Mastering Product Management for Salesforce Solution Development

In today’s competitive marketplace, Salesforce has emerged as a cornerstone for organisations seeking scalable and dynamic customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. As a Product Manager developing solutions on Salesforce, your mission is to translate business objectives into tailored, impactful systems that leverage the platform’s full potential.

Let's first understand the key differences between Product Management on Salesforce vs. Custom-Built Products

While custom-built products may offer greater flexibility for niche use cases, Salesforce’s platform capabilities empower Product Managers to deliver enterprise-grade solutions faster, with lower risk and greater scalability. Its built-in tools, collaborative ecosystem, and frequent updates make it an ideal choice for organisations looking to innovate and grow in a competitive market.

• Develop@Speed: Salesforce’s low-code and declarative tools enable rapid development. Features like Flow Builder, Einstein AI, Zero-Copy Integrations, and AppExchange templates allow product teams to launch solutions faster compared to custom-built products, which often require months of coding and testing.
• Right-Fit Tools: Salesforce offers modular solutions tailored to business needs - whether it’s Sales Cloud for CRM, Marketing Cloud for campaigns, Service Cloud for customer support, or Data Cloud for customer 360 data and AI solutions. Instead of building from scratch, Product Managers can focus on leveraging existing tools to build core features and add custom-built features for differentiating capabilities.
• Experiment-Ready Capabilities: Salesforce enables agility with features like sandboxes and A/B testing capabilities. Teams can experiment, iterate, and validate ideas without disrupting live environments, which is often a challenge and effort intensive in custom-built environments.
• Collaboration Friendliness: The platform fosters seamless collaboration. Built-in tools like Chatter and Slack allow cross-functional teams to stay aligned. This is a far cry from custom products, which may require integrating third-party collaboration tools.
• Data Management: Salesforce’s robust data management capabilities - such as pre-configured data model, dashboards, reports, and Einstein Analytics - streamline data handling. Custom-built systems often require extensive engineering effort to achieve similar functionality.
• Continuous Platform Updates: With Salesforce’s regular updates (three times a year), Product Managers gain access to new features, security enhancements, and innovations without the overhead of maintaining custom codebases.
• Integrated DevSecOps: Salesforce embeds DevSecOps practices within the platform, ensuring compliance, security, data privacy, and version control. For custom solutions, building and maintaining a similar framework requires significant investment in DevSecOps tools and engineering capabilities.
• Ecosystem for Innovation: The Salesforce ecosystem, including the AppExchange and Trailblazer Community, accelerates innovation by providing pre-built apps, APIs, and access to shared knowledge.

Let's now understand the evolving role of Product Managers for Product Management on Salesforce

As digital platforms like Salesforce become foundational for businesses, product management on such platforms differs significantly from managing custom-built products. There are several critical success factors for Product Managers when ideating, designing and developing Salesforce solutions.

1. Know the Salesforce Ecosystem Inside-Out

Salesforce isn’t just a CRM; it’s an expansive ecosystem. From Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud to Data Cloud, Tableau, MuleSoft to Platform capabilities and 3rd party apps from AppExchange, the platform offers a wealth of possibilities. As a Product Manager, you need to be fluent in its capabilities and stay updated on its tri-annual releases, which bring new tools, features, and enhancements.

Action Tip: Partner with Salesforce architects and admins to understand what is feasible out of the box versus what requires customisation.

2. Map Business Needs to Out-of-the-Box Salesforce Features

Your primary responsibility is ensuring that business problems are addressed effectively by Salesforce solutions. This requires a thorough understanding of both the organisation’s goals and Salesforce’s capabilities. For instance, does the sales team need better lead scoring? Einstein AI might be the answer rather than thinking grounds-up development of a new algorithm. Is customer service seeking faster ticket resolution? Agentforce features could offer a ready to use solution with low development efforts.

Action Tip: Engage stakeholders early and often to gather clear requirements and prioritise features based on business impact. Use Salesforce’s native tools like Agentforce, Einstein AI, Flow Builder for quick, cost-effective solutions.

3. Prioritise User Experience and Adoption

The most sophisticated Salesforce implementation will fail if end-users don’t adopt it. A user-friendly experience, combined with proper training and change management, is key to ensuring success. A 60:40 split between design and development effort is recommended to ensure user centricity, maximise use of out of the box features, and minimise customisations.

Action Tip: Involve end-users in the design process through workshops and frequent feedback sessions. Roll out features incrementally and provide hands-on training to ease the transition.

4. Balance Customisation with Scalability

While Salesforce offers unparalleled customisation, over-engineering solutions can lead to technical debt. Your role as Product Manager is to balance business needs with scalability, ensuring that the solution evolves with the organisation.

Action Tip: When designing solutions, always ask, “Will this work as the company grows? Can this integrate with other systems seamlessly?” Build for both the present and future.

5. Measure Success and Iterate

Your job doesn’t end with the rollout. Use Salesforce’s built-in reporting and analytics tools to measure the success of your solutions. Are KPIs being met? Is productivity improving? Based on these insights, you can iterate and optimise.

Action Tip: Define success metrics during the planning phase and regularly review them post-implementation. Agile methodologies work exceptionally well for Salesforce projects, allowing for continuous improvement.

6. Leverage the Salesforce Community

The Salesforce ecosystem thrives on collaboration. From the Trailblazer Community to AppExchange partners, there’s a wealth of resources available to help you solve challenges and discover new possibilities.

?Action Tip: Attend Salesforce events like Dreamforce and local user group meetups to network, learn, and share insights.

To conclude, let's have a look at an approach to guide Product Managers to build Salesforce solutions throughout Discovery to Solution Validation

The approach provides a comprehensive guide for platform-based product development, divided into four phases: Discovery, High-Level Design, Design & Implementation, and Solution Validation. Each phase outlines specific inputs, activities, and outputs, with key stakeholders such as Product/Business Owners, Product Managers, and Lead Business Users involved throughout. The Discovery phase focuses on analysing business strategy, performing gap analysis, and establishing requirements prioritisation. The High-Level Design phase involves defining solution design principles, conducting platform capability analysis, and planning sprints. The Design and Implementation phase includes preparing detailed user stories, finalising solution design, setting up the development environment, developing the solution, and establishing test automation, if required. The Solution Validation phase includes preparing release notes, setting up the UAT environment, conducting user acceptance testing, and validating the product for release. This structured approach ensures alignment with business goals and seamless integration into the existing digital business systems ecosystem.

Are you managing a product on Salesforce or considering a shift from custom-built products? Share your experiences below!

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