💃 Salesforce Governance, Done Right 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Governance has a branding problem. 😰 

Say the word in a room full of Salesforce professionals and half the audience imagines approval queues, architecture review boards, and someone asking for a spreadsheet before you can deploy a validation rule.

That reaction is understandable. A lot of governance is poorly designed. 💩 

But real governance is not about control. It is about enablement.

When done well, governance helps teams move faster, ship safer, and scale without the platform collapsing under its own weight.

The most effective way to get there is by grounding governance in a simple, durable model: People, Process, and Technology (PPT). 🧑‍🦰🔃💻️ 

This article breaks down what a Salesforce governance framework grounded in PPT actually is, how it works in the real world, and how to design one that accelerates delivery instead of strangling it. 👇️ 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

💃 Salesforce Governance, Done Right 🕺

• Enablement, Not Handcuffs

• People: Ownership Roles

• Process: Scale the Decisions

• Technology: Guardrails, Not Magic

• Speed vs. Safety

• Governance That Scales

GOVERNANCE’S REAL JOB

ENABLEMENT, NOT HANDCUFFS

Governance exists to answer one core question: How do we make good decisions repeatedly, even as the org grows? 🤔 

It is not a compliance exercise. It is an operating model.

Strong governance creates predictability. 💪 

Teams know how work enters the system, how decisions are made, and how changes move safely to production.

Weak governance creates either chaos or bureaucracy. Sometimes both at once. ❌ 

A PPT-based governance framework starts with a simple premise:

• People decide and own outcomes 🧑‍🦰 

• Process creates consistency and scale 🔃 

• Technology enforces guardrails, not opinions 💻️ 

If any one of those pillars is missing, governance becomes performative.

You get meetings without decisions, tools without discipline, or rules no one follows. 👎️ 

CLARITY BEAT CONSENSUS

PEOPLE: OWNERSHIP ROLES

Every governance failure eventually traces back to people.

Not skill. Not effort. Ownership. 💯 

Healthy Salesforce governance requires clear answers to uncomfortable questions:

• Who owns the platform?

• Who makes architectural decisions?

• Who is accountable when things break?

Titles matter less than decision rights. 👈️ 

Product owners prioritize value. Platform owners protect long-term health. Architects define constraints. Delivery teams execute within those boundaries.

When governance relies on committees instead of owners, velocity collapses. 🐢 

When no one is empowered to say “yes” or “no,” every decision becomes a debate.

The goal is not consensus. The goal is clarity. ✨ 

A lightweight Center of Excellence often helps here, not as a gatekeeper, but as a coordination layer.

PROCESS REPLACES HEROICS

PROCESS: SCALE THE DECISIONS

Process exists so your best people do not have to save the platform every quarter. 😅 

In Salesforce orgs, the most valuable processes tend to cluster around a few areas:

• Work intake and prioritization

• Design and architecture review

• Release and change management

• Incident and post-mortem handling

These do not need to be heavy. They do need to be repeatable.

✍️ A documented intake flow beats hallway conversations.

🔍️ A lightweight design review beats production rewrites.

📆 A defined release cadence beats “we’ll just deploy it tonight.”

The key is that process should scale beyond individuals. If governance only works because one architect remembers everything, it will fail the moment that person is unavailable. 🔥 

Good process does not slow teams down.

It removes ambiguity so teams can move faster with confidence. 💨 

TOOLS ENFORCE, PEOPLE DECIDE

TECHNOLOGY: GUARDRAILS, NOT MAGIC

Technology is the most visible part of governance and the most commonly misunderstood.

Tools do not create governance. They reinforce it. 🧱 

In Salesforce, technology-based guardrails often include:

• CI/CD pipelines with source control

• Environment strategies and sandbox policies

• Automated testing and deployment checks

• Declarative and programmatic constraints

For example, separating data access, business logic, and orchestration in Apex creates natural enforcement points. 😋 

Deployment automation ensures standards are applied consistently.

Observability makes failures visible instead of mysterious. 💥 

The trap is tool-first governance. Buying better tools without defining ownership or process simply accelerates bad decisions.

Technology should make the right thing easier and the wrong thing harder. Nothing more. 🙌 

CONTEXT MATTERS

SPEED VS. SAFETY

Governance is not one-size-fits-all. 🙅 

What works for a five-person admin team will collapse under an enterprise rollout.

What protects a regulated org may suffocate a startup.

The balance between speed and safety shifts as scale increases: ⚖️ 

• Small teams optimize for speed with minimal guardrails

• Growing teams formalize process to reduce risk

• Enterprise teams automate governance to preserve velocity

The mistake is freezing governance at one stage. 🥶 

Mature Salesforce orgs evolve governance intentionally, tightening controls where risk is high and loosening them where experimentation is safe.

Governance that cannot adapt becomes the bottleneck it was meant to prevent. 🫡 

FINAL THOUGHT

GOVERNANCE THAT SCALES

Salesforce governance done right is invisible in the best way. 👩‍🦯 

It empowers people, standardizes decisions, and uses technology to enforce consistency without killing momentum.

The PPT model works because it mirrors reality. Platforms succeed or fail based on people, process, and technology working together. 🪞 

Ignore any one of them, and governance becomes theater.

Design governance as an enablement system, evolve it as you scale, and measure it by outcomes. 📐 

That is how Salesforce platforms stay fast, stable, and trusted long after the org outgrows its original design.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Salesforce Memes