💃 "Chess Not Checkers" is the Wrong Advice!🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! Has your mentor, manager, or well-meaning advice-giver told you to “play chess, not checkers!” ?!

Unfortunately, for a Salesforce professional, that’s bad advice. Here’s why-

Chess gives you visibility to all the pieces ♟️.

Chess has a board that offers predictable movements 🤓.

Chess has nothing to hide 🫣.

Chess….is nothing like Salesforce.

The game you need to be playing is….👇

ONE AND THE SAME

Poker = Salesforce 🤷🏻

In Texas Hold’em poker, each player is dealt cards that only they can see. Then. community cards are laid out for all to see. By the end of the hand, both scenarios exist where anyone who’s left has to show their cards, or no players have to show their cards.

It’s a game full of uncertainty, hidden information, intentional deceit, shifting odds, and river cards that make or break your success.

Sound familiar?

In Salesforce delivery-

♠️ You are given uncertain, ambiguous requirements.

♥️ There is legacy technical debt or undiscovered exceptions.

♣️ A business SME who insists they gave you the req but you didn’t write it down.

♦️ Your stud Technical Architect rolls off another project and on to yours.

🃏 The client hires a new COO the week before go-live, who insists on pausing the project until they’ve personally reviewed the work to date.

Welcome to the wild west, where poker is the game of choice for it’s dynamism, excitement, and stakes 🤠.

YOU CAN’T PLAY EVERY HAND

Betting...and Folding

♟️In chess, you pursue the optimal move every turn.

♠️ In poker, you fold. A lot.

Salesforce professionals often struggle with this idea…especially perfectionists. But in delivery, folding is a core competency 💯.

Hacking away at Pardot to make it do Marketing Cloud things? Fold.

Spending two sprints for an approval process only one of five sales managers uses? Fold.

Build a $12,000 custom API because the free standard connector was developed by the VP of IT’s school bully? Fold!

The smartest Salesforce professionals know they can’t win every hand. You play the hands that matter.

You do not have enough time or resources to deliver every good idea, fight every battle, or manage every exception.

Poker is a game of selective aggression. So is Salesforce delivery.

You bet big when-

♠️ A requirement drives revenue or reduces real operational pain

♥️ A design choice unlocks future scalability

♣️ A dependency is cheap to tackle now but expensive later

♦️ A cross-cloud opportunity exists (especially common in Sales Cloud + CPQ work)

You fold when:

❌ A stakeholder is “solution browsing” instead of solving a problem

❌ The architecture cost outweighs the business value

❌ You’re optimizing for perfection instead of impact

❌ You’re trying to impress instead of deliver

Know when to hold ‘em, and when to fold ‘em!

RISK MANAGEMENT

Dealing With Risk

Notice this is not “managing risk” 👀. Dealing with risk is a head-on approach that can be defensive AND offensive.

Poker players live in a world where even perfect decisions can lose. Salesforce is the same. So you have to be ready

😫 Great design choices can still blow up because of obscure Salesforce limitations.

😫 A flawless integration can still fail because someone “cleaned” picklist values.

😫 An SOW that is well-guardrail-ed may leave out a critical “this is NOT included” line-item.

There’s a ton more examples just like this, the point being Salesforce projects are saturated in risk 💯.

In poker, you can’t eliminate risk, so you deal with it 👇

🚧 Limit Exposure

Break your build into increments.

Agile methodology encourages deploying small, often.

Separation of Concerns segments your components and reduces heavy mixing of code.

💸 Control the Pot Size

If a requirement is risky, isolate it. Put exceptions into their own buckets!

Don’t let one wild feature dominate the entire project.

Manage the pace of the project, don’t start too hot at a pace you can’t maintain for a 6 weeks, 6 months, or 6 quarters, depending on project length!

🙅 Avoid Going All-In

Projects are a long grind with a plethora of stakeholders. And you have limited relationship equity. Don’t use it all up to win a low-leverage battle.

You need to maintain working relationships with an array of personalities through good times and bad. Don’t get too low and don’t get too high!

Salesforce delivery is tough, don’t overload your best (or your worst, for that matter..) resources. You risk burning key people before you get to the finishline!

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Once you start treating Salesforce delivery like poker, the chaos becomes a bit clearer.

♠️ You make better decisions, even when lacking key details.

♥️ You stop trying to control the uncontrollable.

♣️ You see around corners.

♦️ You recognize risk sooner and deal with it more effectively.

🃏 You quit sinking effort into low-value tasks.

Poker makes you a force!

Pokerforce! 🤣

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes