💃 A Beginner's Guide to Salesforce Project Team Roles, Part 1 of 2 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! There is no shame in not knowing what the plethora of roles we work amongst do on a day to day. What their objectives are, what skills are required to be successful in those roles....how much they get paid. All the interesting stuff!

Today we keep it simple and give brief descriptions of the role and responsibility, and throw out some 💰money bags💰 for how they stack up to each other.

Agenda for today includes

• A Beginner's Guide to Salesforce Roles and Responsibilities

• Part 1 | BA | QA | PM | Admin

• Part 2 | Consultant | Developer | SA | TA

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

A Beginner's Guide to Salesforce Project Team Roles

Business Analyst

SalesforceChaCha's favorite role. Interestingly, seen as an entry-level role, which is fine, and a good BA will promote up quick. The role of a Business Analyst is the ability to identify and understand business process. Tangibly, they will document the current state, ideally with workflow documentation, the desired state, and the gap analysis. EVERY role above BA needs to have BA skills. In reality, most do not.

Other responsibilities include business requirements gathering, user story and test script writing, and sometimes being the liaison between the Salesforce Team and the Business.

The Business Analyst responsibilities are foundational for all roles. A competent BA is worth their weight in gold and new opportunities should be made available to them to continue their professional journey.

Salary - 💰💰

Who excels at this role: Good thinkers and writers. Those who understand inputs and outputs are as important as the thing in the middle. The discipline to ask why 5x, every time. Great BAs go to bed at night asking why.

Quality Assurance

It takes a unique personality to want to be in this role as a career. QA work is not for everyone, and in a place where there is a 40hr/week role dedicated to QA...on one hand, you must be disciplined, tough, and resilient. On the other, you will rarely make impactful decisions or be set up to make someone else's life easier. It makes a lot of sense for someone who wants to work their hours, then shut off work at 5pm, collect a check, and get on with their personal life.

A QA person needs baseline understanding of the business process and the Salesforce solution they are testing.

Salary - 💰💰

Who excels at this role: Masochists.

Project Manager

The Project Manager role is a similar to the BA role in that the core skills are foundational to all project roles - the ability to track and manage statuses, identify and understand risks and their impacts, and alignment and the communication tools and techniques to nurture it.

It is also similar because a good Project Manager will be promoted up. In that regard, a good Project Manager may pivot to a different role when they understand that they have visibility to all the things, they have a good view of opportunities and risks, yet they have no decision making powers. It can be a very frustrating place to be, to have all the knowledge, and no bat to swing.

A Project Manager's responsibilities are well documented and the profession has a larger community and count of certs than the Salesforce community.

Salary - 💰💰

Who excels at this role: Organization is, of course, a very important skill. But the ability to align the project team and stakeholders through excellent communication is THE skill. This also happens to be one of the primary skills of Executives and Leaders....

Salesforce Admin

In a project team, the Salesforce Administrator is an SME. On one hand, the Admin will be focused on the design and build of the Salesforce solution. On the other, the Admin will be required to flex their PM and BA muscles, too. Being an SME, you will need to set others up for success for all things Salesforce, so will supplement PM and BA responsibilities.

If you asked most Admins, they would consider being on the project team preferable to the traditional day-to-day admin role. And why not? No tickets, no interacting with grumpy users, no requests to change the opportunity statuses AGAIN. Just designing and building a new solution, being supported by the rest of the project team.

Salary - 💰💰💰

Who excels at this role: Our previous newsletter broke this down well.

Bonus*

Intern

An upperclassman who either knows someone (family), was recruited at a college campus event, or is a hustler who created an opportunity for themselves. This person will be given very little responsibility and minimal to no stakeholder-facing time. The company hosting interns is hoping they picked a budding star and can pick them up for relatively cheap as a fresh undergrad.

Who excels at this role: it would be exceptional for an intern to excel, but not impossible. If they excel, they likely have one highly developed skill they can lean on, like SQL or Excel.

Salary: 💩

Next week, we cover

• Consultant

• Developer

• Solutions Architect

• Technical Architect

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes