3 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started My Architect Journey

I recently received the following question from an architect that is early on in their journey as a Salesforce consultant:

What is one thing you wish you had known back when you were starting your journey in Salesforce?

I replied with the following three lessons learned in priority order (3 is my favorite number and I couldn’t think of just one). The timing was perfect because the question allowed me to reflect on my journey as a Salesforce architect while our team is actively preparing for Dreamforce ’22 and our second Architect Keynote. Below is my response with some added context and relevant Dreamforce sessions in the Architect track.

1. Get value from what you’ve purchased, first.

One of your first priorities as an architect should be to get value from your technology investments. This is especially important for consultants and partners. Architects can get distracted by designing new solutions or even inventing problems to be solved. Remember that you invested in Salesforce because Salesforce makes it easy to innovate and deliver value, faster. Avoid licenses “sitting on the shelf” by demonstrating the value of what has been purchased. The pre-built functionality of the different clouds along with the powerful automations and low-code development provided by the platform were part of the initial benefit analysis, afterall.

Identify the power users, business analysts, and Salesforce champions in your organization that can build demos and proof of concepts (POCs) to show how easy it is to deliver simple, automated, and engaging solutions. This becomes especially important if your future state involves customizations and dependencies that will take time to deliver. Provide insight into your decision making with a roadmap that communicates the value you can deliver now with standard functionality while the rest of your solution is being built.

Here are some relevant Dreamforce sessions to help you get value, fast:

• Architect Keynote: Build the Future with Salesforce Well-Architected — Join Parker Harris and special guests to see how architects build trusted, easy, and adaptable solutions on Salesforce Customer 360.
• Architect a Simple Salesforce Solution — Get hands-on with Salesforce Well-Architected in this interactive workshop where you’ll redesign an over engineered solution to improve readability and maintainability.
• Architect an Automated Salesforce Solution — Get hands-on with Salesforce Well-Architected in this interactive workshop where you’ll design automations to meet key business goals and objectives at scale.
• Architect an Engaging Salesforce Solution — Get hands-on with Salesforce Well-Architected in this interactive workshop where you’ll design a solution that delights users and drives adoption.
• Building a Transformational Multi-Cloud Roadmap — Create a digital roadmap spanning multiple clouds and business capabilities that will help build stakeholder alignment and increase the likelihood of buy-in for innovative projects.

2. Technical issues are usually Governance issues in disguise.

A well-architected solution is readable, maintainable, and intentional. Take the time upfront to get your teams aligned on building the right thing the right way. Establish processes for intake, prioritization, delivery (i.e. design standards and documentation), and deployment. Be proactive and revisit this strategy often to save yourself pain later when issues arise masked as technical limitations of the platform or of your architecture.

Here are some sessions to help you build the right thing the right way:

• Architect a Resilient Salesforce Solution — Get hands-on with Salesforce Well-Architected in this interactive workshop where you’ll design a solution that can quickly bounce back from unexpected changes in predictable ways.
• Architect a Compliant Salesforce Solution — Get hands-on with Salesforce Well-Architected in this interactive workshop where you’ll design a solution that adheres to regulations and ethical standards and serves users equitably.
• Compliance and Control Preparation for Architects — Compliance and control are the pillars of an effective governance strategy. Learn about the critical steps an architect should take to ensure compliance in any Salesforce org.

3. Think about your value story early and often.

As we covered in point 1, it’s your job as the architect to deliver value. Crafting a value story made my top 3 because this exercise is often overlooked or viewed as self-serving, but it is your strategic responsibility as an architect to align technology decisions to business strategy. Your ability to do this early and often will demonstrate the value of your solutions and the value of you as an architect, the most trusted digital advisor.

You already identified the benefits expected from your Salesforce investment, so start there. Identify the metrics to track progress towards your benefit realization, capture those metrics on user stories, baseline the metrics at the start, and regularly communicate the value being delivered to your stakeholders.

Here are some sessions to help you communicate the value being delivered:

• Create Your Architect Value Story — Join the Architect Relations team for an interactive workshop where you’ll identify, track, and report on success metrics to communicate the value of your solutions to stakeholders.
• Architecting for Analytics — Optimize your Salesforce data model in this interactive workshop where you’ll learn to use data modeling to improve stakeholder decision-making through analytics.
• Architect’s Guide to Executive Stakeholders — Get tips for how to build strategic alignment with business executives in complex enterprise environments and craft a plan for executive stakeholder sign-off on project and funding proposals.
• Architecting Your Salesforce Data Model for Analytics — Join us to learn tips and tricks to ensure that your Salesforce data model is designed to handle future analytics requirements, improving your organization’s ability to make data-driven decisions.

I hope you find this list insightful and I hope to see you at Dreamforce. Be sure to check out the Architect’s Guide to Dreamforce ’22 along with Tom Leddy’s overview.