On Butterfly Effects & Deliverables — a Community Sprint Retrospective
I just got back this last weekend from a whirlwind trip to NYC for the Salesforce World Tour and the Community Sprint. As much as I love a World Tour, the Sprint was the highlight. If you’re new to the Community Sprint Program, you can read the official recap of the event at our GitHub. However, I’d like to do something a little different than the usual event recap.
I’ve heard it said of late that the Commons doesn’t “deliver products or apps like it used to.” I could point out that it has delivered a tremendous amount of accelerators and best practices, and that what it’s been delivering was selected by the community itself. And while I do get the feeling of frustration with all the change, I humbly submit this story as my answer to that critique.
I went to my first Sprint in 2018 (I think, might have been 2017). By that point I’d been a solo admin for a hot minute working at a nonprofit crisis response center for sexual assault survivors. We had implemented Salesforce the year before for the same reasons nonprofits still do: to get our operational and fundraising data together on a unified, modern platform. That “modern” part is doing a lot of heavy lifting; we’d been using “Efforts to Outcomes,” so, just… #iykyk
I was still learning the ropes and understood very little about how the platform really worked – I just knew that suddenly I was free to build infrastructure that could support just about anything I needed to track, so I turned that lens back on my work as an Admin and created a ticketing system.
It seemed intuitive – why not? I wanted everyone in Salesforce anyway. It worked great, and my users were happy… but I would sometimes bump into other Salesforce practitioners who disapproved. Showing off my baby, they would tut tut that there were better solutions, and what did I think I was doing trying to replicate that?
Fast forward to my Sprint, and the group I joined had me sitting at a table with the usual mix of Salesforce practitioners working on some or another problem. I actually don’t even remember what the project was! It’s beside the point.
At some point, the idea of tracking work came up, and I screwed up my courage and showed off my baby. The guy sitting next to me was, as it turned out, a Developer by trade. When I was done, he turned to other Developers and said –
“Look at that. She built a whole Jira, basically.”
I immediately felt my face go hot with embarrassment. Clearly I was doing something wrong. For some reason I couldn't yet name, admins weren't supposed to be doing this. I wasn’t meant to be building things in Salesforce that helped my day to day. That was for others, who made “real” apps, not for me.
He turned to me and said, “Without any code. That’s amazing. Way to go, Developer.”
I wished I could tell you who he was. I forgot his name, and I don’t think we ever interacted again. He hadn’t attended a Sprint before, and to my knowledge didn’t again, and given I can’t even remember what we were working on, it’s likely that his attendance (and mine for that matter) didn’t result in any tangible deliverables.
But… it was the nudge I needed. In life we sometimes drift along until an interaction bumps you onto a new course. I left that Sprint with a new-found feeling that I belonged, I had a right to sit at those tables – I built things in Salesforce. Clicks or code, I was a Developer, in my own way, in my own right. I’ve attended Community Sprints ever since.
That experience set me on the path to becoming a technical architect, and eventually owning my own consulting firm — and crossing paths with everyone I've had the privilege to teach and learn from along the way.
Check out all these Developers!
Sure, it has been a hot minute since new “apps” have been delivered, but every year new BUILDERS are made. New Developers. New Architects. Every year, Sprint after Sprint, new contributors are born and the umbrella of belonging covers just a little bit more space.
If you ask me… the best “deliverable” of all. So, if you’ve never been to a Sprint, come to the next one. You don’t need to deliver anything, you just need to show up. I’ll be saving a seat for you.
