💃 Salesforce Professional Need to Side-eye the "Quick Request"🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! Happy May and if you’re aligned with Salesforce’s fiscal year then hope you had an excellent Q1!

So, I spent the last 6 hours on a “quick request” from a sales manager 😩.

30 minutes is a quick request. 6 hours is not…

Why did the user think a complex request would be a “quick request”?

Why did I think that?

What could I do about it?

CRINGE…

The Salesforce “Quick Request”

You’ve heard it.

You may have even said it yourself once or twice 🤷🏻.

You’ve definitely cringed when you instantly understood the quick ask was going to be a disruption to your perfectly planned week.

“Hey, quick request - can you add this date field?”

The way it leaves their mouth, they truly believe it’s a simple ask, like “can you turn the tv on?” But in reality it’s “can you mount the tv to the wall and give it a wireless look?”

As a Salesforce professional, you know the truth - there’s no such thing as a quick ask in an enterprise software app where hundreds or thousands of users are cramming who-knows-what into fields that are tied to automations, validations, reports, and security.

Maybe earlier in your career, you treated the “quick request” like it actually was a quick thing…and paid the price for it. Never again, you said…☠️

Now you know, this is what goes into that “quick request” ⬇️

NOTHING QUICK ABOUT THIS

Salesforce Quick Request, Line-itemed

“Hey, quick ask - can you add this date field?”

Seems simple - get into the object manager, spin up the field, add to page layout. Bing bang boom 💥. Done!

Nooooo 🙅. The reality is-

🧐 Requirements clarification - What is the objective of this field? Is this required at creation? Close? Not required at all? Do you need reporting on it?

🧐 Design decisions - Field type? Do we need historical tracking? Validation rules? Help text? Dependent logic?

🧐 Impact analysis - Will it affect integrations? Flows? Apex? Screen components? Syncing to CPQ? Reporting snapshots?

🧐 Security & access - Who can see it? Who can edit it? What about partner users?

🧐 Testing environments - You’re not cowboying this into prod. Spin up a scratch org or sandbox, build, and test.

🧐 Documentation & enablement - Update the field dictionary, communicate to users, possibly train.

🧐 Deployment - Package the change, test the deployment, and confirm nothing broke.

🧐 Post-deployment monitoring - Check for unintended side effects. Is it populating correctly? Is it being used?

And that’s assuming it goes smoothly 😅.

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

Understanding and Managing the “Quick Request”

The Multiplier Effect

Let’s say that “quick request” takes six actual hours. What’s the big deal?

Here’s the problem - most Salesforce professionals are carrying dozens of “quick requests” at a time 🥵.

These aren’t isolated. They stack. They compete for attention. And they increase cognitive load.

And because they’re perceived as small, they’re often not scheduled or tracked like full tasks, projects, or initiatives. So they interrupt real work ☹️.

Now you’ve got a team who feels overwhelmed, a system that’s bloated, and a user who still wonders why their “simple request” took a week.

Unnecessary Disruption

When we underplay the cost of changes, we under-resource the people doing the work, and we risk breaking the very systems we depend on.

That “quick request” culture leads to-

😵 Orgs cluttered with abandoned fields and half-implemented features.

🥵 Teams burned out by invisible, unscheduled work.

🫣 Solutions that don’t scale because they were built without design time.

It’s not about being precious with our time. It’s about respecting the complexity of enterprise apps and the expertise of the people maintaining it 🫵.

So What Should You Do?

How to break this cycle? Here are a few ideas, and remember there are different tools for different scenarios, these are not one-size-fits-all!

👉 Treat every request like a mini-project until proven otherwise. Assume there’s more to the story. Validate the need. Understand the impact.

👉 Educate stakeholders with curiosity, not condescension. “This is a great request, can I ask a few questions to make sure we build it right the first time?” This is my favorite approach and often you can get them to abandon the idea with some socratic questioning!

👉 Ticket systems or request submission forms. They’re great when they work. But these are easily bypassed through slack, email, and passing you in the halls 😩.

👉 Push back when the solution is clear but the impact is fuzzy. “I can build that fast, but I don’t yet know what else it might affect. Can we take 15 minutes to review it properly?” How important is this? Will they give you 15min of their time to discuss it?

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

The “quick request” is not quick. As the steward of premium enterprise software, it is your responsibility to understand this, and manage it accordingly 🙌.

And not to be a Debbie-downer, but every Salesforce role you find yourself in, you will always deal with “quick requests” so best to prepare for it now and have a the proper toolkit to handle it wherever you are 💪!

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes