Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re joined by Kyle Husni, Salesforce Innovation Lead at W.L. Gore & Associates. We discuss the Agile mindset and the steps admins can take to make their days and lives easier to deal with.
Join us as we talk about how Kyle gathers requirements for his Agile development process, why you need to work backward in order to build the right tool, and how to measure the success you’ve created for your business.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kyle Husni.
Kyle started with Salesforce from a relatively young age—his sophomore year of college. After working with one too many spreadsheets, he quickly identified that Salesforce was the future and found himself an internship to learn more about it. He became an admin and grew his skills, eventually switching to a financial services company shifting to a business analyst and product owner role. Long story short, that’s how Kyle got started working in an Agile framework.
When it comes to Agile, “It’s really a framework and a mentality,” Kyle says, “it’s the idea that we’re not going to spend months and months trying to get detailed requirements but we’re going to be proactive and reactive at the same time,” he says, “it’s a philosophy of constant change.” That begins with how you gather requirements. “The key is to ask what the end goal is for something—what are we trying to actually achieve?”
Like with so many requirement gathering processes, it’s about reverse-engineering that Why so you can figure out the best way to build it. “I want them to really think about the experience they’re going to have for the users,” Kyle says. Essentially, you need to work with your stakeholders to develop the ideas they have in their head and get a clearer picture of what an ideal world would look like. That helps you understand if there are any big UX requirements, and how success is measured for a particular project.
“I’m a big rapid prototyping fan,” Kyle says. Even in his role as a product owner, it’s important to him to be able to jump into a developer sandbox and scratch something out as an example of what they’re trying to build. That might even mean going as far as jumping on a developer org during the requirement gathering process to show a little bit about how things work. “That’s where Lightning has helped me a ton, is just being able to jump in on the Lightning record pages and do a lot more enhanced customization on the front-end side,” he says. You can make someone’s instance change before their eyes so they can better understand what Kyle can do to change their workflow.
“When we look at a maturity level of what kind of features are we rolling out, I try not to overtake things,” Kyle says. You want to deliver an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that accomplishes the key goals as you understand them from your requirements gathering process, without building out other things before you need them. “MVP is such a hard term because so many folks want it to be the entire experience,” Kyle says, “but my focus is always on how I can rapidly create value for the business.”
“When release notes come out, we try to do a quick peel of our backlog to see if any new features that are coming will address any of those,” Kyle says. They also try to divvy up release notes so it’s not so crazy and details aren’t missed. That also means relying on the resources of the community, including podcasts and just what people are talking about to make sure that no new features are overlooked.
Mike Gerholdt: (Music). Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you become a more awesome admin. I’m Mike Gerholdt and today Kyle Husni is joining us to talk about the Agile mindset and the steps admins can take to make their days and lives a little bit easier to deal with. So I can’t wait this amazing discussion. Let’s get Kyle on the podcast. So Kyle, welcome to the podcast.
Kyle Husni: Thanks for having me Mike. Appreciate the time today.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, you bet. Well, I’m interested to dive into our topic, but let’s get to know a little bit more about you. So Kyle, kind of how did you get into the Salesforce ecosystem and what do you do right now?
Kyle Husni: So right now I actually work as a Innovation Work Stream Lead for W.L. Gore and Associates based in Elkton, Maryland. But been a long journey to get here. So I actually started with Salesforce, is my sophomore year of college. I won’t reveal how long ago that was, because it was not that long ago. But I actually worked as a inside sales rep at a bank in Wilmington, Delaware and struggled a lot as a college student who was studying Finance and Information Systems.
Kyle Husni: I kind of knew what was out there and what we were capable of in terms of getting information. And we just had to rely on weekly spreadsheets. So I obviously wanted to make sure I could go study, go hang out with my friends and I had to really prioritize the time that I could get to making sure I got all my work done. It really didn’t help me to get that on a weekly basis.
Kyle Husni: So I got pretty curious and started figuring out, could we go and invest in something? Could I maybe help my managers find a better way to do this? And I stumbled upon Salesforce. I obviously realized that to convince a billion dollar company, “We should go by Salesforce,” might be a little bit outside of my efforts. So I started to get a little bit more intrigued of could I go find an opportunity, an internship for my junior year of college where I could actually start to use Salesforce myself and get a little bit more interest.
Kyle Husni: So I was lucky enough, I found an internship my junior year and kind of took it more as a sales operations role, really starting to get into more of the analytics side. And luckily enough they started to ask me to build reports, build dashboards, and slowly became a Salesforce administrator for a small inside sales team. And lucky enough from there I just kept growing responsibilities, taking on a global sales team, adding in a service team, doing a service cloud cut-over, a lot of different fun stuff that I was able to grow on that side.
Kyle Husni: And then I think my role started to change a little bit more as I got more experienced and started to look, I think more at the business value of where Salesforce could really help a business grow and mature and add new capabilities. I had joined another financial service company in Baltimore, T. Rowe Price, and took a little bit more of a business analyst and a product owner role to really help them implement financial service cloud and Lightning. Really, really exciting stuff. And I think that grew my love not only for Salesforce but I think the Agile process, seeing how that could help relate an enterprise level scale, knowing that I had done this at such small scale, but then I got to just really take that at just kind of the next level.
Kyle Husni: So now I’m taking some of those experiences that I had before and now working with W.L. Gore, really trying to ramp up our Salesforce maturity and really thinking about how we use Salesforce in a different way. So definitely something I’m really excited about. I’ve been here about a year now and we’re in the middle of kind of revamping our entire Sales Cloud instance while also having e-commerce projects with CloudCraze and some other pieces of Service Cloud also taking off as well.
Kyle Husni: So a lot of fun Salesforce stuff going on around here these days.
Mike Gerholdt: Wow. I would say, I mean we could do, look, I’d love to do a whole other podcast on just the luck of, getting in and having a company that’s really driven to kind of grow their instance because I feel like that’s super accelerator for an admin. And you’re very fortunate, right?
Kyle Husni: Oh absolutely.
Mike Gerholdt: That you’ve been with companies. So when we started talking, I think one of the topics that came up in our discussion was around Agile. And I will profess this and get it out of the way. For a while when I was a Salesforce administrator back in ’06, I would just make a change in production. And I realize the error of my ways now. But, listening to you and listening to the amount of complexity that you’re working in, and I don’t think it’s necessarily dependent on complexity, but understanding change management for an admin, I think Agile is really key. And I know we’ve done previous episodes on Agile, so I’d love to kind of have our discussion begin there with, from an Agile perspective, if you hop in an elevator and somebody’s like, “Hey, I heard the word Agile,” how would you explain that?
Kyle Husni: That’s a wonderful question. So I think if I look at Agile, as a whole really, I think you’ll hear some people say, “Oh, you develop an Agile.” And I kind of stop people there and go, “No, it’s really a framework and a mentality,” right? It’s the idea that we’re not going to spend months and months trying to get detailed requirements, but that we’re going to be proactive and reactive at the same time of trying to understand how do we bring someone along for a journey?
Kyle Husni: I think if anyone hasn’t had the chance to read the Agile manifesto and understand on that side, it really lays out that it is a philosophy of constant collaboration. Being able to respond to that kind of change and really making sure that folks can get hands on with the work that they’re actually interacting with. To me, the collaboration piece I think is the biggest difference in Agile than any traditional waterfall type project I’ve been in. Everything is constantly moving. Folks are constantly involved. There’s never that, “Hey what’s going on?” Kind of mentality.
Mike Gerholdt: Right. So thinking through because learning a methodology and a delivery mechanism can sound intimidating I guess. What was your approach?
Kyle Husni: So for me, it was I think a pretty typical for I think a solo admin. I really remember when I started. But I’ll say as gathering requirements, I had an Evernote notebook that I think was famously joked as the Bible of Salesforce. Because that’s where all of my ideas were. All of our kind of mockups ended up staying at, I would just kind of scratch things up there.
Kyle Husni: So I was already doing Agile, to a perspective there. But I think I had to start to understand to some degree like what were the little things that could make my life easier. I knew where my biggest struggle was, was I didn’t really have a consistent way of going through and making sure I understand what our user requirements were, having them formatted in a way that if someone, my boss, one of our other developers that would come in every once in a while could help us out, I didn’t have a really consistent way of going about that.
Kyle Husni: So starting off with user stories for me was a really good way to just, as I looked at all the things that Agile had in scope, that made it really easy for me to go, “Here’s the problem I have and here’s how I can go to solve it.” There’s so much, I think content wise was kind of where Agile covers. It can be really, really difficult I think to try and grab everything.
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Kyle Husni: So for me it was, just writing up kind of a retrospective of here’s what I’m having trouble with, can I go take this methodology that everyone’s telling me works so great and I’ve learned a little bit about. Can I go find somebody that’s going to help me out with that problem and use that and kind of start there.
Mike Gerholdt: So you mentioned gathering requirements. And I think everybody does it a little differently. I’m always afraid of what I… I love the term of order-taker admin, right? Somebody comes in and says, “Well we need this box on our account or we need this on an opportunity.” What’s your approach to gathering requirements? Right? I want to start there, because that’s the phase we’re in.
Kyle Husni: Yeah. So if I look at that, and it’s funny you call it the order-taker. I mean I kind of had this term of a, I had a really wonderful sales manager, I think one of the sharpest guys I’ve ever worked with.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.
Kyle Husni: And he was famous for coming over and banging on our desk going, “I need this today. It’s the most critical thing in the world.” And it was like, “Drop everything you’re doing and go do this for me right now.”
Mike Gerholdt: Sure.
Kyle Husni: And the first few times I’d do it, because I was like, super important manager.
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Kyle Husni: I got to make sure I get this done, I got to be on his good side. And then it would come back that it was only just he had a bad Tuesday morning about a sales call and he thought he needed this.
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Kyle Husni: So I think the big thing for me is always kind of asking the, “Hey, so what’s the end goal with this? What are we trying to actually achieve?” Because usually if it’s just, “Hey, I just want to put a flag on there so I can check that,” then that’s, I kind of have to dig a little bit further, but if I can kind of pull that out of someone and going, “Hey, well I need a better way to get this kind of insight. Or we need to enable this process that allows me to get a better retrospective and kind of work backwards to say, okay, great. Now who’s going to be involved in this process?” And I don’t tell them that I’m going through that kind of requirements gathering, but I’m in essence trying to help them develop what this looks like in their head.
Kyle Husni: And usually for me, I think I’ve gotten lucky enough that as admins you start to get more experienced and you’ll start to hear things that go, boom, I know the solution. Boom, I know the solution. But we know there’s so many kinds of got yous [inaudible 00:09:57] that lay in there.
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Kyle Husni: That I do want the user to feel like they’re kind of giving me that feedback, that they’re kind of crafting the plan in their head. And typically I will even start like even just pulling up a Salesforce org and just go, “Okay, great well it’s not there yet today. But explain to me how this would kind of work for you.” Right? Because it’s so hard sometimes. I think if we were to put our requirements head on and tell them, “Don’t look at the solution, don’t look at the solution.” It’s very hard, especially if someone’s a visual thinker, they need to kind of express themselves and getting on a screen going, if I want to click a button over here, I would need it to do something like that.
Kyle Husni: And in my head that’s where I can start thinking through, “Hey, what kind of sharing requirements do we have?” I kind of have that all stored in my back pocket. But I want them to really think about the experience they’re going to have for the users. We all know as admins, there’s going to be the little things we have to go back and kind of track on, but if I can get them to tell me really what they’re going for from a business objective outcome and kind of what that looks and feels like for a user perspective, we’re going to be able to craft that story right away. Those are my two big focuses that I try and drive on.
Mike Gerholdt: You mentioned you took notes in Evernote. What would be some tips for an admin on taking notes around requirements or kind of managing all of their intake?
Kyle Husni: Yeah. So I think the big thing for me is I try to always… Now what I do a little bit, is I try not to write my falsely [inaudible 00:11:22] requirements. I try not to go as my typical user story format right away. So people will see, and I kind of joke that I think in basically as a, so that, kind of mentality around how we write requirements. But I do like a little bit of just kind of shifting a couple of different pieces.
Kyle Husni: So I will call out like UX. If there’s a really big UX component to this that, hey, there’s got to be a report to this and the report has to look like that, I want to make sure I know that that’s a critical success factor. The other big thing I try and do as well as with every user story, we always say we have to have acceptance criteria. That’s a big measure for us in terms of just, “Can I make sure that I deliver the business exactly what they’re asking for?” But I think the even bigger thing that I try and do is say, “Hey, what’s going to make us successful? Or how are we going to measure that this is successful?”
Kyle Husni: Because if we can’t do that, it’s going to be really hard for me at the end of my year when we have those conversations around did I contribute to the business? What kind of value are we providing as a Salesforce platform back to the organization? It gets really hard to just tell everyone, “Okay, that’s great. We developed a lot of user stories. I gave you a ton of new features and functionality,” but great examples of, “Hey, if we’re able to produce a document or an easy way to say, look, we cut down your time that you don’t have to put together this manual report now.” I can go back to all the user stories I delivered and just start to take those notes of like, look, this is something that’s going to save us on cost.
Kyle Husni: And I try and have that in my mind. So I know that as I’m going to push this to my development team or as I was developing this myself, that I kind of kept that in mind, of, look guys, if we can’t do this or we can’t do that, it’s going to have us lose a bit of that success factor. Or maybe if we do have to go out and put something in different kind of a sequenced way, right? We might not be able to deliver everything in one big shot, we at least have an idea of how to control that message of saying, look, it’s going to be manual right now, but here’s our product roadmap. We know we’re going to get you that feature in three months. So we’re not far away from it, but hey, right now we’re not there.
Kyle Husni: And I think that’s a really important thing as well as I look through those requirements. If I know there’s stuff like we had a great conversation when we had our Lightning rollout, we knew we couldn’t do 10 column related lists, but we knew that that was coming at some point.
Kyle Husni: So we kept that item in our backlog because I think the transparency that came up as we were taking notes going, look, we got to let people know that they feel comfortable. It’s OK to tell people that something’s not generally available. It’s not out of the box. I think there’s always this fear of, well even if we don’t tell them, they won’t notice that it’s not there. I think that level of transparency, I try and always let people know upfront of, hey, it’s not there yet, but that doesn’t mean there’s not an AppExchange that can do it. Not a custom component we can’t go use, there’s always a way, right? It’s jokingly, Salesforce basically has that [inaudible 00:14:07] solution almost.
Kyle Husni: So we try and get that up front visibility. But yeah, I think making sure you focus on those big areas of kind of the UX. If there’s reporting things that need to be out there, any kind of critical success factor, but really making sure that you have a way to measure that success I think is always key. I joked a little bit with my girlfriend one day about that, that… She even jokes, she’s like, “So how are you measuring all that cool stuff you’re pulling out there?” She’s like, “You’re building a lot. But like how does everyone know that you’re going to be successful?” I’m like, “You’re right.” That’s a good way to think about that. We’d have to go back and make sure we can find that really well.
Mike Gerholdt: Okay. This a point that, I mean again, multiple topics we could do a whole episode on proving your value too for Salesforce. And we got started into that talking about requirements, you mentioned AppExchange, you mentioned, hey, we know this, we don’t know this. I think sometimes you forget the benefit of what you do know and don’t know as possible solutions. I would love to know, kind of moving through the phases of working a project or working, getting requirements, next phases, building or researching a solution. I’m going to guess, right? I’d love to know what your approach is to that, right? How do you know if there’s an AppExchange app to it or if you got to build something. Or what your approach to kind of taking this ideal vision that they have and turning it into functionality.
Kyle Husni: Right. So I’ve been very fortunate, I think in my career, as I started with a solo admin, not really knowing how to do Apex, but I think I’ve found all the limits of Process Builder Flow and everything that’s out there. But even now as I work through this, as more of a product owner and in my role, I’ve got some wonderful solution architects, but they’re nice enough I’ll say. And I think, trust me enough that I’m a big rapid prototyping fan. I think everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve been like, can I please have a dev sandbox? And I promise I won’t promote anything into our actual environments. But I’ve always been a big fan of working with my team or taking on the effort myself with like, hey guys, I’m going to go scratch something up really quick and let me get a quick prototype out there and let’s see how that works, right?
Kyle Husni: And there could be something as simple as we create a new object. I throw some process builders together and workflow rules with the validations that they like. And just get them the example. And that’s where I think as I start to kind of show that, it’s a lot easier for folks, I think in our business to get that kind of comprehension. We can have some really quick conversations. I think internally between our solution architecture, our business analysts, and I think we start to get a good gut feel of, “Hey, we know we need a custom object here. We know we’re going to have to write some Apex.” Yeah, we used to write this as a hard-coded thing, but “Hey, solution architect, I don’t like hard coding stuff. Can you go look at this new custom metadata and see what we can do with that setting to alleviate that. For the demo purpose, I’m going to hard code it just so people can get an idea of does that functionally work for everyone?
Kyle Husni: And I think we’ve seen a lot of success for that, right? Because I know for my development team, if I have to go send them off to go write Apex and go make new… I think an example is Apex managed sharing rules to go out and do something like that, it’s going to require a lot of ask for them to even take the time to go figure out how we want to get those requirements. But I think improving our relationship with the business and having them get upfront feedback on some of that solutioning. I mean, we’ve done prototypes in, I’ll say like 15 minutes. I’m a big fan of even just jumping onto a Dev Org while I’m kind of grabbing requirements to a degree of they’re far enough along. And just saying, “Look, let me show you kind of behind the scenes a little bit. And I can maybe build some just really quick.”
Kyle Husni: I think personally that’s where Lightning has helped me a ton. It’s just being able to jump in on some of the Lightning record pages and do a lot more enhanced customization on the front end side that we couldn’t really do before with Classic. And I think people having that look and feel and being able to see their instance changing before their eyes, that’s been a huge value effort. That, I’ll even say I can’t tell people how many times I ask for something.
Kyle Husni: And it could be a very simple report. And being able to show them just something so quickly, it’s easier than Excel or it looks just like an Excel workbook for them as they’re trying to move out of that, I can start to give them that comfort of, look, if you are using this object and creating it in Salesforce, your report that used to take you four hours to run macros on, now it’s just click run, but you do have to put the data in the system and here’s how we’re going to do that. I can really bring them along for the full ride.
Kyle Husni: And then luckily enough after I do that part, then we get to have some conversations internally with our BAs and our SAs to say, look, here’s kind of the mockup we found, now you guys need to go scale this. But for them they’re not as much trying to always having to figure out the how or the why or trying to get a lot of feedback from the business at that point. We’ve got that kind of directional, yes, now their focus is really on how do we make it scale.
Kyle Husni: And usually they’re in these conversations, I’m not flying solo. But they’ve seen enough and heard enough that their challenge now is what’s the best way to do this, not the what are we going to do, at that point.
Mike Gerholdt: And what, I mean a lot of Agile is, and you mentioned it, rapid prototyping. At what point are you rolling out features, functionality, kind of turning back and giving the business the solution for some of the requirements that they give you and what advice do you have for admins doing that?
Kyle Husni: So I think the biggest thing for me, I’ll probably hit the second part first Mike. The biggest thing for me is probably the less is more type mentality. And I think it gets so hard. And I give an example of, you look at this really big piece of work and sometimes I do it too. I’ll go and do a meeting and I’ll listen to some of my business partners talking and my eyes light up. I’ll see this massive scope of work that they’re giving me. I see eight months of projects, I see all this cool stuff that we’re talking about. But inside of that, there’s this one little thing that they actually need.
Kyle Husni: I’ll use the example of you need to get from point A to point B. I could absolutely give you a Ferrari today to do that and you get there super quick, but it’s going to cost you $3 million. Or I could give you a bike and yeah, I mean you might get a little bit sweaty, but you’re going to get to that point just the same way, maybe not as fast, but you can still accomplish the goal. To me, it’s always trying to get our user story, trying to get our features. Trying to make sure they’re as small as possible. And I can get them the value that they want as quickly as possible is big, right?
Kyle Husni: So the rapid prototyping is great because I think they get that idea of, “Hey, I can see it. Hey, I can touch it. Hey, I know it’s going on.” But if we can’t get our users to use it in a live environment or they can’t feel that value right away, it’s a real struggle for me. So that’s I think where me as a product owner, my preference is, how do I start to get that workout as quickly as possible?
Kyle Husni: And that I think is a real test of having conversations with, for myself, my business analyst, my tactical team, or when I was on a solo admin perspective, trying to be really thoughtful around what’s the least I can get them out and it can be valuable to them? You’ll hear the term a ton of what’s our MVP? It’s a really hard concept, right? I think that’s where the prototyping for folks, maybe it’s getting out a custom object with some really simple automation or it’s just no automation. It’s a manual process, but you’ve never had data that’s reported that way before. That’s typically where I’ll kind of start on that perspective, but I think when we look at a maturity level of what kind of features are we rolling out, I try not to over bake things.
Kyle Husni: It can be so hard not to do it, but I think typically for me is when I get a good enough sense from our solution architect of how quickly can we get something out there and how big it really is, it’s really going to dictate. But it also comes down to priority. But I know we touched on a little bit that drop everything development. That’s where we have to really be critical of, our team’s time is extremely valuable. And to deliver the business the right things that we need, it does take a level of kind of a gut check to say how big is the priority of this and how much is it going to move?
Kyle Husni: I was lucky enough that as I’ve had these conversations over and over again, you do learn a little bit and we can always tell when someone just, I think wants something. But I think now that we’ve put in a few places before, is where I put in those metrics to say, hey, how many people is this going to impact? And what kind of time are we going to save because of that? Can we have some kind of measurable outcome that allows us to understand that and okay, now that we look through some of our features, where maybe in our backlog refinement we can have the conversation of if I give you one and two and three, is that going to move the needle for you guys? We think so. Let’s get agreement for that.
Kyle Husni: I think the biggest thing in terms of the, when we roll it out, technically, I think the tactical part is actually the easiest part sometimes. But having a good feeling of our change management, our training teams, our business. Making sure that they feel like when we give them that functionality one, they’re ready for it. But I’ll say two, that they’re going to be able to feel the value by the what we give them. MVP is just such a hard term because I think so many folks want it to be the entire experience, but my focus is always just how can I rapidly create value for the business and really let them learn.
Kyle Husni: I mean we get no better feedback than when something goes into production. I will say that is unfortunately and fortunately our best way to see how things go.
Mike Gerholdt: Right. Now, I guess touching on that, a lot of what we’ve discussed is really you taking the input, gathering the requirements, figuring out the solution. I am going to throw in the other component which is, Salesforce is three releases a year. Sometimes we’re throwing solutions at you or new features and functionality. From your standpoint, how do you manage that? How do you, when some of the releases come out, there’s things that are already on, right? Like the next day or the next Monday that a user comes in, there could be new functionality there because it’s part of the release. What is your strategy for handling that?
Kyle Husni: So really, where I’ve seen this be successful is I think trying to be aware, that’s the biggest thing for me. So I think every time I get a complaint or… I’ll say a complaint, a suggested feedback of where Salesforce could be better, I think I try and take it on myself to go, okay, where can I go look in that? And thankfully Salesforce does a great job with the idea. With the community and throwing ideas out there that usually I can either find that, A a bunch of other people aren’t happy with it too or B, that hey, we all noted that and guess what, we’re going to fix it.
Kyle Husni: So I’m a big fan of just making sure one, if there’s that noted area, I try and make sure that that’s still inside of our backlog. And we usually do a pretty good tab of when release notes come out. We try and do a quick peel of our backlog and say hey, any new features coming out in this release that we know are going to address any of those. That for us kind of makes sure that as we’re solutioning anything that’s in progress or something that we’re waiting for, that we don’t miss, right? Because I think the worst thing in the world is you go out and build something and it’s kind of the same with the AppExchange apps. I’m always kind of just looking through to say, is there anything new out there? Is there anyone developing a new component, a new way of doing this? So that we can kind of get that measured up.
Kyle Husni: That’s kind of my first level. I think the other thing too, is as much as we can, trying to break up release notes. I am fortunate enough I think, in the last two companies I’ve been with, we have a pretty big team, so it’s easy enough for us to divvy up release notes and say, guys, someone’s got to go neck deep and make sure they get every part of one to two and I’ll get three to four and you get five to six. Taking the time I think to put kind of a team effort. And then we’ve actually started doing release recaps internally. That way, I think all of our team members from the testing team, the business analysts, our application support, our training team, everyone kind of has that same language around what’s coming out round the release.
Kyle Husni: That’s something that again, like there’s almost no reason to a degree of, we see that as a priority because it could solve one of those problems for us and we know that the problems are always going to keep coming up and the new user stories are going to keep coming. So being as educated as possible, I think on our end around that side, was really, really key.
Kyle Husni: And I think again, using every avenue that you can. And I think that’s been the biggest thing, whether it’s the Admin podcast. I’ve been a big fan of SalesforceBen has been someone I’ve followed on for a little bit. There’s tons of people out there that are publishing information on Twitter over and over and over. I’m a big fan of the crowdsourcing is, there’s a degree of that of where I kind of say is we want to put the time into, invest as a team and myself. That’s how I did it as a solo admin. I knew I couldn’t read all the thousands of pages, that’s why I trusted the Salesforce community to help me out a little bit and tell us where to look to a degree, of what was exciting. But yeah, just constantly measuring. And again, the backlog I think was the big thing.
Kyle Husni: As long as we had those items in there, no matter which way I looked, I knew that I could understand those needs. But even if we saw something that was brand new, I forget, we put the Lightning on iPad beta. It is in our backlog right now, of something that we’re still looking at in our own backlog to say, is it working? Is it not working? Where are we seeing it work well, where are we not seeing it work well? So we kind of have that critical success measure for ourselves, of something that we’re still monitoring. I mean again, still I think something that as we learn and we get more enhanced with betas and try to get our hands on to be more early adopters and I think get ahead of some of those changes. We’re working right now through the Lightning on mobile pilot as well.
Kyle Husni: So I mean both things that we’ve gotten our backlog that we’re monitoring pretty heavily and trying to make sure that we have a good feel for.
Mike Gerholdt: As we kind of wrap up, just sitting back digesting everything you said. I’m really glad we had the chance to sit, talk. Again, three or four spin off series could come from this. I’m thinking, I always like to go back to the first question, the first answer and I’m really… We covered a lot. I’d love to know from you, kind of at what point, because you were very fortunate when you got started, I felt, to go through different jobs and have different experiences and companies push you for functionality and that forcing you to kind of grow.
Mike Gerholdt: I’d love to know, kind of looking back, which sounds like we’re not going to look back very far, because your sophomore year in college, I might have some shoes that are older than that. But I’d love to know kind of what’s one memorable moment that you feel was kind of your turning point so far, in your Salesforce career?
Kyle Husni: Oh wow, that’s tough. It hasn’t been that long. Admittedly, it’s been, what? I’m trying to think now a little bit. I just graduated college officially four years ago, so not that long. But if I look back at it, I mean there’s so many that I could pick from. But I think as I look at the… Probably the most transformational one for me was, I started a new job a year ago here too. And I left a company that I had only been at for about a year and had been driving back and forth between Delaware and Baltimore, Maryland, which if folks don’t know that’s about two hours in one direction. So it was about four hours of driving each day. But I came back after we rolled out Financial Service Cloud out to a brand new first time Salesforce implementation for that side of their business.
Kyle Husni: And I was lucky enough to go down to Tampa, Florida, but I was also lucky enough to be the one that found the critical defect, the honor go light day. So it was a really interesting night of, I think kind of a culmination of the years of experience that I had gained and just from working so hard and being up I think until like one o’clock the one night trying to figure out if we had everything in line to get this thing fixed out the next day.
Kyle Husni: And I think for me that was kind of that moment that I’ll say like very humbling one to be. Thankful to be up that late and I think feel like I was in control. And I think that’s really an interesting feeling. I think as admins you have those moments where you know that you did something right. And you know that you are able to contribute and go into work the next day and having people telling me, “Hey, great job. Thank you so much for staying up.” And I had only been at that company I think for five months at that point.
Kyle Husni: But I think, to a degree, I could already hear people talking about, “Hey, now that this works,” I’d never been able to see this and I’d never been able to do that. I will say I’m a lifelong lover of Salesforce, from my career start. Enough to paint my shoes for Dreamforce. But when I did that, when I kind of heard that comment for the first time, it was definitely really empowering. I think there’s, I’ve always kind of made it my lifelong mission of, can I get people out of the office a little bit sooner? Can I get them to go spend time with their family, making their lives better, investing in themselves, not because we don’t like working, but because there’s always a need for that balance.
Kyle Husni: And I think when I fell in love with Salesforce is that I realized, yeah, I can take you two hours away from a spreadsheet and give you that in 10 minutes. That’s time that you can be more efficient getting your work done, so you don’t have to stay here to yourself in the o’clock at night. And starting to see people and feel like I was actually getting ready to enroll that enterprise wide, really large company. That was such a cool feeling. And just knowing Mike, kind of like you said, there were so many people that were important to get me to that point and that helped me push and that I had to push for more opportunities and they openly gave them to me. It was kind of that aha moment of I’m in the right place at the right time and I’m excited enough now that I’m still getting to do it.
Kyle Husni: Fortunately enough, if it wasn’t for one Google search back in my sophomore year of college, I don’t know if I’d be here. So it’s definitely, it was a very humbling experience to sit there with a bunch of delicious sushi and realize that hey, maybe I did make a good choice a couple of years ago.
Mike Gerholdt: Well, that’s very cool. Kyle thanks for coming by, being on the podcast. If people want to follow you on Twitter, what’s your Twitter handle?
Kyle Husni: It is salesforcekyle. I kept it simple.
Mike Gerholdt: Huh? Smart. That’s great. We’ll add a link to that in the show notes-
Kyle Husni: I had to ahead of the game.
Mike Gerholdt: Of course. Well, let’s either… I feel like all of the Twitter handles are either that or SFDC something.
Kyle Husni: Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: All right. Well, Kyle, thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Kyle Husni: Awesome. Appreciate the time Mike.
Mike Gerholdt: (Music). The Agile method is always a hot topic. And I appreciate Kyle for showing us a different perspective on this episode. An important thing to remember is Agile is a framework and a specific mindset.
Mike Gerholdt: So in order to carry out a project successfully, you and your team need to be proactive. You need to know how to react fast, recover faster, always collaborate and be as transparent as possible. Transparency is a huge thing with me. I love it. Eliminating waste is a huge part of the Agile method. So when it comes to gathering requirements, try starting backwards. Your first leading question should be identifying what their desired end goal is. And then from there you can start getting feedback early and often allowing the user to feel and hear that you are creating their plan and that vision together.
Mike Gerholdt: Of course the last step is figuring out what is the critical success factor of this project, and then how to measure the success you’ve created for this business.
Mike Gerholdt: Rapid prototyping is an amazing idea for admins to do while you are gathering requirements. Spinning up at Developer Org start sketching out the ideas and solutions you’re coming up with and live in the moment. The value of that instant gratification is huge. And maybe you get to the point of trying to find a solution that has not been created yet. Kyle and other admins or developers know that Salesforce always has a way and different ways of doing things, but don’t be afraid to tell your users that just because it’s not here yet, it doesn’t mean it won’t be there.
Mike Gerholdt: Use your resources wisely and of course never give up. Make your vision a reality. We have some great resources in the show notes for you this week, like the transform your business with mobile trail on Trailhead, which talks about how the Agile method can help you deliver and improve your building strategies. I would also go to admin.salesforce.com to check out our Lightning on mobile content, starting with the set up Lightning experience on mobile by our own principal admin Evangelist, LeeAnne Rimel. Of course, you can always follow along with us on social. We are @SalesforceAdmns, no I on Twitter. And you can find me on Twitter as well, I am @MikeGerholdt. And with that, have an amazing day and I’ll see you next time in the Cloud.
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