SalesforceChaCha
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💃 Build It, and They Might Come🕺

💃 Build It, and They Might Come🕺

Discover, Design, Build, Test, and Deploy and they will definitely come!

Salesforce ChaCha
May 22, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! Is there anything more fun than getting an interesting business problem to solve on your most favorite-ist platform?

It’s what you live for - from where there was nothing, you will create something 🙌. Get into Setup → Object Manager → and go ham 😁.

But here’s the thing…you tend to romanticize “the build”. That glorious moment when your config or Apex starts to do the things ⚙️. You hit Activate and watch data fly 🚀.

But every great build stands on the shoulders of.…👇

SCENARIO

Build First, Ask Questions Later 😈

I once got a request that said-

“We’d like to automate stage updates based on activity.”

Before I even finished reading, I had the Flow Builder open. I dragged out a Record-Triggered Flow, dropped a Decision Tree, added a Get Records for Activity history…

Ten minutes in, I had a working automation 💪. I am amazing 😊!

Then I read the next line in the ticket:

“This should only apply to renewals, not new business. And we’d like to control the triggers via a checkbox.”

Well, shoot. Now my Flow was a mess. I'd hardcoded assumptions that weren’t true. And worse, I realized I didn’t actually understand what the sales team wanted 🙁. Hours of reworking this were etched into my future 😭.

I was building in real-time as I was reading the requirements. They say to measure 4x and cut once. I was cutting before I even knew the reason I was cutting, and I certainly wasn’t measuring anything...

MISE EN PLACE

Fantasy vs Reality

Elegant. Effortless. Sexy.

This is what we want Salesforce delivery to be.

And sometimes it is!

But the reality is, good Salesforce delivery is more like this-

It may not seem sexy, but when delivering amazing Salesforce solutions, the build is just a fraction of the total work.

Like in professional kitchens where food prep and mise en place is the important- laborious-and-not-sexy work, it’s required to get to the Jon-Favreau-cooks-amazing-pasta-for-Scarlett-Johanssen phase, ie “the build.”

GETTING TO THE BUILD…AND BEYOND!

Phases for Salesforce Deliverables

Delivering Salesforce solutions can be broken down into 5 phases-

🧐 Discovery/Business Requirements Gathering

25% of the delivery effort.

Ask the right questions. Identify and define the objective. Understand what is in scope. Understand what is not in scope.

🧐 Design

35% of the delivery effort

Measure. Measure again…and again…and again. Designing for the happy path is easy 😎. Considering and then designing for the exceptions is hard 🥵.

🧐 Build

15% of the delivery effort.

Finally! You get to flex your Salesforce skills and do what you love - configure the most powerful CRM on the planet 🌎! It’s like a car lover who gets to wrench on Ferrari’s all day 🥳.

🧐 Test/QA/UAT

15% of the delivery effort.

Ahhh what a downer. Testing booooo 👎. Don’t forget to write those test scripts, generate test data, and document the user sign-off ✅.

🧐 Deploy to PROD

10% of the delivery effort.

Depending on your environment - deep into devops 🫡 or directly in PROD 😅 - this step ranges from having a dedicated deployment/devops team to working directly in PROD.

If you jump straight into building, you’re likely borrowing time and pain from the future. Discovery, design, and testing will come back around, but now they’re rework 😩.

Why is it so tempting and thrilling to build?

🤷🏻 It feels productive. You’re creating tangible solutions! You’re shipping!

👁️ It’s visual. You can see your work, unlike a stakeholder conversation or a design doc.

🥳 It’s fun. NBA players love to shoot the rock. Few love to do the work to get open, get balanced, stare down the rim, execute a quick release, and follow through.

But building too soon is like boiling your pasta before you start your sauce - your pasta will be well past al dente before your oil, garlic, and onions are emulsified.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Next time you’re crafting a deliverable, pause.

Read the entire request. Ask questions. Sketch the logic, mentally, or even better- in a workflow document. Think about the edge cases, considerations, and exceptions.

Mise en place.

AND THEN get to cooking, building, executing your deliverable.

SOUL FOOD