💃 Just Because You Can Doesn't Mean You Should 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! This iconic scene produced a timeless message 🗣️.

A message that changed the trajectory of a budding superhero.

A message that can put your career path on the parabola of success.

Here’s how👇

WHAT IS IT?

Uncle Ben Truth Bombs

Spiderman can keep an entire city safe, takedown world-enders, and hold his own against his peers.

He has great power. And he understands the immense responsibility it comes with.

Salesforce professionals are the same.

Wanna use a Salesforce web-to-lead form for inbound Accounts?

Sure!

Spin up the Lead form, build a Flow to create an Account record based on the Lead fields, then delete the Lead record.

And do it all in Production!

A powerful Salesforce admin can easily do all of this 💪.

But is it responsible?

WITH GREAT POWER…

Your Salesforce Powers Know No Bounds

🤔 You can build the Flow to automate the creation of a task, and then a follow up task, and then an escalation notification if the tasks aren’t completed.

🤔 You can write Apex that will poll for bad data and convert it to good data.

🤔 You can create the 900 fields marketing needs on the Lead object that will guide their future ad strategy.

🤔 You can convert the hundreds of Crystal Reports to Salesforce reports that Marketing and Sales leaders swear are required for the business to survive.

🤔 You can build the REST callout because the standard connector didn’t include a couple fields deemed critical by the business.

✅ You can do all these things with your great Salesforce power 🦸‍♂️.

❌ But….

COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY…

Your Responsibility is to the Business

Just because you have great Salesforce powers, doesn’t mean you flex ‘em and build all the things 💯.

In short - just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Solving a first order problem, like polling for bad data to convert to good data, creates second order effects, like out-of-sync data.

To be fair, it’s often not your choice. 🤷🏻

You are there to serve the business, the users, and your team 🫡. You don’t always get to say NO 🙅 to a bad business (or your own) decision.

However…

✅ It is your responsibility to setup the decision-makers for success.

✅ To set the expectations for what the solution will do, good and bad.

✅ To provide the impact analysis, pros and cons, upstream and downstream.

✅ To make the case to influence away from bad, and to a better alternative. Or to take no action at all because there is no ROI, or it doesn’t scale, or the inputs are not controllable.

✅ To have a rollback plan when the business’s awful decision inevitably burns their users.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Your power, the things you know - both the good and the bad - the decision makers need to know, too.

They may decide to move forward with a bad decision. But it’s their decision, and you will have kept the receipts 🧾.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Your ability to execute the Salesforce things delivered you a career and compensation you used to only dream about.

Early in your career, you were eager to solve all business problems thrown your way.

And now, as you’ve progressed through your career, you are feeling more like Spider-man, post-Uncle Ben death - with your great powers comes great responsibility.

Saying no to certain requests. Or, at least, providing the risk analysis.

Your progressive career responsibilities - enterprise software design, stakeholder management, integration strategy - require an evolving toolset.

Salesforce skills got you here, but it will be your strategic skills that shoot you to the moon 🚀🚀🚀.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes