💃 Scalability - What Does That Even Mean?!🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Scalability is a widely-used, rarely-explained business term.

Kinda like “Risk Management.”

What does scalability even meeeaaann?!?

Depending on who you ask, you’ll get the same, but different response 😵.

Salesforce has a good (and quick!) Scalability Trailhead but they are careful not to bite off too much and go down gray-area-y rabbit holes.

Today, we go a few layers deeper…

Agenda for today includes

• Scalability - What Does That Even Mean?!

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

WHAT IS IT?

Scalability, in a Salesforce context, is the ability for the Salesforce org to handle business growth.

Growth in Data, Users, and Complexity, as a few examples.

It’s an advanced concept because of the significant considerations required to support scaling up-

Data- data sources, entry, throughput, accessibility, synchronization, etc etc. So much data consideration 🥵.

Users- There are various users - roles and responsibilities, and how these apply to, for example, Salesforce security 👮 - Role, Profiles, and Permission Sets.

Complexity- in this context, covers an array of items. A few examples-

• Business process

• Company’s technology stack, application architecture, and where SF fits into that

• Data synchronization requirements

• Systems of record

Salesforce-specific items include Apex limits, Flow designs, and Profiles and Permission sets, as examples where you consider scalability, daily.

WHY SHOULD I CARE?

As the Salesforce Professional, you have are an owner in designing and maintaining a scalable solution.

If you are designing a Salesforce solution for a high-growth tech company, you need to plan for data volumes that are multiples, perhaps exponentially, larger than their current state.

10x, 100x, 100,000x.

How will this impact your design considerations?

Maybe Flows work fine for thousands of records, but what about millions of records? Is Apex the better choice at that scale?

And, there is the most difficult task- influencing the business that improving scalability is a higher priority than building them new things that help them hit this quarter’s sales goals, and that their sacrifice will pay off in the long-term.

That’s a tough sell 😅!

Maybe an impossible sell, which is why there are plenty of companies out there are static or declining in growth 🤷.

WHAT’S INCLUDED?

The ability to handle growth in multiples. And not that weak double or triple growth. We’re talking 100x growth!

Also, as previously mentioned - a business culture change will be required.

Sacrifices will need to be made by the business - exceptions, specifically. Exceptions are the death of scale ☠️.

All those individual permission sets? Yeah, that doesn’t scale ❌.

That Lead Source Field and the Secondary Lead Source text child-field? Yeah, that doesn’t scale ❌.

Eliminating special snowflakes ❄️ is the name of the Scale Game!

The business will need to conform to the software at least some of the time. There are a significant count of legacy industries where they expect the software to conform to the business.

HOW DO I GET IT?

It’s hard 😅!

The good news is, “scalability” is a spectrum or a scale. It is not binary and you don’t need to make huge swings and go from 1 to 10. In fact, incremental improvements are encouraged and tend to be more stable.

Here is an ironically simple “plan” to scale-

1. Culture of Scalability and Continuous Improvement

2. Business Process

3. Current State

4. Desired State

5. Gap Analysis. Implement improvements.

Lean on number 1, and iterate 2-5. 🫡

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes