Alex Colburn – February 16, 2021
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.
On this episode of The Developers Speak, Alex shares a tip on how to better understand what your end users are asking for.
Hi, I'm Alex Mracek. I'm a Salesforce consultant at Digital Mass. Today I want to talk about why it's important for Salesforce consultants to understand the business process of their end-users. We'll also talk about how to understand how end-users talk about the problems that they're experiencing. When a Salesforce consultant doesn't have these skills they waste time, money, and effort building solutions that don't cut to the core of the problem. At the end of the day as developers, our job is to make our end-users lives better and make their work more efficient and easier to do.
One way to go about gaining this skill is to schedule shadowing sessions with your end-users. When I've done this I always pick up on when they saw things, how they talked about them. This is important because, as Salesforce consultants, we have a different vocabulary on the development side than the business end-users do. Shadowing sessions have allowed me to understand their reasoning for requests so I can diagnose the problems much faster. All these things make the end user's lives much better and save you time as well because you're always building the right thing.
About the developer:
Alex Mracek was Digital Mass’ first hire in 2018. Before he joined DM as a Salesforce Developer, Alex had been working in the technology space for over 5 years and was studying Marketing at Concordia-St. Paul. Once he joined Digital Mass, Alex quickly received his Pardot Consultant and Pardot Specialist certifications. Quite a powerful marketing developer combo if you ask us.
In his free time, you’ll find Alex fishing at the cabin, watching the MN Wild or the Liverpool FC, and playing D&D.