💃 Once Upon a Whiteboard 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Picture this:

You’re standing at a whiteboard, marker in hand, surrounded by business stakeholders, developers, and at least one person pretending to take notes. 📝 

You’re not just here to draw boxes and arrows. You’re here to tell a story.

As Salesforce professionals, we spend most of our time solving problems most don’t fully understand, inside systems they don’t fully appreciate. 😕 

The secret weapon? Technical storytelling.

The art of turning complex designs, integrations, and trade-offs into a narrative that resonates. 👈️ 

Without a story, your elegant architecture is just… rectangles.

With a story, it’s a vision that sticks. 💯 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

💃 Once Upon a Whiteboard 🕺

• What is Technical Storytelling

• The Salesforce Story Spine

• Anatomy of a Great Technical Story

• Why Architects Need it

• The Moral of the Story

PIXAR MEETS PLATFORM EVENTS

WHAT IS TECHNICAL STORYTELLING?

Technical storytelling bridges the gap between technical truth and human understanding. 🧠 

It’s how you explain your solution and get people to care about it.

In architecture, facts alone don’t persuade. Context does. 🖼️ 

Storytelling gives your audience a mental map of:

• Problem → what’s broken and why it matters

• Conflict → what happens if nothing changes

• Resolution → how your architecture fixes it

Think of it like code for the human brain: it compiles logic and emotion.

Never forget … stories are memory machines. 🏗️ 

They make stakeholders feel the pain, root for the hero (that’s your solution), and celebrate the win. 🥳 

BORROWED FROM PIXAR. OPTIMIZED FOR ARCHITECTS.

THE SALESFORCE STORY SPINE

Pixar built its movies around a simple narrative formula called the Story Spine. 📖 

Turns out, it’s equally perfect for Salesforce presentations.

Here’s what I mean 👇️ 

Example in action:

That’s not just a technical update. ❌ 

It’s a transformation story that even a CFO can follow. ✅ 

THE 5 ELEMENTS THAT MAKE IT LAND

ANATOMY OF A GREAT TECHNICAL STORY

Every compelling technical story, like every strong architecture, is built from solid components:

🖼️ Context – Set the stage. Who’s involved? What’s broken? What’s at stake?

😖 Conflict – Highlight the tension: “Why can’t we just keep doing it this way?”

🤩 Solution – Present your design as the hero. Diagrams, Flows, Apex, and all. This is just an example. Please make your queries selective.

global with sharing class AccountDeduperBatch implements Database.Batchable<sObject> {
    global Database.QueryLocator start(Database.BatchableContext BC) {
        return Database.getQueryLocator([
            SELECT Id, Name, DuplicateOf__c FROM Account WHERE DuplicateOf__c != NULL
        ]);
    }

    global void execute(Database.BatchableContext BC, List<Account> scope) {
        // Merge logic
    }

    global void finish(Database.BatchableContext BC) {
        // Sync to Snowflake
    }
}

📈 Impact – The “why it matters” moment. Before/after metrics, user quotes, improved KPIs.

🤝 Takeaway – The moral of the story: what changed, what’s next, what lessons endure.

Each element builds trust and understanding. Which is the real architecture of influence.

BECAUSE EVEN APEX NEEDS AN AUDIENCE

WHY ARCHITECTS NEED IT

As Salesforce architects, we’re translators. 🗣️ 

We bridge exec strategy with system reality, turning “We need to scale” into a decision matrix of Apex triggers, Flow orchestrations, and Mulesoft APIs.

Technical storytelling gives us a framework to:

• Clarify thinking – If you can’t tell the story, the design probably isn’t ready.

• Win buy-in – Executives invest in outcomes, not object models.

• Reduce friction – A good story turns pushback into dialogue.

• Defend trade-offs – Framing “why we didn’t choose CDC” as part of the narrative earns respect.

It’s how you transform “architecture reviews” from interrogation to conversation. 👍️ 

When you tell a story, people don’t just understand your design.

They believe in it. 🦋 

Here are a few battle-tested storytelling habits that work in any Salesforce room:

🎯 Know your audience – Exec? Admin? Engineer? Tailor your language.

⚡ Lead with impact – “We were losing $2M in pipeline to duplicates.” Boom.

🧩 Follow the Spine – The Pixar rhythm flows naturally in conversation.

🧠 Explain your logic – “We used Platform Events for near-real-time sync; CDC was overkill.”

🪄 Use visuals as backup – Slides support your story, not replace it.

🗣️ Rehearse – The smoother your delivery, the sharper your message.

🚀 End with action – “Next steps: enable dedupe jobs, refresh sandbox, schedule go-live.”

Keep in mind … Nobody remembers your architecture diagram. They remember how you made them see it.

UNTIL FINALLY …

THE MORAL OF THE STORY

In Salesforce, architecture is rarely the hardest part.

Communication is. 😅 

By mastering technical storytelling, you move from explaining solutions to inspiring confidence in them.

You make complex designs understandable, defend decisions gracefully, and lead discussions that drive alignment instead of confusion. 🚀 

So the next time you’re standing at that whiteboard, don’t just architect the system.

Architect the story. ☀️ 

Because the most powerful tool in your Salesforce stack isn’t Apex, Flow, or Mulesoft.

It’s your ability to make others believe in the architecture you built. 🙌 

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Salesforce Memes