Transcript
Good to go.
Okay.
Hi, everyone. I'm Nicola, community manager at Gear Set, and I've been very fortunate that I've got to work with and get to know this lovely bunch of people on the stage, our five panellists. They were all selected as Gearset DevOps leaders for the twenty twenty four programme, and they've all they're all incredible at what they do. Wonderful people, and they've got lots of great advice to share as well. So let's get started. Johnny, do you wanna kick us off? Just share your name, your goal, your company, and how long you've been part of the ecosystem.
Yeah. Sure thing. So my name is Johnny Harris.
I am the release supervisor at Zurich.
In the e full Salesforce ecosystem, been in it now for about eight years. So my previous company, I was a end user and joined Zurich as an admin.
I've kinda gone through the whole journey. So admin to developer, developer to a DevOps engineer, and actually it's release supervisor role.
It's been a really good journey, and a lot of that journey has been with the GearSet guys as well, using the tooling, and kind of both learning together. It feels like over the last four years, it's been a really good journey.
Jolene? Hi, everyone. I'm Jolene. I work for a company called HackerOne as their applications engineer for Salesforce, which is just a job site because in reality, I do a bit of everything.
They're DevOps engineer. I'm their developer. I'm their admin. I'm a bit of everything. I work closely with their sales operations team, and this is probably the biggest evolution we've been through in the company bringing on gear set and actually putting some practices in place to govern what Salesforce has.
Prior to me arriving, we had nothing, quite literally. We had Salesforce, but we didn't have anything else supporting it. So it's been a journey, and I think it's definitely one GearSet that's been on with us for the whole thing.
Jeremy?
Hey, everyone. Jeremy Foster. I'm the manager of Salesforce development at the pilot company in the US. We're a truck stop company.
I've been in Salesforce for a little over eight years. We've been using Gear Sets since twenty nineteen.
We evaluated that as a development tool for DevOps and automation, went with it and haven't looked back since.
I manage the Dev side of the house. We do keep our admins and Devs in, like, separate team management.
But with that, I kind of wear the hat of managing the DevOps process along with everyday, development projects. But I'm happy to speak on GearSet.
My name is Deepak Gira. I am a product manager at MongoDB.
The role is relatively new. I've been there for about five or six months now. Before that, for the last seven, eight years, I've been working as a Salesforce consultant. So primarily in the CPT space. I think that's been my foraying to gear set with the CPT tool.
But yeah. Yeah.
Amit? Hi, everyone. My name is Amit Tiwari. I'm, working as a head of Salesforce architecture and practice in a company called Intellect Design Arena Limited.
Primarily, our company is in the BFSI domain and dealing with the, the wealth management, the insurance, and the all the core banking transactional and the consumer banking area. But, I'm responsible for making sure that, okay, in within the Salesforce ecosystem how the best practices should be get accomplished from the architecture wise and for the development deployment and all those aspects.
I I use, in the Salesforce ecosystem, I joined as a Salesforce developer and it's been more than fifteen, sixteen years. Yeah. Thank you.
So more than fifteen or sixteen years, how has the Salesforce ecosystem changed in that time?
Honestly, I I I'm sure many of you who are here and following the Salesforce, they you you could able to relate it because, it's it's not a change that we can ignore, you know, that that the change what has been made into the Salesforce is is is phenomenal, and it's, the main advantage what I am still seeing that it's it's remarkably growing continuously, and we are fortunate enough to be a part of it. When I have started working on it, I still remember that, okay, the leads, contacts, and opportunities were there and just we are we are dealing with them and then writing lot of Apex codings now now that that platform has evolved a lot, and we don't need to write lot of custom code.
It's it's pretty much a no code platform. Acquisitions what Salesforce has made, whether it is Velocity, whether it is MuleSoft, whether it is Tableau, all has added lot of value. Just recently, you know, they have launched Einstein, and then now for the predictive AI and now the Gen AI, you know, and before the Gen AI, the data cloud part. So I I have feel that, yes, it's it's evolved a lot.
Like, it's it's not just a CRM. It is being at this stage, it is being used as a platform, as a service application, as a service software, as a service in all all those aspects. That's what I feel. Yeah.
Lots of changes. What about you, Jeremy? So you've been eight years?
Yeah.
Started with no Salesforce experience at all.
Worked for Fruit of the Loom previously and, they implemented Salesforce with a single individual there. So, they built out a team and we all had to learn it from scratch. And, it's been very interesting to see the change from low code declarative tools mainly, like a push for that and kind of, I don't know, a wariness to use customization like Apex.
At least in our implementation to where now it fills with tools like, Gear said that you can actually do a lot more custom development and use more traditional development practices to guide not only your development team but your admins. So that's been a big shift that we've embraced embraced over the last few years is trying to get everyone to use what would traditionally be considered, developer practices or developer tool sets to work even for the admins to build out their flows and and declarative tools like that. And integrating all of that, it's just been a lot easier for us. And
seeing that change even with Salesforce, like we see some of the stuff from Flows that the administrators went to TDX and got some feedback on how to like document the steps in your flow and how to label things. It's very reminiscent of putting comments in your code and organizing naming conventions for how you build it. So it's funny to see that kind of leaking in now instead of being so separated like it was when I first started.
Jolene, do you have any sort of predictions or thoughts on where it's going in the Salesforce ecosystem? That's a good question.
Really bad question.
I think, like, everyone, has grown arms and legs. I think especially in the five past five years, years, the amount of things that's came into Salesforce is crazy.
Jack touched on it this morning. I don't think there's any expert alive anymore that can say they know the entirety of Salesforce, and I think that's only gonna continue. I think you're gonna have to now start to break off into these kind of, not silos because that's what we've just worked so hard to get away from, but the individual expertise across the products and stop trying to be a catch all because it's not gonna work.
And so, absolutely, changes in the ecosystem. Johnny, tell us a bit about more of your personal career changes or any key decisions or opportunities that you've sort of taken that have helped in your career?
Yeah. Definitely.
I don't know if anyone's here last year, my talk, especially about my journey at Zurich.
One of the biggest decisions I made was was taking on the DevOps apprenticeship over two years and having the opportunity so I was in the DevOps team. I know how we do stuff, actually understanding and learning the why you do certain things.
Getting contextual knowledge really helps in understand be able to explain it back out into our team so we can kind of, as a team, grow and develop. And as you said, with all these tools that come to sales constantly and the more products that they're buying and introducing, You need a way that you can all understand how to dev work in a dev ops environment to keep it working, keep it all moving through. So for me, that is a really big one, spending two years of working plus extra learning on top each day is a big undertaking, but well worth it. Yeah.
That's That's really cool. Deepak, what about you? Any key sort of career changes or decisions, opportunities that helped you?
I think I've gotten lucky. I have, I founded about Salesforce, I think, seven years ago because somebody said, hey. I think you'd be really good at consulting. It changes context every once in a while. I had never heard of Salesforce then.
I happened into it. CPQ was just growing at the time. So it happened to that space and then, you know, MongoDB and a product manager now. So I think I've gotten lucky knowing good people, good mentors in my life, and I think I'd attribute a lot of career decisions to them.
Cool. And, Julian, you were just out of university when you started in Salesforce, right now?
I was. Yeah. I can tell him it's my happy accident. Sometimes I don't feel that way, but it was my happy accident. I found myself in a world where we had regular engineers, and they did not like Salesforce. I think that's a resonated feeling to regular engineer teams. It's just too too constrained for them to work in, and it was very neglected, and we were selling classic, and we I took the decision myself as a grad that, okay, I don't know anything yet, so I may as well learn this.
And I never looked back, found Salesforce and decided, actually, this is the career I would like to move down. And from there, it's grown. You start to notice the pain points for everyone, and you wanna fax them, you wanna take all the challenges on, and it's not always possible, but there has been change, and there's been massive change in the past five, ten years as we've moved along from that.
That. And so we're here at DevOps Streaming, but I feel like for everyone, DevOps can mean different things, like a DevOps culture. What does a DevOps culture look like or feel like to you, Johnny?
Yeah.
I think the one of the big things for me and that I've tried to also personally do is taking the practice of that continuous improvement that you do in the DevOps journey.
Right? As Josh said earlier, the infinite loop, trying to take that and apply it to yourself as well so you continue to try and improve yourself, never stop learning, and, actually, then allowing that culture to grow to your teammates to try and help each other just better each other each day as you go through.
And just yeah. It's that all learning together like this today. Right? The devil's seeders program that we're here to help other companies also go on the journey and learn and improve. Because I think if everyone does it, then then we're all in a better position. Right? And it's just a contagious way to work.
Jeremy, have you done anything specific at the pilot company to shape DevOps culture?
Yeah. The company itself has been going through a lot of culture changes over the last few years, in general. And that's with a lot of our processes. A lot of IT, is involved in all of that. But similar to what Johnny has mentioned, like it's definitely the people and the processes and continually improving.
We started with an approach of evaluating the processes that we used at the company to see what was working, where bottlenecks were happening, where things were going to run away from us.
A director of mine asked a very good question of the things you're doing today, are they scalable? If we keep growing at this pace, if we keep taking on new projects, bringing in new workloads, new teams to work with Salesforce, are we going to be able to deliver on time? Is it going to have major impacts to what we deliver with our velocity? And it was definitely going to be a yes. Like we weren't going to succeed if we continued the way we were. So embracing like the DevOps pipeline, taking that on as a personal challenge, but then being able to learn it and teach it and share it out to my team and use our team's success as an example to share out to the company that's really helped create more of that culture and spread the knowledge and and tools that we use to affect even other teams using different tools, different code bases.
But it's just been a gradual learning experience and everyone working together to share the knowledge as they try to improve what they're doing.
Great. There's quite a culture in this eco system for certifications, and I'm intrigued to know what your thoughts are, sort of certifications versus continuous learning or and continuous learning.
See, if we'll go for a direct comparison or in in the way if we will think, personally, for me, the continuous learning is is is very different and it's a journey, you know, like, which we have to do. Certification is a part of it that, yes, you know, when we are learning that, okay, to motivate the guy or to prove our strength, yes, we should gain it and and prove, that, okay, we have this much of certifications and some of the relevant certifications.
Definitely makes helps to make our carrier path into that particular, you know, the area or the journey. But the important point is that the habit of continuous learning as as everybody have mentioned here also when we are talking about the DevOps culture and the shaping, the collaboration, understanding that it's a shared responsibility.
That is that is very, very much important. And and then only, I think, the different teams, whether it's a development or the operations, they can come together to work. And, when when they feel that, yes, we have an open boundaries for asking questions, our our learning, like that. So in even in our, in my company and with the team, you know, we have struggled enough, that, okay, few of the new things when we are trying to adopt that how we can make people learn and motivate. So we we did some gamifications, and we, of course, included certain certifications route as well.
But the primarily, we try to provide them a top down bottom approach that, okay, we are the advocate of the DevOps culture, and it needs a continuous learning and how we can inject into, inject that with everyone. So that's that's has actually helped us, and, that's the way we have moved in.
What do you mean by gamification?
So, yeah, that's like, I can quote one of the incident that when we were initially looking forward to handle that, okay, how we can take care of the Omni Studio, deployment and all those aspects. And we we do have a limited knowledge into that space. We want the champions to become into that. So so we have, we have basically, launched a program called Omni Studio Pathfinder.
And then during that Pathfinder program, we have set up certain rules that, okay, how what are the things you can do and how you can come up with the ideas to present, and, how it can bind up more more team members, and we have set up certain rewards as well. So that's the gamification we have introduced, and it really worked.
Later on, you know, after our program has concluded with that, we we find it out some very key champions, who are actually leading that journey in our organization with other people as well.
Amazing. Yeah. Deepak, have you got any thoughts on certification versus continuous learning?
I think there's a question of are certifications valuable still? That's articles or you'll see articles posted about that. I, I think I have a nuanced take. I feel like certifications are valuable. They're great at communicating credibility on a resume. I think having that approach is helpful because it it sort of gives us boundaries. So I don't think it's necessarily a a way for us to say this person is great at x because they have x certification.
But coming into a company, having that resume line item does go a long way. So I would say treat this for what it is. It is great for communicating credibility, especially if you're trying to switch careers. But I think if you are trying to master a topic or you're trying to continuously improve, I don't think certifications are that. I have met great, amazing people that have zero certifications in Salesforce, and I've also met people on the other end of the spectrum too. Right?
We'll leave it at that.
Johnny, have you got any so you mentioned your the DevOps Yeah. And the accreditation you got.
Is there other resources or is there things that you would advise people to do or look at to help with continuous learning?
Yeah. Sure. So, obviously, you've got the main ones, the Trailhead, I'm sure you all know. The DevOps Launchpad is a great tool.
And then just sometimes some reading materials. So I know the big famous one for DevOps is the Phoenix Project.
It's actually quite an interesting read if you take the context out of it of how it happens. You could get a lot of information, and you could also get some of I've read in, Creativity Inc at the moment. So it's written by the guy who started Pixar, and you wouldn't think there's links in there to technology, but it's weird how even filmmakers and creative stuck people are doing the same sort of things that we're doing in DevOps. You know, they're doing retrospectives on their own films.
So part of it, they're watching Toy Story at the very start of the filming. And if people are gonna say, no. That's not right. We need to do it better.
It doesn't really follow a storyline that they're improving each other. So just sometimes finding books that you wouldn't think are linked to DevOps is a good way to get different perspectives on some of that journey.
Yeah. Also training tools, though, Trailhead, Launchpad, the main ones.
In theory, like, continuous learning, I can't imagine many people disagree with it, but we've all got day jobs as well. Like, how do you sort of fit everything in? Do you have any tips or advice, Julian, on how to avoid burnout?
Or That's a good one.
Question why. Like, your biggest biggest thing for continuous learning is experience. You can read all your books. You can do all your courses.
You can get all your search, and nothing will beat you actually getting hands on with something. Go do it. Figure it out. Get yourself a sandbox.
Break it. And then fix it, and then you'll learn. It's the only way I learned first, and that's your continuous learning. So your continuous learning should be in your day job.
If you find yourself doing the same thing day in, day out and never doing something new, change it. Go find new things to learn. Go find new things to implement, and you'll soon learn from it, and then get your certifications. Don't do it the other way around because then you're getting your badge.
You wanna say, you know what? I learned it first. I've got the experience, and now I'll prove it so that everyone else can see that for themselves.
Dupak, how do you sort of avoid burnout? Any tips, advice, balance?
Good question.
I think it's tough. It's like we live in an odd era where we don't remain experts in our fields for long. Things are changing so fast, and it's incumbent on us to keep learning new things. But it also comes at a pretty big cost.
Our time, of course, is is the main one that comes to mind. I would say the biggest thing is be gracious to yourself. You are probably better at things than you think you are. I feel like that's served me well.
And I think after a while, if the context becomes more familiar, we become quicker at things. But I would say I would say it's that. And, also, also be careful because I think it's cunning when we become good at things. It doesn't really seem like we're working a lot.
Right?
So drawing good boundaries and healthy boundaries, I think, is important. So be careful not to some things that are asked of you, but also things that you're good at because it's quite seductive.
Great.
Shall we go around the whole panel with what's what's the best career advice you've ever received?
You can start with Ammit.
I I was lucky enough to work with the wonderful, mentors, you know, very talented people and, of course, the wonderful team. Lot of learnings with the team and and and from the mentors.
There are many, key advisers during my professional career journey or even a personal journey. I have I have got it, But but at certain moment of time, I have feel that, you know, I was I was working with one of my our senior executive leader, and, I I learned with them indirectly, it is an advice to me as well, but I learned with them that, okay, how how we can keep a balance of our work life and, of course, our personal interest, our personal life.
You know, that that's very much key. It's very easy to get burnout, especially consultancy environment or in the IT. We we really need, as as mentioned by Deepak as well, we really need to understand that where is our boundaries. There are items which can be get handled at a later stage as well, you know.
So so we need to be efficient enough. At certain times, yes, it is it is okay to, you know, to handle certain things depends on the priority and severity, but otherwise, to be more productive and efficient, it is very important you should understand your boundaries. Don't sacrifice your personal interest and the life. That is that is, the most key.
It's it's not only the work, you know, which which actually accounts after that. Okay. How you approach to the work and your other skills also to take care it and delegate it among the team and how much you are balanced and you are you are communicating or you are, how much you are convincing power towards your client that those all also been looked off. Yeah.
So decide your boundaries and stick to them? Yep. Kind of like that. Deepak, you wanna go next?
Yeah.
This is something I was wracking my brain about, and I feel like this advice has shown up in at many different points in my career, but it came up recently in conversation with my friends, Liz and and Holly from London.
But I think the two there's two that come to mind. One, I think, is career paths aren't linear.
It's okay to sort of, bounce around a little bit. That's certainly, I think, played out, like, had dividends for me. I went to grad school to study interpersonal communication to become a professor. Right? And and here I am talking about DevOps. So, but it's been nice to draw from different life experiences. I think the second thing I would say too is, you know, no career or no job is above you or beneath you.
There's a lot of, I think, ego and pride that comes in our any line of work, not just ours, but, we're not above anything, but also don't feel like you're, you know, you can't approach a table. You don't have a seat at it. You're a lot smarter than you think.
That's great. Jeremy?
I'd say at least technological skill advice. The best I got was as a freshman in college. One of our CS professors advised us to always be learning, and I think that's been reiterated up here. And I know that sharpens the blade for your skill set.
But thinking on this, I probably was still a little bit from an interview with, Sir Ian McKellen when he was talking about getting the role of Gandalf. And he mentioned that to get that role, part of it was the kindness of others. And thinking back on my career, that's honestly been the biggest impact that has got me to where I am today. Because very often people around us see more in you than you see in yourself.
And so I was pushed by a lot of really, really kind people, really good mentors through my career to pursue Salesforce, to embrace DevOps, to step up to a challenge that I might have been afraid to otherwise. So, yes, always be learning for your own skills, but I think also pay attention to those that are around you that are championing you or being kind.
Julian?
Wanna pack it back on at that point and say that don't wait for that either. Be your own champion. I didn't get anywhere I got in my job without just doing it myself. Salesforce nobody asked me to.
Nobody asked me to do DevOps. I did that. And found out I was okay at it, and here I am today. So if you find yourself in the same position, you see something, you don't like it, you wanna learn it, just do it.
And you might find that actually that's the thing you like to do. There's your career on route.
Great advice. Johnny?
So, yeah, mine's a bit of a weird one.
I have had time to think about it. It's actually a pretty good one that I, to be fair, always think back to is and the golfers in the room will know this is, you know, the thing called look for feels aren't the same. Right? It might feel like something's happening, but it might look completely different.
Using that technology, sometimes, actually, you feel like you could be stuck in the same place. You're not really going anywhere, but just sometimes take a step back and look at where you have come from and what you've done.
Could you get a bit more perspective and also just talk to people? Could you suddenly realize actually you might be at a further stage than you think you are.
Technology can be one that you fit remote in your room, you're working every single day, you feel like you're stagnant, but just take a step back and look at your journey and it definitely gives perspective.
Brilliant.
I feel much better informed. I'm gonna take that all on board.
I think we've got time, a couple minutes for questions from the audience.
If anyone's got anything they want to ask.
Yes.
Phone gear set.
That's all you need to do. Give them a phone. It's exactly what I did at HackerOne. I started there.
There was absolutely nothing. We don't even have a manual process. There was nothing. And, yeah, we picked up the phone.
We phoned gear set, and we said, help. And here we are. So if you don't have a tool, please get one. It's not worth the headache behind it.
Any other thoughts?
Hopefully, you've heard it as much as I have, but fail fast. Like, honestly, I know Jolene mentioned it earlier, like, break it. Like, put it in a test environment, go out there, break it, fix it, figure out how it works, and and move it forward that way. Like, you learn better from from lessons where you fail.
So Great.
I do know that everybody is happy to take any questions throughout the rest of the afternoon, so if you do have any, feel free to go and speak to them and also add them on LinkedIn as well. Very happy to answer your questions on LinkedIn.
So that's, yeah, all we've got time for. Thank you so much to our panellists, Johnny, Julian, Jeremy, Deepak, and Alex.
