Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re talking Liz Skaates, Senior Manager of Product Management at Salesforce, to find out about the Lightning Report Builder that’s coming out with Summer ‘18.
Join us as we talk about the ins and outs of Salesforce reports and how the Lightning Report Builder will make building reports easier and more intuitive than ever before.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Liz Skaates.
How an education background informs Liz’s process.
Liz started out trying to be a math teacher but, when she was in college, the tech industry was really booming and some friends convinced her to get a minor in computer science. She went on to get a masters in education, “but I realized I’d rather be playing around in the industry rather than just teaching math.” She got hired to be a trainer at a software company, then started working on technical implementations and eventually ended up at Salesforce in product management.
The education background is helpful for Liz because so much of her job is about helping people understand what her team is building and how that can help them. “It really is about listening to people and understanding where they are and what needs they have,” she says, “and then clearly communicating what we’re trying to achieve to address those needs.” For Summer ‘18, they’ve been working on an amazing new feature called Lightning Report Builder.
The amazing new Lightning Report Builder.
“We are taking advantage of this platform called Lightning to reinvent how you create reports so that more people who use Salesforce can create their own reports,” Liz says. The idea is that if you need a report, you should be able to create it for yourself, and that’s where Lightning Report Builder comes in. It’s actually been on pilot and beta for several releases so that they could get feedback from customers as they were building it out.
“What we had heard from the classic version of the builder is that there were so many buttons and terminology that you just didn’t know where to start,” Liz says, “so we wanted to take away the learning curve.” A common thing they ran into was users knowing how they wanted to organize their data without necessarily knowing the jargon for what that was called. Instead, they’ve focused on simple language to help people make the report that they need and built in more flexibility along the way. Their main goal was to take away the clutter and make everything about reports more intuitive.
Help us make Lightning Report Builder better!
So the Report Builder is coming with Summer ‘18, “but even though it’s out there and generally available, we still want feedback about anything that can make people’s’ lives more productive.” Going forward Liz’s team hopes to further perfect it and make it even snappier to use. This is all about the little things, like making it easier to find a report faster, or speed up creating one. It’s all about cutting down on clicks and reducing friction so you can build more.
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