Alex Colburn – July 13, 2021
In this episode of The Developers Speak, Tom shares:
I'm Tom and I'm a Salesforce developer at Digital Mass. Today I want to talk about one of the biggest things that I've learned as a Salesforce consultant. To start, understanding users' business processes and training needs is just as important as writing good code.
Salesforce is an incredibly powerful tool. Some companies might not be getting the full value out of their Salesforce instance simply because they don't know. Your role as a developer, before you write a single line of code, is to get a very comprehensive understanding of the business model and the business processes within it.
A great way to start is to have meetings with business users. In those meetings, go through what they do at a high level. If you can build a comprehensive mental model of how everything fits together, you'll be able to write better code. On top of that, you'll smoothly align their Salesforce instance with their business processes and create a better user experience.
Now that you've optimized the users experience, you just have to get comfortable with the changes that you've introduced. A great way to do this is to create training documents to give to the users. A better way is to have a live demo where you walk the users through the functionality. This will really help your users get comfortable with the changes, it'll make their work faster, their lives easier, and make Salesforce a joy to use.
The Developers Speak is a video series featuring certified Salesforce consultants at Digital Mass. They come to you twice a month to help bridge the gap between business problems and technical solutions.
About the developer:
Meet Tom: Salesforce Developer and full stack star.
After graduating from the University of Minnesota with a BS in Computer Science and working as a Software Engineer, Tom was looking for a new opportunity that would spark his love for the field again. So, he decided to spend some time on Trailhead and realized he had a knack for solving Salesforce problems: they were challenging, fun, and he could zone in and focus on them for hours at a time.
Once Tom joined our team in February 2021, he decided to get his first certification Platform Developer l. Next up is Platform Dev ll! 🚀
When his hands aren’t on the keyboard, he spends as much time outside as possible and away from screens, especially in the Summer months when he can hike around the nature preserve with his friends.