My Salesforce Journey
Many people in the Salesforce ecosystem currently know me as a Dreamforce ‘21 Golden Hoodie and a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect that shares a lot about the CTA path and on Salesforce architecture in general. A lot of people seem to think I’ve just all of a sudden come out of nowhere in the past couple of years, but that’s really not the truth at all. Sure, maybe I have a lot more visibility now between Golden Hoodie and CTA, but I’ve been around for a bit quietly flying below the radar I suppose. It’s also become very apparent that not many people know any of the stuff I’ve been doing because of that, and they don’t know my background or story at all except for some bits and pieces they pick up here and there. I’ve never publicly shared my entire Salesforce journey or have never really talked about the things I have done or experienced along the way to Golden Hoodie and CTA. I don’t put too much of my personal stuff out there and don’t promote or advocate for myself well, but I really wanted to share all of this as there are some important aspects where I think others can identify and maybe find some inspiration through the good and the bad and the ups and the downs. I also want people to have a better idea of who I am. It’s what has gotten me to where I am now and it has made me the person that I am today and I am proud of it all. I see my story is one about perseverance, dedication and picking myself back up after getting knocked down many times and I hope it can inspire others to do the same. I’ve struggled on my journey and now do whatever I can to help others not to struggle the same way I have. That’s what motivates me, and it helps me to help others.
First a little bit of background — I became a mother at the age of 17. I started college as a full-time student at this time with an infant. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study, and when I was asked by my advisor what I was good at I said “mathematics”. It was an area where I was in gifted programs and had always excelled, so they suggested that I study computer science. As someone that enjoyed playing computer games such as Carmen Sandiego (probably where my love of travel started) and math blaster, I felt like this was a good fit and thought it sounded fun. I ended up being only one of a few females that was a Comp Sci major at my college.
When I was done with my freshman year of college I became pregnant again with my second child, a daughter. We ended up moving into family housing on the college campus for my sophomore year to make things easier. I had my daughter during the Spring semester and made arrangements with all of my professors to bring her to class with me. When I was in college I was a member of IEEE and started up a chapter of ACM at my college with the support of my Computer Science professors. In the fall semester of my junior year, I split up with the father of my children becoming a single mother. Despite this, I still finished college and graduated with Magna Cum Laude honors (.01 from Summa, still kind of salty about this that they didn’t round up 😅) and was the Vice President of Kappa Mu Epsilon, a national mathematics honors society.
When I graduated from college I ended up getting jobs in the field of technology as a software engineer in the Java stack. In 2002 when the .com bubble burst I found myself unemployed. Struggling to find a job, I decided to go back to school for my MBA. My focus was Information Systems which I felt would broaden my horizons more than a Master’s in Computer Science. While studying in grad school in Florida (after initially starting in MA I chose to change schools), I was hired by a company to learn the Microsoft .NET stack to build them a mobile app for mystery shoppers. I jumped at this opportunity so that I could learn something new to help me have a better chance of finding jobs as .NET was starting to explode around this time.
2005: When I was just about done with grad school I moved back to New Hampshire and I finished my last couple of MBA classes online.
2006: Because of the .NET skills that I had gained in Florida, I was hired by Steve Baines the Director of IT at a company that manufactured storage arrays to do development work for the IT department. I was brought in to help customize our ERP system which was written in .NET, and to help build both partner & customer portals in .NET that would integrate with our CRM system — that system was Salesforce. This is when my journey with Salesforce started. I was given the task of learning Salesforce as an admin and customizing it for our internal stakeholders. While working with stakeholders, I saw a lot of double entry happening in the systems and we had some scripts for moving data that kept breaking when upgrades happened. While in grad school I had learned about ERPs, CRMs and systems integration. I proposed that we integrate our systems using software and then I was given the task of figuring out how that would be done. After a bit of research and not finding many integration tools out there, I came back and said “we will build the integration framework ourselves”. Steve said “great, now figure out how that will be done”. I was given the opportunity to design our own integration middleware and how to connect the systems. This was really my first role where I got to dive into something that was architecture focused. I had done a short stint as a consultant just out of college and got to work alongside an enterprise architect doing things such a performance testing with LoadRunner, but not much other than that. Tried to go to Dreamforce but my boss said no, someone had to stay back.
2007: Finally finished my MBA in Information Systems and graduated with honors as well as a member of Beta Gamma Sigma, the national business honors society. I ended up leaving the storage array company and I really wanted to stick to working with Salesforce. I liked the platform and wanted to keep getting more experience with it. Not many companies were using it at the time but I wanted to keep working with it. I remember SugarCRM being a bit more popular and thought “should I learn that instead?” but I didn’t. I found myself working for an integration middleware company that had a connector for Salesforce so that I could continue to gain experience. I worked on developing the core software, the Salesforce connector and worked with our Salesforce customers on their integrations.
2009: Left the integration middleware company and went out on my own as a contractor doing an MDM project for Discovery Channel. Learning about MDM was great experience for my future architecture career. I wrote webservices in .NET to integrate Saleslogix CRM (which I got some exposure to at the integration company since we had a connector) with the MDM, so deviated from Salesforce a bit during this year but still stayed in the area of CRM.
2010: Got back into Salesforce project work. Started my own S-corp so that I could work with another company corp-to-corp. I had no idea what to call it, and one of the guys from the company I was contracting with liked to call me Lizzard (Melissa-Shepard…Lissa-Shepard…Lissa-ard…Lizzard? guess that’s what he did 😂). So Lizzard Tech, that’s what I decided to name it. It was rather silly and cracked me up, but so be it — it was part of who I was and represented my name.
2014: After many years flirting with addiction & substance abuse, this year was the year when I decided that it got to the point where it needed to stop and I asked for help because I knew it could potentially end my life. This is something very personal that not too many people know about, but I’m including this because it’s very important and it is part of my story. Very recently I’ve experienced some negative bias towards the word “addict” or “addiction” in the Salesforce community. Addiction/Alcoholism is a disease that affects people like any other disease and it needs to be treated or it will likely lead to death. It’s not something to be ashamed about and I would like to help change the stigma of what an addict looks like or what they can accomplish. Some of the most amazing people I’ve ever met have struggled with addiction in their lives. I like to think of us as highly sensitive people that can sense very easily and have a lot of awareness. There’s many of us out there, including in the Salesforce ecosystem, but our past shouldn’t define us or who we are today. I know the positive potential of any suffering addict who chooses sobriety, and that potential is huge.
In April of 2014 I asked my father to bring me to a treatment center. That day changed my life forever in so many positive ways. I like to think of it as a rebirth, because it really was. April 30th, 2014 became a new birthday for me. I had ended a project about a month before and just slid into a pretty deep cycle of drinking and taking prescriptions after engaging in some very risky behavior. I was basically self-medicating due to crippling anxiety and some extremely traumatic events in my life. I went into a treatment facility for 44 days with not a lot of money in the bank and two teenagers to support. When I got out, work was the last thing on my mind. I didn’t have a phone or a computer while in treatment and had to use a regular phone to call my family to bring me clothes and money because I didn’t pack nearly enough when I left the house (and I was drunk while doing it). I actually really liked the break from the digital world while there and was really able to just focus on getting myself healthy.
When I got out of the treatment facility I went into a women’s sober shelter nearby. I didn’t feel as though home was very safe (I had been staying with my mother) and wanted to continue to build good habits and stability in my sobriety. At this point I was basically homeless and jobless with not a lot of money to my name. I went to multiple 12-step meetings every day and did community service to support my outpatient program, which I would continue for the next 4 months. There were times I didn’t even have enough money for gas, and my life became very simple, but I got by with some support from my family. My main focus was sobriety and stability. Getting back into the tech world right away was not in the forefront of my mind.
After about a month the sober shelter said I needed to get a job, so I started looking. I thought to myself if I could just find something part-time working remote, that would be low-stress and probably manageable for where I was at in my recovery. Well low and behold, an old acquaintance came along with an opportunity that was just that. It was actually doing some part-time Java development work, and I liked being able to brush up on an old skill.
Once I finished my outpatient program in October 2014, and I was no longer eligible for the sober shelter because I had saved up too much money to qualify, I decided to look for a longer-term sober living facility. There wasn’t much in New Hampshire, so I started looking further away such as in Maine and Massachusetts. I landed in a nice women’s sober house in Boston, MA in the Dorchester neighborhood. My plan was to stay here until I had a full year of recovery.
2015: In early 2015, I decided I wanted to get back into the Salesforce world. I was hired by a start-up in Cambridge, MA called HeyWire, to build their SMS Texting functionality in Salesforce for Service cloud called LiveText. This allowed customers to send an SMS over a landline number and chat with a support agent via SMS on their phone and a respond via a chat window on the support side, as well as being able to initiate outgoing SMS from Salesforce. When I interviewed and they told me what their vision was, I knew it was what I wanted to be doing. I was made the offer as a contractor by HeyWire that same day, and I even turned down a different contract offer I got earlier in the day because I knew I would be building something very cool. I was living in a women’s sober house while writing an app to get listed on the Salesforce AppExchange, kind of surreal. I even had to “work from home” when we got a few huge snowstorms that winter. I was their lead Salesforce Developer/Software Architect helping them to figure out how to build it, get it developed and then listed on the AppExchange.
Once I had my full year in recovery, I decided it was time to move out of the women’s sober house and moved in with a sober roommate in another neighborhood of Boston, MA. This was a great transition to getting on my own again.
After living in the women’s sober house I decided to start a nonprofit to help people in addiction recovery. It was going to be a 6–12 month program to support holistic recovery for things such as yoga and retreats. This never really went anywhere but I tried. It’s such a great concept and based on something a friend was doing at the time with inner-city kids. Maybe I’ll come back to this one day.
I also completed my very first yoga teacher certification. Yoga was a very important part of my life and I still like to practice today to keep me stable and to support my recovery. I like to try and live mindfully and participate in a lot of alternative modalities for support on my healing journey.
2016: I finally moved into my own apartment (where I still live now) and I also decided to do my first Salesforce certification — this is when Platform Developer I was out, so that became my first certification. I took Dev-401 I believe it was called at the time to help me prepare. Finally having money to pay for a Salesforce class felt like a dream to me.
Soon after I passed my certification I decided to register my company as a Salesforce partner consulting company. This is also when I started to look at the Salesforce CTA (Certified Technical Architect), before the pyramid came out. I was still doing some part-time work with HeyWire at this time as well. Around this time I also attended my first World Tour in Boston where HeyWire was a sponsor as well as the World Tours in New York City.
This is also when I decided it was time to attend my first Dreamforce. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that it took me 10 years to finally attend after initially being told “No” when I wanted to go in 2006. After that, working as a single mother, I just didn’t have the extra money to fund myself for the ticket, the airfare and the hotel. Most of the time I really just didn't have any disposable income because of my situation. I didn’t do much traveling because I could never really afford it trying to support two children on my own. Also more towards the last few years of my active addiction, I fell into a pattern where I would do a contract for 3–6 months, go into a bad cycle of addiction for a few months once it ended, come out of it and work on a project again for 3–6 months, go into another bad cycle after it ended for a few months and it would just keep repeating. After actually being able to work on projects continuously without any “addiction breaks”, I finally had enough money to get myself to Dreamforce (and honestly I’m glad I never got there while still actively drinking).
About a few weeks before Dreamforce I got an email from the VP of Engineering at HeyWire that just contained a link. I clicked the link and it was an announcement that Salesforce had just acquired HeyWire. “HOLY SHIT!!!” I thought, the software that I built was becoming part of the Salesforce platform. My blood, sweat and tears went into writing that app for many months. After some name changes from LiveText->LiveMessage->Messaging, you would now know this functionality as Digital Engagement. While it was really cool, it didn’t amount to any financial gain for me since I worked on the app as a contractor. So really it was just my first claim to fame and Benioff mentioned LiveMessage in the Dreamforce keynote. Woohoo!!
2017: During this time I focused on building my partner company through the Salesforce AE network. I brought on some full-time sales & marketing people and mostly just hired 1099 contractors or worked with other people corp-to-corp. It was easier to do that when trying to grow the business and it was less overhead. I also attended my second Dreamforce, second Boston World Tour and more New York City World Tours (since they are 2x a year) as well as Phillyforce!
I also completed my second yoga teacher training this year taught by Kia Miller, the wife of one of my yoga teachers Tommy Rosen, who brings people in recovery on yoga retreats through his program Recovery 2.0 (please check out the website if you are also in recovery, so so many resources — I am a founding member https://r20.com/). He believes that yoga and diet are a huge part of helping people to recover and heal, and I agree. They are a huge part of my journey.
2018: I started to run a Salesforce Professionals networking meeting on meetup.com. I really liked the networking events at Dreamforce and World Tours and wanted to have that experience more often. We would get together once a month to socialize and talk all things Salesforce over food and drinks which I sponsored. I had no idea about Salesforce Community Groups at this time, but once I discovered them I decided that I wanted to be a group leader and started a Women in Tech group in Manchester, NH. I spent a lot of time in NH still where I had done my recovery program and it’s also where I grew up, and thought this could be a convenient place to run a group since Boston already had a bunch going at the time. I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I just did it because I wanted to get more involved in the Salesforce community. I also attended my first TrailheaDX where I also brought my son and my brother, who were working with me at my company. This would be the beginning of also getting them involved in the Salesforce ecosystem.
Also in 2018 I was made aware that I needed to get a consultant certification to keep my partner status with Salesforce. This forced me to go take my admin cert which was a prerequisite for doing any of the consultant certs. I studied and passed admin in May 2018 and the following week I sat for Sales Cloud and passed that as well. My partner status was saved! I found that I really enjoyed doing the certs and kept going, pretty much doing one per week for quite a while. I decided to knock out the CTA pyramid and qualified for the review board in July 2018. I continued to keep doing certs, acquiring about 19 new ones in the span of 8 months. I ended the year with 20 certifications. This is also when I started to post in Ladies Be Architects, to figure out what was next when it came to CTA. I started to correspond with Gemma Blezard, as well as Susannah Plaisted (then Susannah St-Germain).
I attended Dreamforce once again this time not just as an attendee, but as a Partner Sponsor and speaker! My company actually had a booth in the expo and we hosted a rooftop party with another partner we partnered with on projects. This was pretty exciting, but what was even more exciting was that we made Silver Partner status just before AND I was selected as a speaker on the Partner track! I spoke about Business Driven Architecture, how you should let the business process drive architectural decisions as opposed to the other way around. This is still a concept that I work into my presentations today but I come at it more for a Process Mapping perspective and how you should let that drive your underlying architecture (and I teach this to CTA aspirants as well!). This is also when I met one of the first superstars in the Salesforce ecosystem who I had been on a project with, Amy Oplinger Singh.
That year we wrote up our tips for Dreamforce for partners:
I also did a webinar for Dell Women’s Entrepreneur’s Network (DWEN) on CRM Systems:
I had been involved earlier in the year as an organizer for the Northeast Dreamin community event in my area, but due to traveling around taking various Salesforce trainings in order to help me pass some of the certs such as CPQ & Marketing Cloud I kept missing calls. I ended up dropping off the organizing committee but stayed on as a sponsor. I had some run-ins at Northeast Dreamin with some community members that would end up becoming very close friends of mine.
I also completed another full yoga teacher training this year, along with a 300 level course and some yoga retreats, so now I was 3x certified in the yoga world 😅
2019: This was when I really started to become more involved in the Salesforce community attending local User Group meetings and multiple LAUG/Dev Meetups in London. I had been in a CTA study group started by Gemma Blezard through Ladies Be Architects and had been matched up with my first CTA mentor, Carl Brundage. Gemma and Matt Morris were both going to the review board around the same time in May and I got to be involved in MANY mocks as a judge for them. These are all published on the Ladies Be Architects YouTube. Pretty much all of the ones with Matt and a couple with Gemma have me on as a judge. I really had no idea what I was doing when I first started, just a bit of an intro from just having taken CTA-601 coincidentally taught by Steve Baines, who was a new CTA!
This is also when I got to speak at the NYC World Tour with Matthew Poe on buidling community. I gave a big shout-out to my involvement in Ladies Be Architects, and a few women came up to me after really excited about LBA.
After Gemma & Matt went to their review boards I was heading over to London for the World Tour in May by myself. I didn’t really know anyone there but had really been wanting to go to London after cancelling a trip over there for World Tour the year before. When I was there, Gemma really took me under her wing and brought me around introducing me to people and bringing me to all the parties. She also met up with me at the partner networking event the day before World Tour started. Matt also introduced me to people as well. I felt so welcomed and at home and would never forget this experience. I then met Todd Halfpenny who invited me to speak at the London Developers group. During the summer I stopped in London on my way back from Singapore to do a presentation on Heroku for the Dev Group, a topic that was new for me but I was studying for the Heroku exam at the time. I remember getting grilled by Rob Cowell on Heroku, and I was sweating bullets because I still just wasn't very experienced with it. This is when the London/UK community became an important part of my story.
We all then met up again a week or two later at TrailheaDX. I got to spend more time with Gemma, Matt and the rest of the UK crew that I got to know while at London World Tour and met more such as Louise Locke, Amanda Beard-Nielson and so many others! This really was my first community. The UK community was and still is very very special to me. I always feel like I’m home when I arrive in London, one of my favorite cities to visit and I try to hit Community Group meetups when I am there. I would go back to London a few more times this year, I think 4 or 5 times in total and I even attended their Christmas Megameet in December which was a total blast! (trying to get back to another but they always seem to clash with NYC World Tour). Feeling so much gratitude towards the UK community, I joined the London Admin User Group mentorship program and mentored two mentees.
Then later in the year we all attended Dreamforce and I kept getting to meet people that would later on become important parts of my Salesforce life. Not seeing much support for those of us in the community that are sober I decided to start a community group just before Dreamforce called Soberforce where sober people could all find each other at these big events. This is still in existence now on Chatter and I’m in the process of bringing it over to Slack after hearing stuff about Chatter at TDX (for anyone that wants to join: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/trailblazer-community/groups/0F93A000000Lnx8?tab=discussion&sort=LAST_MODIFIED_DATE_DESC). Salesforce ended up starting an internal Soberforce just after I launched this group because they reached out to see how we could collaborate, and at Dreamforce 2022 they threw a Soberforce party which was an amazing experience!
An interview that I did while attending a DWEN event in Singapore:
Later in the year I attended French Touch Dreamin with a lot of the UK community which was my first ever trip to Paris. The night before I took the train from London to Paris, I met Zayne Turner who at the time was a developer advocate for Salesforce and presented at the London Developer Group. I had such a great time at French Touch and had an experience with an amazing group of women on the Eiffel Tower that I will never forget. I got to know a bit more of the European Salesforce community, and met Vicki Moritz-Henry, another important person on my journey who would later on volunteer to help me with one of my initiatives, ScaleUp Archs. I’m so grateful for her and her willingness to help.
This is also when I decided to start a community-sourced CTA Study Guide bible (this still exists today on my slack group’s google drive!) in order to help myself and others study for the CTA using the exam guide as our structure because of how important it is for the review board. I gathered a ton of content and included lots of slides that I took pictures of at Dreamforce. This was a precursor to what I would build later on when it comes to CTA.
I also attended Northeast Dreamin again as attendee and was still running my Manchester, NH Women In Tech group (but I have to say, not very successfully because I really didn’t know what I was doing and didn’t have anyone to help and I’m horrible at marketing).
After being inspired by Karene-Sean Hines and her program Pi-Tap, I thought maybe I should pivot my nonprofit to Salesforce education for people in addiction recovery needing to start their lives over again like I had done. This isn’t a bad idea, and maybe it’s something I will focus on one day, but another nonprofit idea would enter my consciousness in a couple of years so this one is on the back-burner for now.
2020: Early in the year I was a guest speaker on the Forcepreneur podcast with Ankit Taneja, now a good friend of mine. He still gives me crap about my comment about my Victoria’s Secret jacket (I misunderstood his question!). I was also asked to do a couple of presentations for Salesforce.org with Tom Leddy on the Marketing Cloud Certification path.
Trailhead Live: Marketing Cloud Credentials and Career Paths for Architects with Tom Leddy:
Also participated in a couple other sessions with Salesforce Trailhead Live — Marketing Cloud Certifications, Salesforce MC Partner Architect Session.
I also was on Women in Tech Republic for a Q&A: https://www.womenintechrepublic.co/salesforceqa-melissa-shepard/
I was also selected as a London’s Calling presenter for a presentation that many now are familiar with “Tackle Your Everyday Business Problems Like An Architect”. I was presenting content that I was learning about on my CTA journey. I was also selected to present this session at Czech Dreamin too. I had this whole European tour planned from May into June. Well, we all know what happened around March 2020 — LOCKDOWN! All of our events got cancelled and my visit to London in March and my European tour would both get put on hold. I tried to record my session for London’s Calling which was being held virtually, but I just couldn’t do it. I tried many times but I was still new to presenting and was terrified and recording myself was really difficult. I had announced this on Twitter, and the Bay Area Dev Group asked me if I would at least present it for them live, and I did! This would be when I would start to get to know Daniel Peter from Robots & Pencils, who is just one of the most amazing Trailblazers out there. If you don’t know him, you need to. I was out there forcing myself to present because it was so terrifying for me, and I knew that it was a skill that I would need to build if I ever wanted to become a CTA.
Finally I decided it was time to attempt the CTA review board. I submitted my case in August after Susannah said she submitted hers too so we could study together. A few days later we both had review board dates of November 30th! EEEkkk!! That only gave us a few months to prepare so we both went to Seb at Flow Republic to see if he could help us get ready in an accelerated cohort. He also had a couple other familiar names join us — Candyce Lu & Charly Prinsloo. Just before My board I participated in a practice CTA Review Board Q&A with three newly minted CTAs Johann Furmann, Jakub Stefanik & Lawrence Newcombe which was published on Apex Hours:
Not feeling fully prepared after feeling very stressed out and terrified of presenting to anyone else except my 1-on-1 CTA coach Doina Popa, the first female EMEA CTA who was always an inspiration for me, I decided to still give it a go hoping for maybe at worst a 2-section retake. I attempted the board November 30th and got my results about a week and a half later — it was my worst nightmare, a FULL FAILURE! I was so afraid of failing the board and here I was dealing with that reality. After being absolutely devastated and feeling destroyed and knocked down, I had a long heart-to-heart with my friend Johann Furmann who I had just met during our CTA journeys. I was ready to leave the Salesforce ecosystem and abandon the CTA altogether feeling that it just wasn’t meant for me. After our conversation and Johann talking me off the ledge of going to the AWS stack or to some other technology, I finally decided that I would make another attempt. I knew what I was missing and decided to build it for myself and take a bunch of others along with me for the ride, especially females (and subsequently many, many, many others). This would be the story of the present day Architect Ohana Slack. In December 2020, I created a channel on my Lizztech slack called cta-study-group. I corraled some peers from Flow Republic that needed to re-attempt or do some section retakes and also posted on the Salesforce Architect Chatter group as well as the LBA Chatter group that I was looking for people to join my study group. My idea was to get enough people so we could run multiple mocks every weekend and thoroughly go through the study guide together. I got a pretty good response and we had about 15–20 initial members. That number wouldn’t stay that low for very long!
In December I also presented for Johann’s newly formed SAIMA group that he created along with Gauarav Keterpal about what it takes to fail the CTA review board along with Martin Humpolec who had just failed the board too (also now a CTA, and I may have kept bugging him to join my study group and attempt it again 😁).
2021: I would say this is the year I accidentally started to really democratize the CTA (but kinda not, I was hurt and upset from my review board failure). In early 2021 my CTA Study Slack group was in full-gear and consistently running on a weekly basis. We were meeting 4x a week for study sessions (1 hour M/W/F and 2 hours on Sunday) and I was coordinating review board mocks every weekend on top of that. Our mock schedule started to get so jam packed that we started filling up Saturday, Sunday and even days during the week as the demand became so huge but luckily we had the members to support it. We were even doing 602 style mocks (this is the Architect Review Board Evaluation) in order to prepare for that, which is like a mini-review board in front of a CTA judge and not to be taken lightly. People were scheduling their mocks far in advance as time slots just kept getting taken up so fast. Everyone was getting what they couldn’t easily find before — a regular study group where we discussed all the review board topics and easily accessible CTA review board mocks to participate in as either presenters or judges. I learned so much as a judge and developed my own strategy/style based on things I took from other people’s presentations and I know that my style became an inspiration for many others to build off of as well. It was all about helping and supporting each other in any way that we could along the way, and people were so grateful and giving back via presentations and still joining the study group calls even after they were successful in passing their review boards and becoming CTAs. The group kept growing rapidly as we had our first CTA pass in February, just after ramping up, and many more kept passing after that. People kept telling their friends about the group and it just kept growing and people were having a lot of success passing their review boards to become CTAs. We had people from Salesforce, IBM, Accenture, Deloitte etc all coming together to share their knowledge and join in all the discussions. This was helping us all to break down information silos that existed in the CTA world and it was making us all better architects! Around April or May I just knew we had something very special going and started thinking it was time to start preparing for my second review board attempt. We recorded all of our sessions and they are all compiled into a huge library of recordings that people now can watch on-demand as they study and prepare for their CTA review boards. Some have said these recordings were a huge part in helping them to understand some very difficult concepts in order to pass their CTA review boards. That’s what the goal of the group was, to help us figure stuff out together and understand a lot of things that would be difficult on our own.
I participated in the Boston Women In Tech Community group panel on my Salesforce Certification journey:
I was also asked to present my session “Tackle Your Everyday Business Problems Like An Architect” for the Cotswolds Community Group in the UK. This presentation was starting to gain some traction.
After doing some presentations and getting more comfortable with presenting, I was able to record my session “Tackle Your Everyday Business Problems Like An Architect” for London’s Calling which went virtual again during the pandemic. Woohoo! I was making progress as a presenter and feeling a lot more confident in my presentation abilities which would also help me for my second review board attempt. I think part of this was due to my 4x a week study sessions I had going with my CTA Study Slack group and the mocks that I was doing with the community. I also was very involved in judging mocks for the Benelux CTA Study Group and one of my last public mock presentations before my review board was for that group. I had three of my own hand-picked CTA judges to prepare me for the real thing judge me for that mock.
Once I decided it was time to start preparing again I formed a smaller more tight-knit study group where we would meet every day Monday-Friday on top of the existing 4x a week study sessions I had going. I found a few others that had also failed their boards and said we are all going to pass this time together and we won’t stop until we do. A couple of them also had a Saturday morning study group running on top of all this, Charlie Guo’s 1111, which I had also joined in December 2020. A lot of the members who were in there were also a members of the CTA Study Slack group. I called our small group the CTA Warriors, because we had been knocked down at least once before but we were getting back up to fight yet again. The first two from our smaller group went to their boards in September, James Quinn (who now works for Salesforce) and Charlie Guo. James had failed multiple times, and to our group’s delight he finally fully passed his board and Charlie got a 1-section retake which was a huge success (he went on to fully pass his board a month or two later). Once James passed, I pulled in another female I had met in my CTA-601, Krishna Tatta. She had small kids and this was her second attempt, so I wanted to support her however I could to pass this time.
In September, I was invited to the very small and intimate Dreamforce ’21. I was asked to tell my story about building the CTA Study Slack during the first ever Architect Keynote with Parker Harris. After I told my story, Parker presented me with the coveted Golden Hoodie. I was absolutely nervous sitting next to Parker and having to do an interview with him on stage. This was extremely special for me as I knew it would bring more visibility to the slack community and the things I was trying to accomplish. It definitely brought a flood of participation to the slack group, so after DF I decided that I wanted it to be more inclusive for ALL architects, not just ones on the CTA path. I decided to change the name to just Architect Study Slack so we could cover all architect certifications, but it was still running on my company workspace lizztech. This is also when I really started thinking about building a nonprofit to train people as Salesforce architects. I was actually preparing for my second CTA review board attempt when Dreamforce rolled around, but was happy to take a break and have fun and hangout with my friends. This is also when I got to meet Sasha Taylor, an amazing human and the mother of the Golden Hoodies! We love her so much. This was a very special Dreamforce for so many reasons!
A few weeks after Dreamforce I sat for my second review board attempt. I wasn’t sure how I had done but definitely felt more confident and a lot more capable than my first time around. Anyone that is familiar with the review board process knows it takes a couple of weeks to get results, and these couple of weeks can bring a lot of anxiety and anticipation. Luckily I had been accepted as a speaker at FL Dreamin, so I was able to go there and spend time with my friends while anxiously awaiting results. I presented my “Tackle Your Everyday Business Problems Like An Architect” here and had a great time. Little did I know, I was presenting as a Certified Technical Architect at this event. My friend and Salesforce MVP Melissa Hill Dees introduced me here as a CTA. I said “No, not yet! I don’t have the results yet!” but alas she was right. This event would kick off my whirlwind CTA Golden Hoodie world tour. I had just been homebound through the covid pandemic in 2020 with my European tour getting cancelled, and then pretty much homebound in 2021 preparing for my CTA (mocks take an entire day to prepare and present and a specific setup to present virtually, so I was stuck at home most weekends to do mocks May-October 2021).
I remember other people started getting results and I still had not gotten mine. This made me VERY VERY nervous. I remember it was early on a Monday morning and I just happened to look in my email — I have my Salesforce emails filtered so that they don’t get lost in the sea of junkmail that we get from vendors, recruiters and whoever else. I remember seeing that there was an email in that folder. I was so nervous. I mentioned to a friend that I needed them to hold my hand as I ventured into the folder to read the email. I clicked on it and nearly fell over. I had passed my review board…I couldn’t believe it — I DID IT THIS TIME!!! I was a CTA!!! All the pain and suffering that I had gone through from the first attempt failure had started to be erased by working with others in my slack group and seeing them succeed, but this sealed the deal. Seeing this result really was one of the happiest things I have experienced in my career and even my life because I had worked so hard and fortunately was able to help a lot of others along the way to my own success. My reasons for wanting to pass the CTA had changed from just wanting the credential to wanting to be an inspiration, a role model and having the credibility to teach and train others, mainly women and minorities. I’ve been on a mission to help other women become CTAs and so far I’ve brought 10 other women besides me along for this ride to becoming CTA since my group started in December 2020.
After I passed my board, in November Krishna also passed her board. This was special for me because one of my initiatives was to support other females in passing their CTA. The larger slack group also saw Lilith Van Biesen, now a close friend who works alongside me on many initiatives, pass her board a month before me and Dawn Sangree who passed her board earlier in the year as female CTAs. Woohoo we were up to 4! Also another CTA Warrior group member, Shoaib Iqbal, passed his board along with Krishna and our final member, Amit Jain, got a 2-section retake. He would also go on to pass his board a couple of months later. We had 6 out of 6 from our small study group now attaining CTA. It might be a record for a small study group.
Over the course of the year I had a couple more things published on Apex Hours, stuff I had been working on to prepare me for the CTA review board and also one of my own mocks:
I also partnered with Amit of Apex Hours to publish content from The CTA Study Slack (now Architect Ohana), so some of the videos out there originated from our group. Here’s one of the most well-known videos from our group by my good friend Jitendra Zaa that was published on Apex Hours:
Also had one of my mocks and Q&A published on ctagof.com (CTA gang of four):
I also presented “Tackle Your Everyday Business Problems Like An Architect” for Salesforce User Group, Cedar Rapids, and presented for the Boston Women In Tech on a Salesforce Certification Journey panel. I also presented for the Boston Salesforce Saturday on my CTA journey and mentored multiple CTA candidates.
Here’s a write-up I did specifically on my CTA journey: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-cta-journey-melissa-shepard
2022: In early 2022 after much thought and rumination and a vote on the slack, I changed the name of the group to Architect Ohana. I felt that this would better represent community so that it could really just be a virtual home for architects in the Salesforce ecosystem. So I finally took it off of my company slack workspace lizztech and created a brand new workspace — architectohana.slack.com (but we didn’t lose anything, all the channels and content are still there, it was a very easy switch). I also decided to launch ScaleUp Archs nonprofit in January while at Cactusforce and got it registered as a 501(c)(3) and using Salesforce NPSP through Power of Us. I found the right people to help me with it and spent the year organizing and planning with some amazing people I somehow roped in — Allison Park, Nadina Lisbon, Angela Mahoney, Vicki Moritz-Henry, Susannah Plaisted. I was still a CGL at this time and still had my Manchester, NH Women in Tech group but once the Architect Community groups launched I decided to start up the Boston Architect Community Group as a CGL. I also have a co-lead for this group now, Brock Elgart, another CTA with Steampunk. I also became a Trailblazer Mentor to help others that are earlier in their journeys!
I also decided to launch the Architect Ohana YouTube channel so that we could publish some of our top content to more of the public and to also give exposure and credit to our presenters. Andy E Utkan stepped up and offered to help get the videos edited and publisehd in a more YouTube friendly format. Thank you Andy for your help!
I attended TrailblazerDX that year as a Golden Hoodie and for the first time as a CTA and helped to bring the architect and trailblazer communities together. I also became closer with some of the other people who received Golden Hoodies in the DF21 cohort — Jenh Vo & Tony Nguyen. TDX was the first time we really got to connect in-person after we received them at Dreamforce. I also got to connect with some of the newer Golden Hoodies such as Karmel James who has become a very dear, close friend of mine. It’s something that has connected us all and has brought some of the most amazing people I’ve ever met together as friends. I really want people to understand that we are approachable and want to help so please don’t be afraid to talk to us (just don’t ask how to get one because you don’t try, or at least you aren’t supposed to). Also, I got to attend my very first CTA summit just before TDX which was an experience not to be forgotten, and a good portion of the attendees were brand-new CTAs who had studied with me in my slack group. It was so moving to see the bonds and relationships that had formed through my slack community from people studying together. I felt like this was one of my biggest accomplishments thus far, just being able to connect people and bring them together to create life-long bonds.
That year I attended my very first in-person London’s Calling (FINALLY!!!!) where I got to connect with two other female CTAs in-person, Lilith Van Biesen and Emely Patra. I also got to do London World Tour again which I was thrilled about after having such an amazing experience there in 2019. It holds a very special place in my heart, love you Gemma!!
Here’s a rough list of all the events I ended up presenting at in 2022, most were in-person but a few were virtual:
- Cactusforce — in-person
- Northeast Dreamin — in-person
- Czech Dreamin — in-person
- London’s Calling — in-person
- YeurDreamin — in-person
- Dreamin in Color — in-person
- Forcelandia — in-person
- Midwest Dreamin — in-person
- WITness Success — in-person
- Pakistan Dreamin — virtual
- DevOps Dreamin London — in-person
- Dreamforce — 5 sessions in-person
- BA Summit — virtual
- Data Innovation Forum — virtual
- North Africa Dreamin — in-person
- French Touch Dreamin — in-person
- YeurArchitectin Organizer and CTA mock review board judge — in-person
One of the best events that I attended and presented at in 2022 was Dreamin In Color, founded by a dear friend Tiffany Spencer. I met Tiffany and Stephen Spencer at Dreamforce 2021 and just fell in love with this couple. They have to be two of the most authentic human beings I have ever met. I love whenever I get to see them and spend time with them. My session was about bringing Diversity to the Architect Path, where Nadina Lisbon shared her story about how she advocates for herself and I spoke as an ally and the things we can do to support bringing more diverse talent to the architect space. I love to dance, and there’s a LOT of dancing at this conference. Probably the most fun I’ve ever had at any conference. I also go to participate in a special listening session with Leah Mcgowen-Hare.I will be be back at Dreamin In Color in June 2023 and plan to help bring more enthusiasm for Salesforce architecture.
This is also when I first got to speak on a big stage at Dreamforce and I got to do it as a CTA. I did speak on the partner track back in 2018 but it wasn’t to a big crowd on a large stage — this time it was! My topic was Asynchronous Automations which I presented two different times:
I also got to present and facilitate two Well-Architected workshops at Dreamforce 2022.
Architect a Reliable Salesforce Solution:
And I also participated on a CTA panel called “Ask the Certified Technical Architects”. This was a lot of fun and I’m so happy that I was able to represent female CTAs and architects!
Throughout the year I also helped to kick off multiple Architect Community Groups through presentations, besides the one that I lead in Boston, MA which kicked off in June 2022. We hosted an in-person meeting in August at the Validity HQ and then again in November at the Boston Salesforce office supported by Marissa Dimino Burns, who is an amazing leader for us in the community and we love her! We had two top-notch rockstar speakers, Susannah Plaisted and Pei Mun Lim (who I got to connect with while over in London!).
I also helped kick off the LA Architect Community Group for Rachel Park alongside Taylor Grimes https://youtu.be/kwrckdRW-HY
I also wrote about what it really means to be a CTA: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-really-means-cta-melissa-shepard
One of the things I’m most proud of is a group of us launched an Architect Dreamin (we called it YeurArchitectin at the time) event in Paris alongside French Touch Dreamin, with the help and support of the amazing French Touch Organizers J-Michel Mougeolle, Fabien Taillon and Doria Hamelryk! So not only did I become a co-organizer of a brand new Architect Dreamin series of events along with Kevin Jackson & Sam Wadhwani, I also came back around to become a new co-organizer on the new Northeast Dreamin 2.0 board! (I was able to re-emerge now that I’m not preparing for CTA or 30 other certs — just a few planned for this year lol). And we have another Architect Dreamin (Yeur Architect Dreamin) event happening May 24th-25th, 2023 in Prague just before Czech Dreamin. I’m so excited because I loved Prague and will be speaking again at Czech Dreamin…woohoo!!! Be sure to keep an eye out for more Architect Dreamin events as we plan to do multiple per year in different locations hopefully alongside with other Dreamin events https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/yeurarchitectin/
Earlier in the year I was asked by Salesforce Paris CTA Christophe Bouchet, who I had helped study for his review board, to come in and talk to his group of architects and CTA aspirants at some point. Since I would be in Paris for French Touch and YeurArchitectin, I decided to go a couple of days early so that I could go into the office to present. Since we had the Salesforce Architect Relations team involved in YeurArchitectin, I asked Susannah and Zayne if they would also like to go in and talk about Well-Architected to the Salesforce Paris office architects. So from there, we coordinated with Christophe and I spent the day before YeurArchitectin there with Zayne, Susannah and Marissa. Christophe was also instrumental in getting us set up to do YeurArchtiectin at the Salesforce Paris office, along with Jani Souryavongsa who helped with a lot of the groundwork. Both are amazing Salesforce Paris architects!!
I’ve done many other things in 2022 to help elevate the architect community however I can.
Here’s a little opinion piece I did on what it means to be a CTA: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-really-means-cta-melissa-shepard
2022 Apex Hours Contributions:
TalentHub Podcast with Ben Duncombe:
Sheforce WiT panel:
YeurDreamin Presentation:
RoadToCTA Salesforce Saturday Presenter:
Odaseva Data Innovation Forum:
Salesforce Architect Success Day Interview Session (3:50:00 is where I come in):
Boston Salesforce Saturday presenter
Boston WIT August 2022 Meeting: Women-Founded Consultancies Panel
2023 (through mid-March): This is the year we finally launched the first ScaleUp Archs cohort with 10 students receiving guidance and mentorship from CTAs. It feels like I am finally fulfilling a purpose, because something kept telling me to build a nonprofit to help underserved as you probably could see throughout my story. This time, it was a lot easier than before and it all came together as I kept meeting the right people who were willing to help. That tells me it was meant to happen.
I kicked off TrailblazerDX by attending the MVP/OneCommunity VIP party as a new Mulesoft Ambassador. This was exciting because I got to hang out with all of my friends and get to know the Mulesoft community a lot better.
At TrailblazerDX I participated in a DevOps panel hosted by Christie Fidura, who is a dear friend in the UK community that I met in 2019, Pablo Gonzales and Shayne Fisher. This was a lot of fun and I would love to do something like this again, maybe they will have us back at Dreamforce for round 2!
I also got to help run two Well-Architected workshops. I’m so grateful to the Salesforce Architect Relations team for including me as a Well-Architected Ambassador both at Dreamforce and now TrailblazerDX. I really love to help people learn and this gives me that opportunity.
I also got to connect with so many friends new and old!
It was so great to see Nadina Lisbon attend her first event as a CTA at TrailblazerDX and for her to attend her first CTA reception this year. Lilith and I did our first CTA summit together last year which was a blast. I selfishly love creating new CTAs, especially females, because now I have friends to hang out with at these CTA events 😂 I told Lilith since we are part of the CTA class of 2021 we are now becoming old school CTAs compared to the newer ones of 2022 and now 2023. Wow does time fly! These two are also generously donating some of their time to be coaches for my ScaleUp program and to help shape what the program looks like. So grateful that they are supporting this with me.
I love ending events with big group pictures and we really went all-out this year at TDX. Who DIDN’T we get in this picture might be a good question 😅
We also had a nice little get-together at the end of TDX at the Cigar Bar where I got to relax and chat with some of my closest friends in the community Vanessa Grant, Susannah Plaisted, Michael Drzewiecki & Bhavana Sing.
This year I also became a Mulesoft Ambassador (which is part of the Salesforce OneCommunity VIP/MVP program). I have to thank my close friend Nadina Lisbon for pulling me in and getting me involved in the Mulesoft community. I’m also truly grateful to Sabrina Hockett and the Mulesoft Community for bringing me in as a Mulesoft Mentor and now as a Mulesoft Ambassador, showing appreciation and support for everything that I have been doing for the Salesforce & Mulesoft architect communities. Truly feeling the love from that team as well as the Salesforce Architect Relations team 🥰 My goal is to do what I can to fully utilize the Mulesoft Ambassador program this year and bring awareness to how amazing it is. Due to having a strong background in integration architecture, my plan was to work on the Mulesoft certifications after CTA and now I am supported in that endeavor. I also plan to do more presentations at community events, Dreamforce and hopefully TrailblazerDX next year on integration & Mulesoft focused topics. I also plan to coordinate with the Boston Mulesoft Meetup leader to see how we can coordinate with our Salesforce Architect Community Group.
We are planning to launch a 2nd ScaleUp cohort in late July through December so if you identify as coming from an underrepresented group and do not have any other support to help you on your architect journey, please apply here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSelvN8aHPv2M4_gB5MQ3bsag7T71ReWzD-rdLv3zByEobXWqQ/viewform?usp=sharing
We are also taking donations for anyone that might want to contribute to help us so that we can purchase technology and possibly sponsor aspiring architects to attend community events such as Architect Dreamin: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/scaleup-archs-inc
We are also looking for volunteers — CTAs and we are also considering CTA candidates that might want to get involved as well. More info here: www.scaleuparchs.org
Follow ScaleUp on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/scaleup-archs and Twitter: @ScaleUpArchs
This year I became a Ladies Be Architects (LBA) Ambassador and couldn’t be more thrilled. I already did my first presentation for them on DevOps Best Practices, which I also presented to the Technical Architect group at Simplus along with good friend Vanessa Grant. I’m planning to carry that LBA torch forward for my dear friend Gemma Blezard.
I’m still doing mentorship through Trailblazer mentor program and plan to continue that as well as supporting and mentoring CTA candidates.
In the Architect Ohana slack, I try to bring in quality presenters to present on topics that I feel are important for anyone on any architect journey every so often. We are also launching a CTA office hours where people can join and ask questions from multiple CTAs. People also find each other within the community to form their own CTA study groups or even study groups for the other architect certifications, and we still have the Mon/Wed/Fri 12–1pm Zoom calls on the calendar for anyone that wants to join. Sunday mornings 10am–12pm are still on the calendar as Scenario Sundays, where CTA candidates will present a CTA mock or walk through scenario with the group. Scenario Sundays are the only sessions I record now because it’s a lot of admin work to record all sessions and get them downloaded/uploaded and in our catalog of recordings. Today we have 56 people who have become CTAs as part of the group, and about 75 total CTAs are in our community (although there could be more lurking around that I’m not aware of 🤣).
Today I am once again building my consulting partner company back up as Lizztech Consulting with a few focus areas of Field Service & Service Cloud, CPQ, Commerce Cloud (B2B & B2C), Communications Cloud, Experience Cloud, Mulesoft & DevOps. I also do personalized CTA coaching for individuals and companies and I’m really enjoying teaching people through my ScaleUp program. I’m really looking forward to growing that as a global initiative. My brother is working with another partner CloudQnect. My son, who now has 4 certifications and 1 Accredited Professional certificate, is an up and coming consultant with Coastal Cloud and I couldn’t be more proud! My daughter does NOT do Salesforce, she’s an athletic trainer for college sports teams (hopefully one day she will work in professional sports — for anyone that knows me I’m a HUGE Boston sports fan), and also equally as proud of her.
Here’s a post I published recently about guidance for anyone on the CTA journey: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/guidance-cta-journey-melissa-shepard/
I was also named by Salesforce Ben on International Women’s Day as one of 10 women to follow:
My list of credentials to this day is as follows (I have a lot more to work on this year including Mulesoft certs):
- Tripler Star Ranger
- 32x Salesforce certified
- Certified Technical Architect (CTA)
- B2B & B2C Solution Architect
In 2021 I spent the year democratizing the CTA, believing that everyone should have the same level of access to the information in order to prepare for this exam. In 2022, I spent the year building my ScaleUp Archs program that will now democratize the architecture path in general and bring it to the people who have the hardest time gaining access. I’m bringing CTA-level topics to those that might not otherwise ever get exposure, and I’m loving the results so far!
I’ve met some of the most amazing people in the Salesforce Ohana who have no doubt changed my life and held my hand along the way. I only aspire to pay it forward and give back what has freely been given to me in so many ways. I look forward to what we will all accomplish in the coming years together 🙌🫶
I can say that from what I have seen the slack community has really helped inspire and motivate a lot of other CTAs and architects to give back what was so freely given to them as well. That’s one of the things I cherish the most about the group, the willingness to give back. This is how we become multipliers, by doing things that we love and leading by example. It catches on because I’ve seen it in action! It started with Gemma and Matt and is now being pushed forward into the greater architect community. It’s like a ripple in the water that just keeps spreading out further and further.
This year I’m also very excited to be co-organizing Northeast Dreamin October 5th-6th 2023 https://northeastdreamin.com/ and co-organizing the second Architect Dreamin May 24th-25th 2023 where we have an open “Call for Problems”: https://sessionize.com/architectdreamin2023/
Where can you find me speaking next?
- Dream Ole — Seville, Spain March 31st 2023
- Albania Dreamin — Tirana, Albania April 29th 2023
And I’m sure there will be quite a few more as well!
Also, if anyone knows of more content of mine out there that’s not listed on this page please let me know! It’s hard for me to remember and find it all, but I thought this was a great way to put it all in one place for people to easily find (including myself for when people are looking for things 😅). You can find me on Twitter: @lissa__x, on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lissa0977/, in my Architect Ohana Slack (invite is on this page): https://www.linkedin.com/company/architect-ohana-slack or you can email me: mshepard@lizztech.com.
Architect Ohana YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfWf8b7Dyitl0rQf7oswWlA
Architect Ohana Slack:
