What happened when I gave my Salesforce team real architects

What happened when I leveraged our Solutions and Technical Architects' (now my CPO and CTO) strengths within my last Salesforce team.

⬆️ The whole team's velocity improved. Before anything went into development, the architects provided a roadmap based not only on technical expertise, but their tribal knowledge of the system and business. That intentionality helped us get to the right solution faster and thoughtfully delegate work for features across our mixed team of developers and declarative admins. Developers were both unblocked and mentored in regular pair programming sessions with an architect, admins having that support from me.

💪🏻 Stability increased. Formal technical architecture meant spreading that expertise that prevents bugs, enables scalability and ensures security to all efforts and not just the ones the architects hands-on developed. Formal business analysis meant thoughtful definitions of acceptance criteria, ensuring development resources weren't wasted solving the wrong problems. UX oversight of all development benefit the business in countless ways.

😁 Team job satisfaction increased. This was a fast-paced environment with aggressive, arbitrary deadlines for continually re-prioritized and re-scoped demands. Anyone with experience in software development (or life, really) reads the burn-out and frustration inherent there. We couldn't control corporate culture, but instilling professionalism and strategic thinking into how we worked together was quantified by my team's surveyed job satisfaction doubling.

The experience mirrored what I found in my 15 years Salesforce consulting prior. Many of my clients had employees dedicated to building in Salesforce, from a single admin to full development teams. By nature and desire I am collaborative, I was not there to one-up or replace them. (I've seen that model, it's toxic.)

Beyond helping achieve business goals directly, I often enabled the teams I worked with- extendible Apex solutions and frameworks that smoothed development, coded solutions that included no-code configuration for non-developer admins to extend and maintain without me, SOPs that helped teams work cohesively.

Codality's fractional architecting gives you 3 architects – Principal, Technical and Solutions – in one engagement, giving a full suite of skills to facilitate your team however they need.

📩 Message me if your team could use architectural assistance but doesn't need a ful-time architect quite yet.

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