Pilot scales to support 30,000 users with Gearset
When Pilot Company first adopted Salesforce in 2017, there wasn’t a specific team spearheading Salesforce development and the release process was undefined.
Pilot has now scaled to include a core development team of admins, developers, business analysts and engineers, as well as an internal Salesforce projects team and two implementation partners. They use Gearset to effectively manage those different teams through an end-to-end DevOps process, supporting several clouds and 30,000 users.
Struggling to meet business demands with change sets
In 2019 Pilot Company started to build a dedicated Salesforce team to support their ever-growing use of the platform. Jeremy Foster (Salesforce Development Manager) and Scott Lineberg (Senior Administrator) joined Pilot Company as part of the original team of 4.
The initial team were deploying org-to-org with change sets and were getting particularly frustrated when deploying permissions. The team began using a chrome extension to make searching for components in a change set easier but were still hitting delays with missed items.
“We’d regularly miss components and get validation failures which meant we had to scrap the package and start again.”
Scott Lineberg, Senior Administrator
The developers at Pilot began working with Salesforce DX to see if they could escape the pains of change sets, setting up two DX packages as an alternative development process for developers. But even with some business processes migrated to DX, there were still delays getting features out to end users across both workflows.
Bridging the gap: finding the right platform for everyone at Pilot
The Salesforce team at Pilot Company began researching DevOps platforms in the ecosystem, narrowing in on a handful of options. After looking into each solution, Gearset stood out and Pilot continued with a full trial and POC.
“From the initial research alone we ruled out other DevOps tools — we only wanted to test Gearset and we’ve never looked back.”
Jeremy Foster, Salesforce Development Manager
The Pilot team were impressed with the speed at which they could deploy with Gearset and how easy it was to use for everyone in their team.
“With Gearset we can iterate without rebuilding and that’s been world changing — we get changes out 4x faster than we used to.”
Scott Lineberg, Senior Administrator
Expanding Pilot Company’s DevOps process
Pilot Company was able to quickly get up and running with Compare and Deploy, shaving hours off their deployment times and massively improving deployment success rates. But as the company’s use of Salesforce continued to scale, an org-to-org workflow was getting increasingly difficult to manage.
Jeremy started experimenting with other areas of Gearset — particularly version control integrations and automation with Pipelines — before heading out to DevOps Dreamin’ Chicago to find out more.
“Richard Owen ran a hands-on session about how to build a pipeline and the fog lifted.”
Jeremy Foster, Salesforce Development Manager
Previously, Pilot Company had been using version control as a metadata backup and the team’s admins weren’t interacting with their version control system. With Gearset, Pilot implemented a source-driven workflow that could easily be used by the whole team and began experimenting with different development pipelines to find the best fit for their team’s needs. Pilot now has a full CI/CD pipeline, which Scott highlighted “has saved us so much time because we can move changes through every environment while only having to build the package once.”
“The biggest impact of Gearset is the scalability — Gearset Pipelines have really helped the company get to the operating level we’re at today.”
Jeremy Foster, Salesforce Development Manager
And if the team ever hit a roadblock, the support team is on-hand to get the Pilot team up and running again ASAP.
“We’ve never had a single complaint with Gearset’s support. Responses through the in-app chat are so quick and so accurate.”
Scott Lineberg, Senior Administrator
Avoiding the headaches of managing CPQ
A key element of Pilot Company’s ever-expanding use of Salesforce was adopting CPQ. Pilot worked with an implementation partner to get up and running and were initially deploying CPQ configuration using data deployments, which Jeremey said made CPQ a “double pain point”. But Pilot partnered with the product team at Gearset to get access to the beta version of joint metadata and CPQ deployments before it went GA. They now have a unified release process and have been able to include CPQ as part of their DevOps process.
“Being able to deploy CPQ configuration and metadata in the same deployment made the whole process so much smoother — we weren’t wasting time running two separate deployments because everything goes at once.”
Scott Lineberg, Senior Administrator
Managing multiple teams and implementation partners
There are multiple teams building and shipping changes for Pilot Company’s Salesforce orgs: the core platform team manages the whole Salesforce platform, while the internal projects team and two external implementation partners work on specific Salesforce projects. Using Gearset, Pilot is able to limit access to their Gearset and Salesforce instances without impacting the speed of delivery.
The project team and implementation partners can interact without needing direct access to Pilot’s Salesforce instance or Gearset. These teams open a pull request to merge their changes to the relevant branch via GitHub and Gearset webhooks show whether the changes have been successfully validated from within the PR. If validation is successful, the changes can be merged and Gearset will automatically deploy the changes to the target environment for testing. The deployment then triggers a Teams notification, to make sure everyone interacting with their Salesforce instance has visibility of what changes are being made.
“Gearset makes it possible for us to support the workload from our implementation partners while also making sure there’s the right division of duties and access.”
Jeremy Foster, Salesforce Development Manager
But having multiple teams building and merging changes separately can be tough not just from a workflow perspective — it can cause headaches from a visibility and auditing perspective. Thankfully, Pilot has managed to avoid both using Gearset.
“Gearset has been amazing for our auditing too — the integrations with Atlassian means that Jira tickets are updated with the details of all deployments which makes auditing so much easier.”
Scott Lineberg, Senior Administrator
Ensuring Pilot Company’s long-term success
Pilot Company has partnered closely with the Customer Success and Product teams at Gearset, to deliver feedback and get up-to-speed on new features — Jeremy quipped that updates to the app happen so often that ‘rapidly releasing new features is a Gearset feature in itself.’ The team at Pilot has also been able to work closely with Gearset’s DevOps Architects, to talk through questions and scenarios specific to their workflow and goals, to make sure their setup with Gearset is continuing to support the needs of the business now and in the future.
“The partnership is fantastic — we can come to Gearset with questions or feedback as a trusted partner and get an answer rapidly.”
Jeremy Foster, Salesforce Development Manager
