Dear Salesforce Product Management...Thanks For The Wings!

Dear Salesforce Product Management,

Before you start reading, I want to let you know that this isn’t another post telling you all of the ideas you need to implement yesterday, this is a post to say thank you.  I sit here writing this post just after playing with Lightning Process Builder and re-building a fairly complex process we currently have in code.  I was able to re-build 90% of this process that updates cases and inserts new records when certain things happen on a case.  If I could reach out and hug you through my MacBook I would. 

After sitting here trying out my new process in a developer org I started to think, really started to think why I love Salesforce the company and the platform so much.  It’s because of tools like this.  It is because people like me, who have zero coding experience can easily build out a huge complex process in less than an hour.  I re-built most of this in 43 minutes.  Yes, I timed myself, because I was curious. 

This brought me back to why I first fell in love with the Salesforce platform and why I think the company has been so successful.  It is because Salesforce has made its platform configurable to a businessperson.  Someone who really understands his or her business can set the platform up pretty quickly and easily to meet business needs. 

My thoughts naturally turned to my own career path wondering what my career would have been like if Lightning Process Builder had come about seven or eight years ago.  Then, I started to think about the people I met at Dreamforce this past October who are just starting out their Salesforce Admin careers.  Some aren’t full time Salesforce Administrators; actually most of people I met after my sessions or in the Admin Zone were their company’s Salesforce Administrator plus something else (secretary, operations analyst, office manager, etc.).  I realized that this isn’t just a tool to help automate business process; this is a tool for career path.  I guarantee you there is someone sitting at their job right now, who isn’t happy, who catches on, gets certified and gets a better job; a higher paying job; a job that they love where people treat them with respect because they are the subject matter expert for a tool that that their company relies on to do business.

Each time you build something like this for Administrators and Developers to use, you aren’t just making the platform better, faster and easier to configure.  You are giving someone his or her wings.  Wings to a career path, wings to fly out of a job they maybe stuck in because they need to pay bills, take care of their families. 

I’ve had my wings for just over ten years now and my career is soaring at over thirty thousand feet.  If it weren’t for the Salesforce platform I may still be answering someone else’s phone.

If anyone in product management reads this, please take a moment to go into the community today and see what you have built, what you have really built.  Look at all of the ideas posted, the conversations happening in the various groups, and the people helping each other on Answers.  We exist because of you. 

Thank you,

Cheryl Feldman

Owner of Awesome Admin Wings