The Future of Lightning with Shawna Wolverton

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with Shawna Wolverton, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Salesforce. Most recently Shawna has been leading the charge on Lightning. She currently runs the Lightning Experience teams as well as our process automation work group.

Join us as Shawna shares her inspiration for building out the idea of Lightning and how Lightning is now moving the code cliff for admins. We’ll also hear about some of the Lightning features Shawna is excited to see roll out for Spring 2017.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Shawna Wolverton.

Process builder has moved the code cliff.

Shawna has been with Salesforce for 13 years. “The bulk of that time has been working in Product and building cool stuff for admins,” she says.

When it comes to process builder and logic, Shawna says, “I’ve always been about moving the cliff and extending the runway when it comes to what admins can do with clicks instead of code. What we’ve been able to do with process builder is take the kinds of things you would have had to write Apex for, multi-step, workflow, criteria and actions and giving that power to admins in a whole new way.”

Lightning is eliminating code for common use cases.

So, how does Lightning help move the code cliff for admins? “Lightning is this idea of a new experience for sales and service users. It’s a new eco-system, a new platform and a new way of extending out what you can do with Salesforce,” says Shawna.

As she explains, “if you look at what you can do with a standard page in Lightning versus what you can do in Classic, the difference is astronomical. Similar to Process Builder, we’ve eliminated the need to write code for some very common use cases.”

Lightning helps customers and developers go faster.

The concept for Lightning was inspired by user feedback. Shawna says, “we were hearing that our user interface was really functional but needed some modernization. Then, there were all these requests to do more with the Page Out editor. But what we realized was that we were hamstrung technically. Lightning allows us to go faster when we do development and allows our customers to build things faster as well.”

“Building out components and assembling them into killer experiences has never been as easy as it is today,” says Shawna.

Lightning creates a bridge between admins and developers.

Some admins are still trying to wrap their head about Components. Shawna explains them in simple terms, “Components are building blocks of a page. When you think of a Classic Salesforce page you really only had two components: fields and related lists. In Lightning, you still have those fields and related lists, but now you can put all kinds of things on that page.”

As a Lightning feature, they’re building a bridge between admins and developers. “These components are built by developers, but they’re built specially, and with a model in mind, for admins,” says Shawna.

New features that are coming in Spring 2017.

There are some exciting Lightning releases on their way for Spring 2017. Shawna is excited about Flow, a component that allows you to display visual workflow as a component. How does it work? Shawna explains, “you can now put a flow right on a page. Imagine giving your users guidance on the kinds of things that need to be done on a page and then helping them walk through those tasks with a visual flow.”

“We think this can really dial up your Lightning implementation when you do decide to migrate,” Shawna says.

Shawna is also excited about Favorites. “You’ll see in the upper right-hand corner on any page that can be favorited, a little star. You can click on that, and then you have a running list of all your favorite records, dashboards, list-views, group pages. Anything you favorite you can go back to. This allows users to build their own navigation system in Lightning,” she says.

For more insights, make sure to follow Shawna on Twitter (@shawnawol)

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