Playlist uses Org Intelligence to bring clarity to complex, multi-org Salesforce environments
The Playlist group of fitness and wellness technology brands that includes Mindbody, Booker and ClassPass, have partnered with Gearset since 2020. This year, they’ve been early adopters of Gearset’s Org Intelligence.
We spoke to Eric Grust, Salesforce Team Lead at MindBody, to find out how Gearset Org Intelligence is helping his team share Salesforce knowledge more widely and make safer changes at scale.
As the businesses have grown and evolved under Playlist, Salesforce has become a critical platform shared across multiple teams, with each brand having its own Salesforce orgs, ways of working, and delivery needs, while a central admin-led Salesforce team supports changes across the wider group.
Before working with Gearset, the team relied heavily on Salesforce change sets, which quickly became a bottleneck.
“Change Sets are a pretty clunky process and definitely a bit limited,” Eric says. “It was so cumbersome, we found ourselves doing a lot of manual updates in production.”
To reduce the administrative burden, changes were often recreated directly in production, but the team regularly ran into missing components, profile and permission issues, and post-deployment clean-up work.
As the team grew and became more distributed across the Playlist group, those problems became harder to ignore. There was no single, easy way to manage change consistently, and no shared confidence that deployments would behave as expected.
At the same time, the team was struggling with visibility. With years of customization across multiple orgs, it was difficult to understand how components were connected or what the impact of a change might be.
“One of the biggest issues that we had was knowing interdependencies. Especially with a multi-org company like ours, it’s hard to know why something was created, where it’s being used, and how any updates to it could impact automations or processes downstream.”
Answering basic questions about the state of their orgs often took hours and involved multiple people. For a small team supporting fast-moving businesses, that research overhead slowed everything down.
“My team is being pulled in different directions all day, every day, from large projects and initiatives to just running and maintaining Salesforce,” Eric explains. “We have people asking ’how is this working?’ or ‘I want to change the way this automation works’. It could take hours to go through and figure out the answers.”
Searching for a better way to manage change
What the team needed was a simpler way to manage change and understand their orgs.
“We had looked at a couple of different tools in the DevOps space like Autorabit and Copado,” Eric says.
Many options required deep development knowledge or required complex setup. Free or open-source tools often lacked maintenance, brought security concerns, or didn’t scale well for a global organization and an admin-led team.
“We were trying to solve the issue of getting a better picture of our orgs, how we can make changes without introducing issues that would negatively impact our end users, cut down on bugs, and really just to have the full picture when we were going in to make a change.”
“We were trying to solve the issue of getting a better picture of our orgs, how we can make changes without introducing issues that would negatively impact our end users, cut down on bugs, and really just to have the full picture when we were going in to make a change.”
Making dependencies visible with Org Intelligence
Because the Mindbody team were already confident using Gearset, adding Org Intelligence into their day-to-day workflow felt like a natural next step to solve their visibility issues.
Org Intelligence is Gearset’s exploratory layer for Salesforce. It gives teams a clear, always-current view of their org, making dependencies and change risk visible before work begins. Built on Gearset’s metadata expertise and AI-powered insights, it helps admins and developers understand impact without relying on siloed knowledge or static documentation.
“We’re putting the power directly in the users’ hands to get a really robust picture.”
“We’re putting the power directly in the users’ hands to get a really robust picture.”
Instead of spending hours clicking through Salesforce or pulling in other team members for help, admins can quickly understand how impactful a change might be. That’s useful not just for the Salesforce team, but when answering questions from senior leaders, customer success, or operations teams who need a clear sense of effort and risk.
“It really helps with scoping,” Eric explains. “You can pop something into the search box and if it’s referenced a million times, you can immediately see this isn’t a small, quick change. Just having that quick feedback is extremely helpful.”
To encourage adoption, the team runs weekly sessions where individuals share real examples of how they’ve used Org Intelligence. “AI is still new for a lot of people,” Eric says. “Those sessions are really great because they open up people’s eyes to the scenarios where Org Intelligence can be used.”
One recent example started with a question from a product manager. A downstream team had noticed unexpected behavior in a Looker dashboard tied to a specific onboarding experience. Initially, the assumption was that a button or UI action was triggering it.
“We probably built this thing two years ago,” Eric says. “We didn’t really have any insight.”
Using Org Intelligence, the team searched for the ‘onboarding wizard’ and immediately saw where it was referenced. The issue wasn’t a button, but a picklist value for a specific field.
“We could see that the field was twinned across seven other objects,” Eric explains. “So it wasn’t just a case of turning something off. We needed to take time to test what impact that would have.”
Manual investigation using Salesforce’s global search returned no results for fields and no results for buttons. In Org Intelligence, the answer surfaced almost instantly.
“I just needed to open up Org Intelligence, type in the words ‘onboarding wizard’, and it was the second result. We see all the dependencies, where it’s being referenced by Flows and Apex classes. We had that full picture.”
Faster answers, safer changes
Looking ahead, Eric sees Org Intelligence becoming the first place the team turns during the planning stage, helping them answer questions and assess impact before they start building.
“Having this tool as one of the first things to go to, instead of asking somebody else or trying to do a deep dive in the Salesforce interface, makes the team more efficient right off the bat.”
That’s particularly valuable in an environment where Salesforce questions come from across the Playlist groups entire business. Mindbody has a dedicated Slack channel where anyone, from executives to new hires, can ask for help.
“Being able to just quickly pop the error message they’re getting or whatever the field it is that’s causing the issue into Org Intelligence will mean we can answer these questions much more quickly,” Eric explains, “without being dependent on siloed knowledge.”
It’s also changing how new team members ramp up. Documentation doesn’t always tell the full story, especially in complex, long-lived orgs.
“Before Org Intelligence, it would have likely taken a lot longer for somebody to ramp up,” Eric says. “There was a lot of trial and error finding their own way and getting comfortable with an org, whereas Org Intelligence allows them to quickly get answers to their questions or do a very deep analysis. So they can really hit the ground running.”
A complete solution
Eric says the biggest benefit of Org Intelligence is that it lives inside a tool the team already uses every day.
Before Gearset, the team explored building similar AI insight functionality using tools like VS Code, Salesforce DX, and GitHub Copilot. But that approach came with a steep learning curve.
“We would’ve needed several training sessions over the course of a couple of months to get all of our admins in one room to walk through all of the steps,” Eric explains. “getting the applications and extension packs installed, connecting to the orgs, downloading the components, doing command line prompts, and these were all things that are foreign to a lot of the team members.”
Even then, ongoing maintenance and updates would have been required, making it unlikely the tooling would stay current or widely adopted.
There’s no extra setup, no specialist knowledge required, and no new platform to maintain. “To be able to do analysis without having to do any more setup or maintenance. That was the biggest benefit for our team right there,” Eric says.
“It’s out of the box, plug and play, no setup needed. We already using Gearset multiple times a day. We don’t need to connect or build something to be able to get really insightful information about our org. It’s right there. I just need to click on the tab inside of Gearset and ask a question about how my org is functioning.”
Succeeding at scale
Alongside Org Intelligence, Gearset has also supported a broader shift in how the Salesforce team manages changes across the Playlist group.
With support from the Gearset team, they’ve been rolling out Pipelines and CI/CD, starting with ClassPass and soon extending to Mindbody.
“The Gearset team has been great about helping us set goals and then holding us accountable to meeting them. And pushing us forward to adopt DevOps best practices and the framework that we should be using to be a more sustainable and scalable organization.”
That foundation has enabled a move away from a single central team owning every Salesforce change. Instead, different areas across the business can now make changes themselves, supported by clear processes, gates, and checks.
“It democratizes the development experience,” Eric explains. “There’s less fear of others being in the environment. More teams can make changes without us worrying about things going wrong, because we’ve put the right structure in place.”
For Eric and his team, Gearset has become core to scaling Salesforce safely, sharing knowledge more widely, and supporting a fast-moving business without slowing it down.
