How to Build a Superbadge with Travis Morgan

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re talking to Travis Morgan, Senior Curriculum Developer for Salesforce, to hear about the inner workings of Trailhead.

Join us as we talk about how the Trailhead curriculum gets built and how that can help us think about our job as Admins.

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

The challenge of balancing Trailhead.

“I design awesome, fun things for our community and employees to better use and apply Salesforce,” Travis says. He gets learning requirements from a lot of different places: the community end user, the type of user that you’re trying to turn that person into, as well as feedback from marketing, product, etc. From there, the Trailhead team needs to build out and synthesize that information into learning objectives— “we start with those learning objectives before we do anything else.”

At the same time, building curriculum is trickier than it seems because you can’t make something that works for every single person in the community. “Sometimes you can’t build it for every single person, sometimes you have to understand that this is a subset or group of the overall community and design it really well for that audience,” Travis says, “other times, we make things more broad and it’ll be just for anybody to learn a little bit about this thing.”

What makes a Superbadge?

“Superbadges take everything you love about a regular Trailhead module,” says Travis, “which is the secret sauce, the validation, the proof that you know how to do a thing and it blows it up and makes it huge. It takes a subject or group of knowledge and instead of giving you the instructions on how to do it, it presents a business case to you and it’s up to you as the Administrator or Developer to create the solution in Trailhead that satisfies that need.”

You’re faced with a problem or need and you have to go create the user or permission set in a way that forces you as the learner to really synthesize the information. You get to demonstrate to yourself and to other people that you have the skill that the Superbadge is testing in a real-world situation where you’re not getting all of the answers translated into Salesforce for you.

Tips for hitting your Superbadge goals.

If you’re looking at a Superbadge that you want it can feel a little daunting, “but the good news is that Superbadges require some prerequisites so all of that is baked-in for you,” Travis says. That means that you can pick out what you want to work on and build up to it as a way of gaining more mastery over what you’re already working on, or showing your boss that you’re ready to take on the next big thing.

“Whenever I’m up late testing a Superbadge, it’s for that person in the community who wants to move up and it’s one of the tools that they can apply to show their boss or a recruiter that they have those skills,” Travis says. “I got into training because I wanted to help people do things,” he says, “but this is intentionally shrouding what they should do in business requirements.” Coming up with the end result is the easy part, but getting the user there in the right way that meets those learning objectives is what makes it the achievement it needs to be.

Resources

• #BeABuilder
• App Customization Superbadge on Trailhead

Social

• Travis on the Trailblazer Community: https://sfdc.co/bXyOSs
• Gillian: @gilliankbruce
• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns

We want to remind you that if you love what you hear, or even if you don’t head on over to iTunes and give us a review. It’s super easy to do, and it really helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it.