lucky from what was good, then you're going to depend on getting lucky more and more.

You're going to internalize what you did that made you get lucky rather than internalizing what you did that actually set yourself up for success.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I think that's... some of that has to do with why people gamble. They just feel they're lucky as opposed to working through the, I go back to the... I love the movie Apollo 13. Let's work the problem and go through it. Kind of transitioning that because I obviously could talk Wordle. You also do that really good on the mini crossword, where if by chance you happen to get all the downs, all the downs also solve all the acrosses for the most part.

And so, you'll go back through and be like, "Oh, well, let's look and see actually what these questions were that the answer just autofilled back in." I think there has to be something that it does to your brain because it also trains it. You're like, "Oh, now, I'm not just reading this word, I'm also reading the clue that the creator of the puzzle had in addition to what the word is, and it just happened to be filled in for me."

 

Rangsk:

Yeah. If we want to even just touch back on Connections for a little bit.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, please.

 

Rangsk:

Every day I get comments from people saying, "Oh, the first thing I do is shuffle because they put in these red herrings and I don't want to be tricked by them." And I feel like this is just intentionally throwing out information about the puzzle because we've been told that they think very, very hard actually. They put a lot of thought into the arrangement of the words that are presented to you, which means they've added information to the system.

And by hitting shuffle immediately, without even attempting to interpret that information, you've thrown out part of the puzzle. And to me, I feel like I can go, "Okay, well, they decided to put these tiles next to each other. What does that mean? Are they trying to trick me? Are they trying to hint me towards the solution? What is the information that they are trying to give me by this placement?"

And I would lose all that if I hit shuffle. And so, I feel like it's kind of a short-sighted strategy because you can't learn to overcome the tricks that they're trying to put into the puzzle if you just wipe them clean first thing without even appreciating them.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. Absolutely. Actually, you're the one that taught me that. I was partway through at Connections the other day and I think that two words were iron and steel, and I was like, "Those started right next to each other. I bet those don't have anything to do with each other. I'm not going to fall for it."

 

Rangsk:

Yeah, sure enough, they didn't. Exactly. And had you hit shuffle, you wouldn't have known that.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

No idea.

 

Rangsk:

And you might've said, "Well, iron and steel, those are both metals. Maybe that's a thing." I think they're getting wise to me. I think the other day they actually put three of them all on top of each other that were in the same category.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, no.

 

Rangsk:

In general, they are adding information when they, instead of presenting the tiles in a random order, just having a piece of software randomize it and presenting it, they are laying it out and they're discussing how they want to lay it out. And I think that's part of the puzzle. You're removing some of the interest in the puzzle by hitting shuffle. And it's the same with mini crossword.

Yeah, you can solve it with just the acrosses or just the downs, but you're losing something by not at least going back and looking what was the whole puzzle. Because these kinds of clues are going to come up over and over again and this is a perfect opportunity, while it's fresh in your mind and while you're in the context, to use it as a learning experience for future puzzles.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

I completely agree. So, I think one of the things that fascinates me and I love using, I'll call them word games and maybe they're logic games. You need to tell me the difference. But using these to keep my mind sharp is I feel like it helps me be a better thinker just in general, just at my job, just working through decisions in life. You've been solving games a lot longer than me. How have you seen that kind of help you in your professional career?

 

Rangsk:

It's really interesting that you asked that because an aspect of my day job is actually studying transference is what the psychology term is, which is if you are to play a game and get good at it or do a logic puzzle and get good at that puzzle, does that have transference? Does that transfer to other aspects of your life? Are you just getting better at that game? Or is there sort of a rippling effect to the rest of your life?

Okay. If I play GeoGuessr where I'm trying to locate where I am in the world, does that make me a better driver on my commute? Or if I am playing logic puzzles a lot, does that make me better at debugging software? Whatever it is that you're trying to actually accomplish in your life, are these things just games and you get good at that one game, or are these things that are going to transfer to other areas of your life?

And that's actually a pretty hot topic of study within psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience. And there's a lot of studies going on right now related to that with mixed results. Some of these things that they claim, "Hey, if you play this game every day, you're going to get smarter. You're going to get better in these other areas of your life." And it may not be true.

For me personally, I find it beneficial to just keep using my brain. Think of the brain as a muscle and just keep using it. Make sure those connections are strong. And by practicing it in low-stakes scenarios, when you get hit with a high-stakes scenario, you have this sort of instinct to fall back on for how you're going to handle that. Yeah. Does that-

 

Mike Gerholdt:

No, I'm still processing all of that transference information you gave because I was just thinking about how that applies to other things like prepping for tests. Did you just get good at taking the test, or did you genuinely learn the information? We can also talk about tests, but nobody wants to do that anyway.

 

Rangsk:

I'll talk about it.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Are you just good at taking the test too? That's the third thing to bring up.

 

Rangsk:

Yeah, exactly. And this is a big topic in education, has been for a long time, which is how much do we lean on standardized tests and how much do we teach to the test? And is the standardized test important because we just need metrics on how students are generally doing, or is the standardized test also something that can direct curriculum? That's a question that every teacher has.

And I don't think there's a perfect answer to that, and I'm also not much of an expert on that at all. But in my opinion, I think that anything you learn is good. I've always hated the question, when am I going to use this? The answer is, you use your brain every day. And the more you can teach your brain how to learn and all these cool things, that expands your horizons.

It expands your use of your brain. Yeah, sure, you might not use algebra if you're not an accountant or a scientist or a mathematician. Yeah, you might not use algebra, but one day you're going to have the question and you're going to have the curiosity that's going to relate to math in some way. And you either have the tools to think about it properly or you don't, and that's something that you could have internalized, but you decided you weren't going to use it, and so you didn't.

But there's the expression, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I have always thought that the more tools you have in your toolbox, the more versatile you can be in problem-solving and just living your life properly. Properly is not the right word. I didn't mean to say it that way, but living your life to its fullest extent, being able to accomplish the goals that you want to accomplish, being successful.

It's all about setting yourself up for success. And you don't know what problems are going to arise. And so, the more tools you give yourself, the less everything starts looking like a nail, and the more you can be exacting and fall back on previous experience.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I often think of... it's funny you bring up that algebra example. I was also that kid that was really horrible at math, so I never played Sudoku. But the concept sometimes of how you solve the algebra problem, I think to me, was also more important than what the answer was.

And that to me is almost like the first time you pull the cover off a toy and realize there's a whole bunch of gears inside that make the bear move and kind of understanding, "Oh, there's more to this that I need to understand as opposed to just what the outcome is." We had this discussion the other day, outputs versus outcomes.

And if your outputs is solved puzzles, are you smarter than if your outcome is no, but I learned the process and I learned how to work through difficult situations. The outcome is very different than the outputs.

 

Rangsk:

I love the way you put that and that's something... I solve The New York Times hard Sudoku every day on my YouTube channel. And my goal is not to say, "Look, I solved the puzzle." My goal is to help the viewers be able to solve the puzzle, but not just that. To understand that it's the act of solving it that's the fun part, not having that completed grid with all the correct numbers in it.

And it seems obvious when I say it that way, but I get so many people commenting saying, "Well, if I just go through and fill out all the candidates first, which by the way is super boring, then I can solve it in four minutes, and you took 12 minutes." I feel like I failed that person because now they're going to get bored of Sudoku very quickly.

Because who wants the first thing they do when they first receive that piece of paper or the digitally, the Sudoku puzzle, is go cell by cell and do accounting work? The puzzle can tell you a story if you let it tell you the story. And there are ways that you can approach the problem solving such that you are following along. It's like you're reading a book.

You're following along the story. And in a sense, it's almost like a "choose your own adventure book" where you can choose where you want to go next. What do I want to discover about this puzzle? And just put a smile on your face every day because you found this really cool piece of logic and you go, "Ooh, that's really neat. It just told me about this cool structure."

And people who are like, "Oh, well, I solve it in two minutes and I can just plunk them down, and I don't understand why you're doing all of this." And a year later, they've moved on. They're not doing Sudoku anymore, and they think it's boring. And I'm still doing it and I'm still learning from it every day.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. Because the outcome for you is a lot different. The euphemism is the journey versus the destination.

 

Rangsk:

Yes. I'm a big fan of Brandon Sanderson and that's a big thing in Stormlight Archive, which is there's... not to get too spoilery, I won't spoil Stormlight Archive for people. But there is a group of people who basically have a mantra and part of that is journey before destination. We all have the same destination. And when it comes to puzzles, the destination is the solved puzzle, but it's about how you got there.

The journey is the important thing. And you can start talking about things, do the ends justify the means? It's much of a corollary to that when you start talking about how you live your life. And I feel like if you start approaching even a logic puzzle that you're doing for fun, if you approach that in a way where you're trying to take shortcuts, that's training yourself to take shortcuts in all areas of your life.

And I feel like that's... you're cheating yourself. That's another thing. People are like, "Is it cheating if I do this? Is it cheating if I do that?" And it's like, it's a single-player game. There's no stakes to it. The only person you're cheating is yourself. Are you enjoying the way that you're solving this? And that's the important thing. Okay, if I'm doing a crossword or if I'm doing Connections and there's a word I don't know, is it cheating if I look it up?

Well, that's up to you. Do you want this to be a trivia game where you need to be going into the puzzle with a certain set of knowledge, and you want to learn as you go, and you learn from your failures because you didn't know what that word meant? And now you've looked it up and now you're going to remember it? That's one way to approach it.

And a perfectly other valid way to approach it is, "Oh, this puzzle has shown me this word that I don't know. This is a perfect opportunity to look it up and have some success because I looked it up." And I think both approaches are valid.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. There's so much to unpack there, but the first thing I wanted to say was the best and worst times of doing any of the logic puzzles or The New York Times stuff is when it's solved is the best because I was like, "Yes, I did it." And the worst is, "Ugh, it's over." Especially a few times with Wordle or with Connections or even the mini crossword, "Oh, I finally got it."

And to that other point, there have been times when I was like, "Okay, I clearly..." I don't know some... I think one of the questions was something and it was super pop culture. I was like, "I just need to Google this. That's my mulligan. I'm going to take it, I'm going to Google it and that's going to give me the answer." Because I'm past the point of enjoyment for this game and I need a little boost to get me back and going for that, and it's my game, so I can do that.

 

Rangsk:

Yeah. And it's all about knowing yourself and knowing what you're going to be happy with later and what you might be sad about later. And I think you kind of hit the nail on the head. Are you still enjoying the puzzle? Because that's the important thing. We don't do these because it's our job. We're doing puzzles because it's fun and enriching.

And so, it's all about sustainability. What's going to sustain your interest in this hobby? And are you going to be a flash in the pan where you deep dive into crosswords or Sudoku or whatever word game for a month and then you're done with it and you move on? That's one personality style. Another personality style is crosswords are something that I do every morning for 50 years.

There are people like that too. There are a lot of people like that. And there's a big difference. Someone who's going to do that every morning for 50 years, they're enjoying it every day and they've found ways to sustain that enjoyment. Whereas there-

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Go ahead.

 

Rangsk:

Sorry, go ahead.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

No, I'm 100% with you. I was going to ask because we didn't touch on it and maybe it's for a reason because it's in beta, but Strands. I think you said it in one of your puzzles, I was like, "I just need you. Can you just tell me if any of the four letters I put together are close to one of the words you want as opposed to just nothing?" And I think that for me, we get some of that.

Well, you can tell me more of the game logic. But with Wordle and with Connections, at least with Wordle, I get a yellow. I get a colored square. Regardless of what I put in, I'm getting a color back. And with Connections, oftentimes I'm like, "Please just say one away." But you get kind of that.

 

Rangsk:

But even if it's not one away, it's still information.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

It is, yes. Except with Strands.

 

Rangsk:

Yeah, Strands is missing that. And the reason Strands is missing that is because I really feel like they built the hint system because they knew this was an issue. But the hint system is terrible because people don't want to use it. Some people do use it, but I don't like using it. I think that, first of all, making it a choice. Wordle, you don't have the choice to see whether a tile was yellow or green.

It's just going to tell you. It's part of the game. A hint system feels like it's external to the game as like a, "I'm not good enough, so I'm going to press the hint button." And I don't think that was their intent, but I think that's what's happened because they realized that most of these games have some kind of lockstep functionality where you make as you progress through the puzzle and you gain information as you go.

Whereas with Strands, you can be sitting there for 15 minutes and know as much as you did on minute one, even though you have found 100 words because you didn't find any of the words that they're intending and you're not understanding what the theme is trying to hit you towards. And it's just frustrating. And so, they probably saw that in the playtest and went, "Well, if you get three words, we'll give you a word."

But that doesn't feel good because, first of all, they gave the choice. I kind of wonder what would the game be like? Is it just you get three words and it just reveals one without pressing hint? And it was just part of the game. I feel like more people would accept that rather than opting into admitting that you're not good enough at the game.

But also the hint system is just simultaneously not powerful enough and too powerful. And I could rant about this. I feel like it's a bit off-topic.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

No, this is 100% on topic.

 

Rangsk:

All right. Well, I'll rant about it then. Early on, it's too powerful because it gives you... for those not familiar with Strands, it's like a word search game, but they don't tell you what words you're looking for.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Nope.

 

Rangsk:

Instead, they all follow a theme. Maybe the theme is names of football teams or the theme is pieces of time, so seconds, minutes, hours. And some of them are a bit more esoteric. They might be words that are slaying for money, but are also food was one of them. And so, it really varies in difficulty. And they give you a little kind of crossword style clue hint at the start of what the theme might be.

But it's usually not. Usually, it's either, "Oh, I know exactly what the theme is from this clue," or, "I have no idea what the theme is from this clue." There's not much in between. But anyway, what the hint does is if you get three words that they didn't intend, if you find three words, you can press the hint button and it highlights all of the letters involved in one of the words.

And then, it becomes an unscramble basically. And then, you find that word. And I think the ideal situation when using the hint is then, okay, now that I know what one of the words is, I've now gained information about what the theme might be and I can try to think of other words that match. And if that's not enough, I'll find three more and I'll press hint again and I'll get another word.

But it's too powerful because people don't want to just be shown one of the words. That's literally taking away from the enjoyment of the game because the game is only finding the words. And so, you're literally pressing a button saying, "I want one last word to find please." But then, at the end, sometimes you're down to one word left, it tells you how many words you need to find, and you're down to one word left.

And I've literally spent 10, 15 minutes trying to unscramble that word because I can't figure it out. When it was Broadway shows, and I couldn't unscramble Carousel for the life of me because I hadn't heard of that Broadway show, and it's a weird word. Carousel. And so, the hint wouldn't have helped me. If I'd pressed hint, it would've highlighted all the letters.

So, the hint is simultaneously too powerful early on and not powerful enough at the end. And then, also on top of that, isn't giving you what you want from a hint. So, I feel like it's a failure in game design there. And what they should have done is built-in ratcheting game mechanics that aren't opt-in.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

What are ratcheting game mechanics? Please tell me.

 

Rangsk:

So, if you think about a ratchet wrench. When you go one way, it doesn't lose progress on tightening, and then you go the other way and it tightens more. That's what a ratchet is. And so, you can make progress without losing progress. So, as you put input into the system and as you find things towards the game mechanics, you have now ratcheted yourself, you've given yourself more information.

It's a ratchet-style gameplay. So, like Wordle, you input a guess and you get those yellows and greens and grays, and now you have more information about what the answer might be. And you never lose that information. That information never becomes obsolete. You can always use it. So, in the same way, that's why some of my suggestions for Strands were, "Hey, you know what?"

"If I get partial word, maybe it should tell me, 'Hey, you got a partial word. You're on the right track.'" It's ratcheted that information into the system. It's like getting a green or a yellow in Wordle. Or if they want to keep the hint system, maybe one option for the hint system would be show me the starting letter of one of the words. Not the whole word, just give me somewhere to start.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Where do I start? Yeah.

 

Rangsk:

Yeah. This letter I know is the start of a word now and I can focus my search on that. And so, I wouldn't feel as bad pressing that. But what if that were just part of the game mechanics? It's like rewarding you for finding words. They aren't the right words, but you're still finding valid words that exist. So, why not have those, just add information to the system as you guess in certain creative ways.

So, it feels like a failure of game design that there isn't that sort of ratchet other than the opt-in very heavy-handed hint system that they have right now.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. I am so glad you brought up that Broadway Strands because I was about... I'm like, "I think I'm done. I think I'm done with Strands now." It took me so long to get... the first thing I found with Strands is you either get started and it starts to make sense, or you're sitting there and you're looking at these two words and the clue and you're like, "I have no idea what these three things have to do with each other. I don't know what another word to look for."

But that Broadway with Carousel, I was stuck on Carousel. I got everything else. Those are the only letters left. I never hit the hint button. And I thought, "What happens if you hit the hint button when you're done?" Because at that point, I'll be honest, the game Joy, it was no joy in Mudville right now. I just wanted to be done. Just please tell me what the answer is. I think I went through... I watched your TikTok.

I went through all the same words you did. I'm like, "I don't know what word this is. Just tell me." And when I hit hint, it just put the little things around. I was like, "I know it's those letters."

 

Rangsk:

Yeah, exactly.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

I know it's those letters. Get me out of here. Where is the escape room button? That's the only time I wanted the hint button to just be like, "Nope, we're just going to solve this because we feel bad for you."

 

Rangsk:

And people use my videos as hints. They'll be like, "Well, I'm done with this puzzle. I haven't solved it, but I'm not getting joy out of it. Let's see what Rangsk did." Rangsk being my handle. "Let's see what he did and maybe that'll give me a hint." And that's actually the entire premise of me doing The New York Times hard Sudoku every day in that instructive way is I know that there's always going to be someone who's stuck on that specific Sudoku puzzle because it's so widespread.

It's published by The New York Times. They're going to search on YouTube or Google. They're going to search "New York Times Sudoku today walkthrough or hint."

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Solve or something.

 

Rangsk:

Yeah, solve. And they're going to find my video and that'll track them to my channel. And not only will they find my video, but this video is going to blow their mind if they don't know modern Sudoku-solving techniques. And they're going to be like, "Wow, I need to watch more of these because this is way more fun than how I've been solving Sudoku, and I don't get stuck as much."

"And if I do get stuck, I watch him until he does something I didn't know, and then I can continue." So, almost using me as a hint button. And I feel like with Strands, there's no strategy. Strands feels like a trivia game to me almost. I've been trying so hard to make it a logic game, which you probably have noticed if you watched my Strand solves, where I'm like, "Okay, corner strategy, edge strategy."

And it kind of works, but it's not perfect and there's not a whole lot of logic involved. I will say there are word search games that do feel a lot more like a logic puzzle. One of them that I play is called Cell Tower. And this is probably the coolest word search game I've played. Normally, I'm not a big fan of word search-style games. I'm not very good at them.

But to briefly explain this game, it's a grid of letters just as you'd expect a word search to be. And the way that these letters form words is a little bit unique, and that's not that important to describe, except basically you're drawing shapes in the grid. So, you're connecting the letters together in kind of a different way that you'd normally expect.

You're not drawing a line through the letters to make words in order. You're just sort of highlighting them, and they have to be connected in some way. And it's red left to right, top to bottom. And so, it's sort of limiting you on... you can't make a word bottom right to top left. You can't just draw a line that way, or you can't zigzag around. Instead, there's a specific logical order to how the letters are going to appear in a word.

In addition to that, every letter is part of a word, similar to Strands in that way. So, every letter will be involved in a word, and there is only one solution. So, you can't just go, "Okay, I found this word. Let's lock that in. Okay, now I found this word." You're going to find a bunch of words, but you need to look at how that affects the rest of the grid around it and make sure you're not preventing the ability for the letters around it to also be part of words.

And that's where the logic comes in, where you go, "Okay, I think this word might be part of it. Can I add an -ed ending, an -ing ending, an S at the end? Is there a prefix I can add to it to expand that word? But also, how does that affect the letters around it? Am I going to be able to make a word out of these other letters if this was one of the words I use?"

And so, you end up with this really logical approach to how you solve it. And you're thinking about how letters go together, how they go next to each other, and how words are formed in general. And you're looking at corners like, "Okay, this letter is going to have to be related to the letters around it in some way because it's in a corner because it's been isolated in some way."

And so, it's not that you're trying to just find words that match a theme and the computer tells you, "Oh, yep, you found one of them," or, "Nope, that wasn't what I was looking for, sorry," with no extra information. Instead, you're trying to solve this logically and the computer is not giving you any help at all there. It's just the grid, the full information of the grid being used.

So, in a way, it's a lot like Sudoku, but also like Connections where you can't just pick any four words that happen to relate because that might disrupt the ability for the other words to relate to each other. So, that's what really makes a logic puzzle a logic puzzle is you have to take the puzzle as a whole and you have to take steps that are logical. It's not just a trivia game.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

That's so apropos to everything that we talked about. You have to look at the puzzle as a whole. Last question, because I happened to think of this when we were talking about Strands. As somebody that's online solving problems, word games and stuff, how hard, how many times do you just want to hit that hint button? Does that ever come up?

Maybe you have the patience of a saint, but have you ever gotten to that point where I know you're creating this for the good of other people and you have to walk through that, but you're like, "Maybe I just hit the hint button because I'm at 35 minutes on this video?"

 

Rangsk:

Yeah, for sure. And there's different forms that that takes in my mind. There's the built-in hint buttons to the game, but then there's also like, "Do I just Google this word?" I did do that once. There was a Connections, and I knew I was about to lose. I was like, "Okay, I've got no mistakes left. And there are three words on the board that I have no idea what they mean.

Literally never heard these words in my life. So, how am I supposed to... is it good content for me to just make a guess and lose? Or do I go on Google, look up what the words mean, and continue the puzzle?" And in that case, I decided to do that. And I got mostly feedback saying, "Yeah, I Googled it too. It was fine to Google it, looking it up. What's wrong with that?"

But then, I got a lot of negative feedback too about "How's it feel to cheat? You're such a cheater, blah, blah, blah." Just so much negativity. And so, I have to weigh the decision on how much negativity do I want in my comment section here, because they aren't just insulting me when they're calling me a cheater. They're calling everyone else who Googled a cheater.

So, people are seeing themselves in that comment when they're reading through the comment section. And that's something I need to figure... it's not something I've solved. I don't have an answer. But what I try to do is understand myself and go, "Okay, am I 35 minutes into this puzzle legitimately, or am I just done with it?" There's a game I play called Squaredle. There's actually two games I play.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

It sounds like all the puzzles put together.

 

Rangsk:

Yeah. There's two games I play called Squaredle. One of them has an extra E and one doesn't. The one with the extra E... so one of them removes the E in square and one of them keeps the E in square when they add the -dle ending. They're completely different games. One of them that I play with the E, it's another word search game.

It's a grid of four by four or sometimes five by five letters. And you need to find every possible word other than esoteric ones. They have some list of words that... you know how there's words that aren't really words, if you know what I mean? The esoteric ones, the archaic ones, out of use, highly specialized words. You don't have to find those.

They count as bonus words if you do find them. But there's a list of words that it's looking for you to get. And sometimes this list is 60 to 100 words. And this game can take me an hour and a half.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow.

 

Rangsk:

I sit there and I record the whole solve. It's a special occasion usually. I'll do it once every week or every two weeks and then put it on my YouTube where I solve the hardest Squaredle of the week. Because just like The New York Times puzzles, it gets harder through the week. And so, I'm like, "I'm going to solve the hardest one today."

And it's a lesson in patience because you have to find every word, and it can take an hour and a half. And that's the kind of game where it's like, "Okay, I'm 30 minutes in, but I'm still solving the puzzle. And that's okay." There's also Sudokus that can take an hour, an hour and a half just because they're that hard. But it feels like you're making progress.

If you feel like you're making progress, that's just you're still in the journey. You're still solving it, and that's fine. It doesn't matter how long it's been, as long as you still feel like you're in the puzzle and you're making progress and you're enjoying it. But then, there's puzzles where... the puzzle usually takes two minutes, and you're 30 minutes into it, and you feel like you haven't made progress in the last 25 minutes or ever.

And you just have to make the decision of like, "Is this worth my time anymore?" And I've definitely had puzzles where I hit the stop button on the recording and I delete the video, and I just go, "I'm not solving that one today." Or ones where I go, "Well, it's time to get a hint." Literally, I just say, "I have failed this puzzle, but I want to see the end of it, so I'm going to look stuff up."

You have to make that decision in your head. And I think you brought up a really important point, which is... I think you brought this point up at least, it became this point in my head, which is you need to decide for yourself when that is and that it's okay. You gave it your best, time to seek help. And I think that's something that's really important in life is that it's okay to seek help when you need it.

I think people appreciate when you've put in some effort yourself first, but at the same time, they don't want... let me put it this way. I've been lead of several different teams as a programmer for my day job. And as a lead programmer, I would rather a junior programmer come to me with a problem that I can solve in a minute than spend six hours banging their head against it.

But at the same time, if it would've only taken them 10 minutes, I'd prefer them to learn that on their own. So, it's important to learn at what point have I stopped being productive? Have I stopped enjoying this? Am I not in the right mindset and I either need to take a break, do something else, or I need to seek help, or both?

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. No, I think you're right. The hint button and being called a cheater, you're only cheating yourself. It's what do you need to move on with? And your example is perfect. Is there something that can be gained by that person asking you? But I also think, what level of thinking did they put into solving this before they came to me?

And I always look at it as I'm very appreciative of, they came to me because they hit that wall, but they also realized quickly that they hit that wall.

 

Rangsk:

Exactly.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

And now they need to move on so that that learning journey continues as opposed to being frustrated in themselves.

 

Rangsk:

Yeah. And that's a skill unto itself. And that really separates the people you enjoy working with from the people you don't enjoy working with, people who are team players and people who aren't. That really separates them because it's a matter of, "I don't want to be doing your job for you. I've got my own job to do, but also I don't want you sitting there suffering as if you were alone."

And there's that balance. And recognizing in yourself when you've hit that state is really important. And I think that... going back to the conversation about transference. That's something that can transfer. If you're playing games, and you can learn in a low-stakes scenario, how do I... be in yourself, be in your body, be in your mind, and be like, "I now recognize what I'm like when I'm in this hopeless scenario where I've given up without giving up, where I'm frustrated, where I'm tired, where I'm hungry."

It's something even like children need to learn. Am I sad or am I just hungry? Or do I need to take a nap? That's something children need to learn, but it's not something we stop learning as a child. It's something we need to always know ourselves, know how our mind works, know what our limitations are, and know what our limitations aren't.

Is this something I can just continue on, or is this something that I need to use my coping mechanisms that I've learned throughout my life to deal with this situation? Part of the problem has now become my own mind. And that's something you can learn by putting yourself constantly in these difficult situations, like difficult logic puzzles or trivia puzzles, where you're not very familiar with that trivia or whatever it is for you that puts you out of your comfort zone in a safe, low-stakes environment.

So, you can learn how you yourself react to that and what that's going to take. And part of my job, implementing things, software. I need to recognize... have you ever had that... I'm sure everyone's had that late night where you've been banging your head against this fog or a thing you're trying to implement is just not working. You go home dejected. You get some sleep. You come in in the morning and you fix it in two minutes.

And had you just recognized that you were in that situation where you were not going to be productive anymore, and you'd just gone home and you'd gotten rest and you'd accepted that that's what's happening. And you actually had your relaxing night and you took the time that you needed for yourself, and you got the good amount of sleep, and then you came in the morning ready to go, and you just solved the problem.

Those two scenarios look the same from a work perspective, but look very different from a personal hygiene, mental hygiene perspective.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. I think it's also a great way to end this discussion, David. Thanks for coming on the podcast. You gave me so much to think about and here I was just excited to talk about word games. But really a lot of it is how you look at everything in life and how you tackle situations.

And really part of, I think, the word game or the game itself is also helping you understand yourself. So, this is a great discussion. I appreciate it. Thanks so much.

 

Rangsk:

Well, thanks for having me on. And if people want to watch my content, I'm just going to plug my stuff real quick.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

Absolutely.

 

Rangsk:

So, I am Rangsk on all platforms. R-A-N-G-S-K. I'm sure there'll be something in the description where you can find that. I'm on YouTube and also on TikTok. And I recently had to split my TikTok into multiple accounts. But if you find that Rangsk_YT account, that's the main one, and you'll be able to find the others through my videos.

And so, if you enjoy Sudoku, logic puzzles, word games, that sort of thing in an instructive calm environment, then my channel is for you.

 

Mike Gerholdt:

So, as I write, this was a shot in the dark, I'll be honest with you. I reached out to David after being completely addicted to his TikTok videos on Connections and Wordle, and just thought, "This is really what critical thinking looks like to me." And the conversation, I probably could have gone for another hour easily. I had a hundred more questions in my head, but I hope you enjoy it.

I do want you to do one thing. If you enjoyed this episode, go ahead and give David a follow. I promise you it's super rewarding to watch his critical thinking and the way that he solves problems and word problems and word games online. I honestly do think it will make you a better Salesforce admin and a better business analyst in general.

So, go ahead and give a click on the links below. Also, if you're not already following the Salesforce Admins Podcast, please do so. We're available on all the platforms. Click follow. Then new episodes like this one, we'll download automatically every Thursday morning.  So, with that, thanks for listening and of course, we'll see you in the cloud.