💃 When DevOps Breaks Salesforce 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! We’ve talked about this before, Salesforce doesn’t usually fail with alarms and outages. It fails quietly.

A release slips a week. Then another. A “minor fix” turns into a rollback. 😰 

Sales misses a launch window. Marketing builds a workaround.

Leadership starts asking the uncomfortable question: Is Salesforce slowing us down? 🐢 

That’s rarely a platform problem. It’s a DevOps one.

At enterprise scale, DevOps failures don’t show up as red build lights. 🚨 

They surface as missed revenue, delayed launches, and declining confidence.

By the time executives feel the pain, the technical causes are already deeply embedded in how teams build, test, and release Salesforce. 🔄 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

💃 When DevOps Breaks Salesforce 🕺

• The Org Strategy Trap

• Governance Isn't Optional

• Manual Deployments Don't Scale

• Testing Isn't a Phase

• Why The Business Feels It

MORE ENVIRONMENTS, LESS SPEED

THE ORG STRATEGY TRAP

Enterprise teams often equate safety with more environments. 🦺 

Sandboxes multiply. QA splits. UAT becomes a long-lived snowflake. Temporary orgs quietly become permanent.

It feels responsible. It isn’t. ❌ 

Environment sprawl increases coordination cost, slows feedback, and creates drift.

Teams stop knowing which org reflects reality. 🥴 

Metadata diverges. Data models don’t match. Integrations behave differently depending on where you test.

✅ Mini case:
A retail organization delayed a seasonal pricing launch by three weeks because five parallel environments had conflicting field definitions. Every deployment “worked” somewhere. None worked everywhere.

The business impact is direct - org strategy drives delivery speed more than developer productivity. 💯 

When environments aren’t intentional, releases become reconciliation exercises instead of launches.

CHAOS SHIPS FASTER - UNTIL IT DOESN’T

GOVERNANCE ISN’T OPTIONAL

When production breaks, developer error is usually blamed. 🤷‍♂️ 

In reality, most Salesforce incidents are governance failures disguised as technical mistakes.

Common signals:

❌ No clear production owner

🚑️ Emergency changes bypassing review

🥺 “Just this once” admin fixes

❓️ Unclear release authority

Governance gaps don’t reduce friction. They push risk into production, where it’s most expensive. 💰️ 

Mini case:
A financial services team pushed a last-minute Flow update directly to production to “save time.”

It conflicted with an in-flight release and locked records during peak hours. The outage delayed onboarding and pushed revenue recognition into the next quarter. 😅 

Good governance doesn’t slow teams down. It defines who can take risk, when, and how.

Without it, Salesforce becomes unpredictable. Executives notice quickly. 💨 

HEROICS ARE NOT A STRATEGY

MANUAL DEPLOYMENTS DON’T SCALE

Manual deployments work for small teams. They collapse at enterprise scale. 💥 

Change sets. Ad-hoc scripts. Release notes living in someone’s head.

A single “go-to” person who knows how prod really works. 🦸 

This model breaks the moment:

🍃 Teams grow

🔗 Workstreams overlap

🔼 Release cadence increases

🏋️ Audit pressure shows up

Mini case:
A SaaS company missed a partner launch because a manual deployment skipped a permission dependency.

Fixing it took hours. Explaining it to leadership took weeks. 😱 

Automation isn’t about convenience. It’s about removing variability from critical paths.

Platforms like Gearset matter because they enforce consistency, visibility, and repeatability. Not because they’re flashy. ✨ 

When deployments depend on heroics, launches depend on luck.

IT’S A DELIVERY SYSTEM

TESTING ISN’T A PHASE

Enterprise Salesforce teams often treat testing as something that happens after development. 🚫 

A sprint phase. A QA handoff. A checkbox before release.

That guarantees late surprises. 🎉 

Mini case:
A healthcare org passed UAT but failed in production when real data volumes triggered record locking.

Fixing it required refactoring core logic, pushing a compliance launch out an entire release cycle. 🌀 

Testing must act as a continuous signal, not a gate.

When test coverage, data realism, and environment parity lag behind delivery speed, Salesforce becomes fragile under real-world conditions. 💔 

The business result is predictable - delayed launches, emergency fixes, and shrinking confidence in delivery dates.

STABILITY FUNDS SPEED

WHY THE BUSINESS FEELS IT

DevOps failures don’t surface as DevOps problems. 🚫 

They surface as:

• Missed revenue targets

• Delayed product launches

• Sales working around Salesforce

• Executives questioning forecasts

By the time leadership feels the pain, the causes are systemic:

• Org strategies optimized for safety instead of flow

• Governance built for exceptions, not consistency

• Deployments dependent on people, not pipelines

• Testing disconnected from delivery

High-performing Salesforce orgs do a few things well:

• Treat org strategy as a delivery decision

• Define governance before emergencies happen

• Automate deployments end-to-end

• Design testing as part of the system

• Make release health visible to leadership

The paradox is simple: stability unlocks speed. 🔐 

When DevOps works, launches happen on time.

Revenue hits forecasts. Salesforce regains its place as a trusted, strategic platform.

And the business stops asking why delivery is late, and starts asking what else can be launched next. 🚀 

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Salesforce Memes