💃 Good Friction and Bad Friction 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! You’re late for a flight…

You are racing to your gate but your shoelaces keep coming undone.

You stop to tie them, rush through the airport, and they loose again 😩.

You stop again. You put your bag down. You tie them. You knot them.

And you’re off 🏃💨.

Good friction and bad friction - one keeps you on track while the other trips you up 😉.

BAD FRICTION

Bad Friction in your Salesforce role

Have you ever been to a packed stadium during halftime trying to make your way to the bathroom?

It’s death by a thousand cuts - each body you rub against, are crowded behind, and queued behind in line is friction keeping you from emptying your bladder where it’s supposed to be emptied.

In your Salesforce role, you experience many forms of bad friction. Here are three-

😭 Micromanagers

Raise your hand if you’d rather rub sandpaper on your sunburn than report to a micromanager at work ✋✋✋.

Covered in a previous article, the ChaCha has no love for micromanagers.

The excessive supervision and control is bad evil friction!

😭 Bureaucracy

To talented and driven tech workers, bureaucracy is the penultimate bad friction.

When your livelihood is dependent on your ability to build optimized, scaleable solutions, then bureaucracy is the Lex Luthor to the Superman solution - bent on foiling all the do-good.

The layers of policy, decision makers, and SOPs will wear down even the most ambitious worker 💯.

😭 Over-complexity

Unhinged project management is a simple example of this.

An overzealous project manager can implement a million things except getting the job done - check the box, log the note, update the status, move the card, notify QA, add to the summary report - nothing that directly serves the users in selling more.

Or the mega-Flow. You know, the one that you have to zoom out to 15% just to see the whole thing. There was friction in the build, but the really bad friction is in the maintenance and support 😩.

GOOD FRICTION

Good Friction in your Salesforce role

After a long day at work, you walk into your house, and your doggy is right there waiting for you, rubbing up against your legs with the “where have you been, never leave me again” face 🐶.

Yes. Good friction is a thing 💯. Here are some examples-

🐶 Solution Validation

You discovered, gathered requirements, designed, built, tested, and deployed the solution 💪.

And along the way, you validated with the client that you were delivering what they expected, right?

RIGHT?!?!

Stakeholders hate surprises. Validation sessions (aka effective meetings) are good friction!

Bonus: special shoutout to testing

🐶 Security

Would you leave your car unlocked? Would you turn off the passcode on your iPhone?

You may not like Salesforce MFA, but it is a good friction.

Entering you password and then swiping your authenticator is annoying on the daily. But, there’s too much at stake, and security is a good friction, just like locking your car and having a phone passcode 🔐.

🐶 Effective Checkpoints, 1:1’s, etc

Keyword here is effective.

An effective checkpoint - like a status meeting or scrum meeting - aligns, informs, synchronizes, and removes blockers.

1:1s can also be good friction when they’re done well.

🐶 Testing

“Did you test that?” is a common question from the project manager as you move your Flow through the development environments.

After deploying a Flow to Production that you wanted to loop but ended being recursive and wiping your limits for the day, you will embrace testing as good friction!

If you want to know everything there is to know about testing Flows, be sure to check out this great read!

TAKEAWAY

Final Thoughts

Stakeholder validations. Daily scrums. Marking tasks complete. QA and UAT. One-on-ones. Approval processes. Clicking save before closing the form. Meetings before the meetings.

These are all examples of friction. Some of them can feel like driving a car with the handbrake on. And others can feel like a warm hug 🤗.

SOUL FOOD

and now....Salesforce Memes