This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re talking to Jason Teller, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce. We cover all the new features coming to Flow in Winter ‘21 and how you can make big performance gains for your org.
Join us as we talk about how auto-layout mode helps with blank canvas anxiety and why the before-save trigger offers big performance improvements for updating fields.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jason Teller.
Why the admin community had a big impact on Jason.
You might recognize Jason from the Winter ‘20 Release Readiness video, where he teamed up with Gillian to talk about all things automation and Flow. He’s a certified Flownatic, and he joined Salesforce specifically to work on the Flow team. “The thing that impressed me so much about Salesforce when I joined was actually the admin community,” he says, “because Flow and automation gives somebody like the admin the power of a developer, it allows you to build things that help people actually do the work they need to do.”
What Jason loves so much about automation at Salesforce is that the focus is always on putting the people first. “In order to do that, you need a level of automation that makes you able to build out richer screens, to build things quickly and easily that fulfill people’s needs in terms of whatever job they need to actually do,” he says. Luckily, there are a lot of features coming out specifically in Winter ’21 that’ll make things easier than ever before.
New Winter ’21 features.
Working with Flow is great until you can’t figure out why it’s not working. Luckily, Jason and his team are coming to the rescue with new debug features in Winter ’21 and more on the way. There’s an auto-launch flow that visualizes what path your flow took when it runs, which helps you see how it’s working and where it might’ve gone wrong.
Auto-layout mode (beta for Winter ’21) can help you get your ideas out there faster and clearer. “I did a lot of work around trying to eliminate ‘blank canvas’ anxiety,” Jason says, “auto-layout gives us the ability to provide an easy bit of guidance and make flow building a lot more straightforward and easier.” It’ll take you through a step-by-step process to make building a flow simple and intuitive.
There are also some special superpowers coming that were once previously only available to devs. Things like trigger-on-delete, scheduled flows, before-save triggered field updates and after-save trigger. These triggers save time, but they also have a big impact on performance because they only run when they need to. This is all to help make Flow your go-to tool for building anything you need. Listen to the full episode for more about this and the ins and outs of Swiss double cream.
Mike Gerholdt:
Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community, and career to help you become an awesome admin. And this week we’re putting on our snow boots, metaphorically, and getting ready for Winter ’21 awesomeness by talking to senior director of product management, Jason Teller. Now, for all you Flownatics out there, you probably know him best. And for you aspiring Flownatics, Jason is the one that is pushing through some amazing features to help you make automation be your hero within your organization. Let’s get Jason on the podcast.
Mike Gerholdt:
Jason, welcome to the podcast.
Jason Teller:
Yeah. Thanks, Mike.
Mike Gerholdt:
I think for many of you… Well, this is the first time on your podcast, but probably a fair share of our audience got to see you do this wonderful job in Winter ’21 Release Readiness with Gillian talking about all things automation and flow. For our Flownatics crowd out there, sit down, find a comfortable place, put your earbuds in because this is your podcast. Jason Teller’s your man.
Mike Gerholdt:
Jason, why don’t we start off by having you tell us a little bit about how you got to Salesforce and all of the fun stuff that we’re doing in Winter ’21 for Flow.
Jason Teller:
Yeah. Thanks, Mike. That’s a really great question. I started Salesforce just about three years ago and I started right here on the Flow team. And the reason that I joined was because I had done a lot of enterprise software in my career, lots of different industries, everything from telecom to banking; and the thing that impressed me the most about Salesforce was actually this community, the admin community.
Jason Teller:
So much of enterprise software out there is something that requires a large team with developers and a lot of custom code. It’s just a lot of additional technology know-how and whatnot to do. But Salesforce, I mean really empowers people. It really allows this community, the admin community, to do their job and to help other people do their jobs as well. And that’s what really attracted me to Salesforce, and flow and automation in particular because it actually gives somebody like the admin, a type of builder, the power of a developer. It’s very empowering and allows you to, again, build things that help people actually do the work that they need to do; and that’s really the main reason I joined this team.
Jason Teller:
I’ve had a lot of experience doing business processes and things like that, and automation as well, and so I can definitely say that what I really liked about the strategy for Flow, especially at Salesforce, is that it really is this focus on putting the people first, putting the users first, putting how are you going to use the software first. And in order to do that, you really need this level of automation. You need to be able to build out richer screens, you need to be able to build things quickly and easily that fulfill people’s needs in terms of whatever job they need to actually do.
Jason Teller:
I’m really, really excited about our Winter ’21 Release because of actually one of the more significant features around multi-column screens in particular. It’s going in for a pilot in Winter ’21, but it’s hard not to really just to take a moment, at least for me, and really think back to where we were about three years ago. We knew three years ago that we wanted to provide this kind of functionality. Most of the feedback we actually got from a lot of our customers was around the ability to actually create screens that had say, more than just a list of specific fields, but you wanted to, say, have a slide or something on the right and then some fields to fill out on the left. Just a richer experience using screens so that way the user didn’t actually have to go in and fill out lots of forms, et cetera, to get their work done.
Jason Teller:
But there was a long road getting there. It sounds straightforward, like take a screen, put stuff on the right, put stuff on the left, maybe put stuff in the middle. But at the time, we knew we had to, one, crank out a new builder, and so we did that. We got the new Flow Builder. And then in that new builder, you had to have the ability to use screen components, first or now LWC components. And then you needed the ability to actually conditionally show or hide components on the screen. And then finally, after all of that, you can actually get to the ability to do the advanced or rich layout with multiple columns and sections, et cetera.
Jason Teller:
It’s been a long road, but I really, really think being able to provide that kind of rich feature functionality for the UIs is probably one of the things that really excites me about our Winter ’21 Release. And then we’ve of course got a whole score of additional features. I called it the “builder wonderland” to make building these flows and processes even easier.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I have to admit, I’ll rewind the clock a little bit too. I believe it was like Dreamforce ’10 that I was at where I went to a session that was a really long title, like “Automate your business processes with visual process” something. And those were the early, early, early days of Flow. And now to see Flow and to think of where business process or just data into a CRM over the last decade, how much more complex it’s become because businesses and processes are becoming more complex. It’s not fair to the end user to think, “Well, they should just know this. They should just know the sales process or they should just know what to do next.” And not have the system set up in a very helpful manner, walk them through.
Mike Gerholdt:
I remember seeing the first time a flow screen and thinking to myself, “Holy cow, I thought I knew a nugget of automation. This is a whole new world.” And now to see those multi-columns and to think that through, right, like how you can actually guide that user, you’re really becoming kind of an end-user designer.
Jason Teller:
Yeah. It’s exactly true, Mike. It’s been interesting. I’ve been in this industry a while too, to kind of see the trajectory this stuff takes and really being able to focus on the user. As you say, being an end-user designer, give somebody a rich user experience because the jobs that they have to do has become more complex over time.
Jason Teller:
Some of this isn’t too surprising in the way that, historically speaking, if you’re going to build something, it’s kind of a data first kind of approach, right? If you work at a bank, if you work for a small business, you need to make sure you capture the right data in order to get that work done. You may have regulatory requirements you have to fulfill, all that kind of stuff. But over time, it definitely gets pretty complicated. And then you have to ask yourself, is it really worth your users time to have to understand all of this and put it in the right place, then they make mistakes and other things can happen, and then you get a lot of downstream impacts, we like to call them.
Jason Teller:
But if something like a rich visual experience, something like what you can do with the sections and columns on a flow screen, you can update or create multiple records behind that. You really don’t have to rely on the user knowing the entire complex process and why should they right? I mean, we want people to feel good about the systems that they interact with every day because, hey, they have to interact with them every day.
Mike Gerholdt:
Speaking of complex processes, sometimes untangling the flows that you’ve built and why users are getting an error, I believe in Winter ’21 release you called it the “debug gifts” that we have for admins. Can you tell me about some of the new debugging features in Winter ’21?
Jason Teller:
Oh yeah, definitely. It’s been something that we get a lot of feedback on is that we love creating flows, we create different processes and things like that, but when something happens, there’s an error, so how do I troubleshoot? Because those are the times that I think can be very stressful for a lot of our admins, right? Especially if there’s errors and they’re getting phone calls going, “What’s going on here? I need to get my work done,” going back to the earlier point that I was making. And so we’ve been doing our best to sort of provide more and more functionality to help you in those types of situations, to essentially distress, a lot of that makes you lives a lot better.
Jason Teller:
And in Winter ’21, we are introducing even more debug features, and it’s not the end of it, we’re going to keep going with this. In the last release, we actually gave you the ability to do rollback and actually run a debugger inside of the Flow Builder. In Winter ’21, we’re building on top of that and basically we give you the ability with an auto launch flow to actually see essentially a visual path highlight of where what path this flow took as it actually ran.
Jason Teller:
And couple that with the ability now to do a lookup and specify the user that is actually running the flow, you now have the ability to really take a look at, because flows do run with the user permissions unless they’re triggered flows, which is sort of a different discussion that, that the user actually has. So you can run through that and make sure that that flow is running as you expect for that user. And at the same time by running it, we’ll have this visual path highlighting that we’ll like to see which path the “user” or which path has actually taken through that particular process.
Jason Teller:
Really just to help you speed up that troubleshooting process, to even help you speed up your building your flow process as well with these great features. And then definitely more to come. I hesitate to sort of talk a lot more about it, but you’ll be seeing what you can do with visual highlighting in our next release hopefully.
Mike Gerholdt:
I have to tell you as somebody who’s very visual, that part of Winter ’21 for me was exciting because I was finally able to not… It took the guesswork out of the path that that record took and when it was hitting those errors. I was very excited to see that. And then to debug as a user because, man, I can’t tell you the number of times it’d been like, “It works for me. Why doesn’t it work for them? What’s what’s going on here?” I enjoyed that.
Mike Gerholdt:
I think one of the really cool features that I would spend time on is making sure that when I opened up Flow Builder my flows looked good because, again, that visual aspect of lay things out, things in my head make sense, but now we have auto layout mode. Tell me how Auto-Layout Mode works.
Jason Teller:
Yeah. This is another great add we have for our Winter ’21 Release. It’s in beta in Winter ’21. And basically the idea behind Auto-Layout Mode is two things. One, we want to make flow building easier, right? We get a lot of feedback that there are aspects of Process Builder that people really like, one of which is just I get to click on stuff and then just fill out that particular note or that particular piece of information or that action that I need to actually have happen or that decision criteria. And then similarly, some of you folks may remember from RLs I did in the past, I did a lot of work around trying to eliminate blank canvas anxiety, where do I go next, right? I’m looking at this sort of big white expanse and sort of scratching my head as to what to build.
Jason Teller:
Auto-Layout gives us the ability to provide an easy bit of guidance and just make flow building a lot more straightforward and a lot easier, right? The way it works is you basically start a new flow in Auto-Layout Mode, and it’ll start you with the start node, which is usually a good place to start, and then you go ahead and click on a little plus symbol. And when you click on the plus symbol to add an element to the canvas, you can then scroll through and select which element you actually want to add. And when you do that, then you get the pop-up that says, give it a name, get a label, et cetera. And so then you can basically build out your flow sort of step by step and piece by piece. And the layout’s all done for you, the up to down and then all the decisions and whatnot coming out of those as well.
Jason Teller:
It’s a really great way of not having to deal with the freeform and exactly where should I put this and whatnot, and just a nice sort of step-by-step process with auto layouts.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Or just throw everything on there. For all of the power that Flow can do, now we have even more, right? Analogy back to when I was a child, we had He-Man, he would raise the sword and become He-Man. I feel like that happened in Winter ’21 because of some of the triggers that you released. Specifically for me, this is a power that developers have had for a long time and I’m Peter Parker just getting bit by the Spider-Man, but I got trigger on delete now.
Jason Teller:
Mike, it’s funny you bring that up. I’ve actually got a great He-Man story.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, well, please share.
Jason Teller:
I was actually born in Taiwan and I went to kindergarten and first grade actually in Taiwan. And at the time, they were going to start producing the first He-Man action figure and the factory was actually in Taiwan. And so they needed to do a test of the new action figure along with the accessories and whatnot, and so they found the test population as my first grade class. And so every kid in the first grade… Actually, well, basically every boy in the first grade class got a He-Man action figure.
Jason Teller:
And this He-Man action figure looks like the He-Man action figure that you may actually recall seeing, but he had quite a few extra accessories. He had a shield that strapped on his back. He had a sword, which is quite famous for his sort of sword. He also had a spear and a bow and arrow, as well as I think there was another belt I think that got strapped onto him as well. Basically quite a number of additional accessories, and he didn’t necessarily, I think, turn quite as smoothly. I mean, clearly these were prototype action figures that we were given. And then they talked to us and wanted our feedback in terms of how much we liked the action figures.
Jason Teller:
And you have to remember none of the story or the branding had gone with this, right, because He-Man just was a totally new thing. And so we just got a bunch of these muscle dude action figures, at least that’s what we thought, with a somewhat medieval-looking theme going on. And so obviously that, I think, test went pretty well because not too long, I think probably a year or two after that, the actual He-Man action figure debuted in the market. But if I recall correctly, I think he only had a shield and a sword and that was it. Now, I do kind of regret, had I known at the time, maybe I shouldn’t have even opened it up because, I mean, imagine what the worth would be of a prototype He-Man that just frankly never existed.
Mike Gerholdt:
Wow. Wow. I am so into… I mean, I was a child of the 80s, but now looking back at all the toys that I had, I was like, “Why didn’t I keep that? That’s worth so much money now.” And I’m on eBay looking at toys like, “Oh.” But I caught on Netflix, there’s a documentary about the history of different 80s toys, and one of them is on He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and how this toy company invented that backstory. That is so incredible that you got to be part of that. Yeah, I mean, literally, you can buy some really fancy cars if you still had that toy or a really nice big house I would think.
Jason Teller:
Yeah. I was a first-grader, what did I know? I think I lost half the accessories six months later, which is kind of a bummer. And then the other part of the story is that every got a He-Man and the parents were not too happy that only the boys got He-Man, and so all the girls ended up getting Barbie dolls just to even it out, which is funny because that’s sort of the mentality back then. And of course, She-Ra came later, right, just to reflect the changing demographics and stuff. But anyway, it’s interesting as a first grader of you into the gender stereotypes and whatever pretty early on.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, understood. Anyway, trigger on delete, in my opinion, is how the prince turns into He-Man. Because as admins, we never had that power before. I never had that power to say when a record gets deleted to do something, and now in Winter ’21 we can do that. And I think we can do even more, right?
Jason Teller:
Yeah. There’s actually a lot that’s going on with the triggers in Winter ’21, for sure. I think you can probably see we have been building out trigger functionality in Flow, right? We started with our scheduled flows, which back to the theme of empowering admins as you mentioned with the delete trigger, basically admins can do batch jobs with scheduled flows. Then we added the capability to do before-save triggered field updates because that’s sort of the big, heavy use case, right? We looked at our information and it’s like 60, 70% of usage for triggers is to basically update fields, and before save is a very high-performance way to update fields. Which I really just want to point out we are listening to the feedbacks around performance, especially when it comes to Process Builder and things like that. And so a lot of these solutions are in line with that.
Jason Teller:
And then we introduced the after-save trigger, which is your more straightforward way of doing updates or changes, or frankly, any other sort of flow functionality you want to do as well. And then we came up on undelete trigger, which you’re right, has never really been a capability for admins. It’s something that was, I think, it was 24,000 idea exchange points, really wanting to be able to do a trigger on delete. And so really just the next step in our theme of really empowering admins, giving you the power of a developer inside a low-code solution like Flow.
Jason Teller:
And we took that even further. Beyond delete, we also have now the capability with triggers to use entry criteria. Basically, you can specify what criteria should apply before you run the flow, and this is a very fine point where I’m not sure it necessarily comes across in the builder experience. Because, again, we want to make things easy to build and things like that, but the flow doesn’t actually run unless the entry criteria are met. Things like Process Builder actually go ahead and run, and if the criteria are met they stop.
Jason Teller:
From a sort of performance perspective, it’s just the fact that it doesn’t run if it doesn’t need to is definitely a big, a big help. And so that’s one of the things that the entry criteria, you know, besides of course helping you isolate exactly what it is you want to run against which functionally makes a lot of sense, is helpful as well.
Jason Teller:
And yeah, we added additional functionality around things that Process Builder has like the ability to have it only trigger when the record is actually updated to meet the criteria. That’s another selection that you put in there. And then on top of that, one of the requests we’ve had is around being able to reference related record data in those auto launched flows that you’ve triggered from the record change triggers. And so we provide that capability as well to be able to then just go to the related record as you’re building it out and say, “I want this piece of information or make an update here on the related record.”
Jason Teller:
Yeah, lots of work we’re putting into the triggers. Really targeting what we’ve been trying to converge on, which is the sort of one-builder experience, right? We’ve got a lot of feedback that people didn’t like switching between automation tools. And so for us, we basically are saying that we want Flow to be your tool of choice. And I choose those words carefully because we really want to make it attractive to our admins to use flow and easy to use, and really not have to even think twice like, “Yeah, just go ahead and use Flow.”
Mike Gerholdt:
As I’m listening to this… Well, first of all, I have a lot of questions. But if I’m thinking through, I just listened to this podcast and my boss calls me in, says we have this new thing, and it feels kind of lightweight. Are you saying I should go Flow first?
Jason Teller:
I would say that if you can you should definitely try Flow first, right? Unless there are obvious gaps that you’re aware of in terms of the feature functionality or whatnot, definitely Flow first.
Mike Gerholdt:
Like it. As I’m thinking through, you mentioned before save and after save, and I want to be sure that I’m trying to think through all the questions that admins of varying skill levels may have. Why would I want something to execute? What is the benefit of before save versus after save?
Jason Teller:
I think the biggest benefit for before save really is around performance and simplicity, right? One, performance; two, simplicity. Before save is designed specifically for cases where you need to update fields. If you’re going to update fields, you should use a before-save trigger, and that allows you to do this on a really massive scale. I mean, performance is… I don’t remember the numbers right now off the top of my head. We mentioned them when we released before-safe trigger. I think it was close to, I want to say, around 10X faster. It’s a really, really big difference.
Jason Teller:
And as you probably know, when you’re doing trigger-based automation, your data set that you’re triggering off of is going to continue to grow. You might be doing nightly upload loads or something like that. It’s just going to keep getting bigger. If it is really around field updates, using something like a before save will future-proof you in the sense that as it continues to grow you don’t need to be concerned about performance and things like that.
Jason Teller:
That’s really, I think, the very targeted use case for before save. If you’re doing more actions and other types of field manipulation and things like that with maybe multiple records and et cetera, just more complex logic then the after save of trigger would definitely work for those types of use cases.
Mike Gerholdt:
And I know, and I’ll admit, people can correct me, but as an admin I didn’t really think about performance. But what I hear from you is performance is also just how quickly that page returns after the user clicks a button, right, and kind of giving that usability to the system where I might not have thought of that as an admin. Because I’ll be honest with you, I kind of didn’t think of that every now and then.
Jason Teller:
Yeah, that’s true. It’s definitely the ability to bring it back. But I also think that as an admin, right, as you’re getting more and more power, and you can do more and more with the system, you’re going to have more and more things happening behind the scenes, right, especially with these triggered automations and such. And so that’s something to keep in mind is that as your data grows, as your updates are continuing to grow, eventually that will be a performance type of consideration.
Jason Teller:
And we encountered some of these with Process Builder, which is why we’re sort of responding here with these types of feature functionality for Flow in particular. And so, yeah, it is something that we generally for sort of your average use case for a lot of the things you build, it’s not something that we want to say, “Oh, you have to think about it all the time.” But there are definitely cases where we know in the future if things are wildly successful, which we all hope they will be, this may come up; in which case, we want to make sure that you’re well equipped to handle those types of those types of use cases.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, always thinking scale, right? You don’t realize performance on your first flow, you realize it after you’ve built and added a bunch of different departments and you have millions of records to process.
Jason Teller:
Exactly. That’s a good point.
Mike Gerholdt:
That’s a good point. While we diverged briefly to talk about fun stuff like 80s toys and you were a first grader in Taiwan, I know in some of our other podcasts as we kind of wrapped up, we talked about board games and other fun stuff that some of the Salesforce people do. Do you have any fun stuff you’d love to share with our admins that they may also share in, besides collecting and overspending on 80s toys on eBay like I do?
Jason Teller:
Oh gosh. Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I have been cooking a little bit more. I did live in Switzerland for a while and so I’ve been trying to recreate some of those dishes since I won’t be visiting anytime soon.
Mike Gerholdt:
Man, is there a continent you haven’t lived on? You’ve lived on more continents than I’ve visited.
Jason Teller:
Yeah, there’s a couple.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, but, I mean, be a first grader in Taiwan, that’s pretty awesome. I’ve never even been to Switzerland. It’s on my list. You’ve lived there.
Jason Teller:
Yeah, I do try to get out and about. I do kind of believe in of global citizen type of things.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, 100%.
Jason Teller:
I’ve lived in Taiwan and then in Hawaii, which I think a lot of people are aware of. I basically grew up in Hawaii through high school, and then I went to college in Boston, and then I was out here. And then I went to business school in Singapore and in France, and then I lived in Switzerland and then I moved back here. That’s kind of the short hopping version of the places I’ve lived.
Mike Gerholdt:
Of the places you’ve lived, is there a dish or something that you really miss out that you can’t get?
Jason Teller:
There’s actually a couple, which is why I was trying to recreate some of them. There is one. There is one that is actually extremely challenging. I don’t know how interested the audience will be in these particular details, but-
Mike Gerholdt:
I don’t know. If it’s cooking, there’s a lot of people cooking now.
Jason Teller:
That’s true. It is somewhat related to cooking, but the challenge is that it’s just so basic that you can’t really do it. Like I said, I’ve been trying to make some of the dishes in Switzerland. I just really like the food a lot. I made a plum tart that’s super popular in Switzerland. Basically, it doesn’t involve much sugar, so it makes it very different from how tarts are made in the United States. Every single Swiss mother knows how to make a plum tart and they’ll make them like once a week for their kids, for the family. Some people eat them for breakfast. I made one of those and that worked out I think reasonably well.
Jason Teller:
The one thing that my wife and I both love, I took her to Switzerland, got her hooked as well right before we got married, is a dessert. It’s somewhat specific to this region near Gruyères, and it’s basically a meringue with double cream and that’s it. It sounds remarkably simple, but I think in a very classic Swiss fashion, it’s all in the details, right?
Jason Teller:
The meringue is actually very hard but extremely, extremely light. It’s the kind of thing where it touches your tongue and it just disappears. That’s how light it is, so it’s very sugary. The double cream is double cream, which is cold. It’s served cold, but it’s cream that is so thick that it’s called double cream. And it’s so thick that the US Dairy Board or the Dairy Council or whatever, doesn’t actually have a ranking that high, which is my hypothesis as to why it doesn’t exist in the United States.
Mike Gerholdt:
Wow.
Jason Teller:
You basically have very, very light sugar and crazy rich cream to the point it almost tastes like ice cream, and that’s a fantastic dessert. I love it because it’s so fundamental, but unfortunately, unless I go and find myself a cow to milk and learn how to make cream, it’s not really that possible. There are some shelf-stable British double creams you can get. But I mean, once you sort of have to cook it to shelf stabilize, it loses a lot of the flavor and whatnot, right? Fresh double cream with a Swiss meringue, I am stuck. I just don’t know how to try to recreate that.
Mike Gerholdt:
Plus, I feel like even if you could, it’s a different flavor because the cow that you’re getting it from here in the US eats different food and is in a different environment than the cow in Switzerland. The thing that I’m thinking of is, it sounds totally low brow, but I was at a Starbucks in London and I got a breakfast butty and they put HP Sauce on it. And I don’t know what it is, but it’s amazing. And I’ve had HP Sauce in the US and it tastes different. Maybe it’s the jet lag, I don’t know.
Jason Teller:
I definitely have had that experience. It does taste different in the United States, and I think you’re right. A lot of it just goes back to the ingredients. If you’re French or talk to the French, they’ll say it’s the terre. It’s not just wine, it’s everything that it applies to. But it is true. I think it is true. A lot of things just taste different in different parts of the world actually. And that’s something that I’ve noticed, as you said, even for things that probably ought to taste similar or the same, they definitely taste different.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Cool. Well, Jason, thanks for taking time out of the day to chat with us. I will include a link to the release preview. No spoiler, but you have a fun misting segment. People can catch up on that, and on top of learning about the important stuff, like all the new things in Flow. That’s very important, and I’ll include a link to the blog post where we talk more about the Winter ’21 features. And then it sounds like maybe we need to have you back in the future because there’s more cool things coming in Flow?
Jason Teller:
Oh, definitely. We’ve got so much stuff stored up we’re going to be delivering that I’d be very happy to come back and tell you more about it. Yeah, and thanks a lot, Mike, for having me on the podcast and really, really big thanks to the entire admin community. I mean, just going back to where we started, I joined this company because of how impressive this community actually is. And I’m really thrilled to see how much of an impact we can have and how excited people are about all the Flow features that we’re delivering, and so definitely excited to come back and tell you even more.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, it’ll be great. Thanks, Jason.
Jason Teller:
Thanks, Mike.
Mike Gerholdt:
Well, it was great to have Jason on the podcast. First time that he has been on our podcast. Promise you, probably not the last because he teased us out that there’s even more amazingness coming in all of the new Flow features. But three things that I learned in our conversation with Jason. One, blank canvas anxiety. Boy, I never put a term to that and it’s so true, and so that’s where auto layout mode comes to the rescue. Thank you, Jason, for putting a term to that and helping all of our admins make really fun and really nice layouts.
Mike Gerholdt:
The second is if you’re going to do update fields, use the before-save trigger in Flow. Again, if you’re going to update fields, use the before-save trigger in Flow. It just stood out to me because a lot of early automation that I did as a Salesforce admin was just simple updating fields, right? And the reason you use the before save is it increases performance. Always about performance, a big fan of that.
Mike Gerholdt:
And the third thing I learned in talking with Jason, well, how cool is it that he got to use a prototype toy? I mean, I’m a child of the 80s and it was kind of neat to hear him geek out and be one of the first to get a prototype toy. Who knows, maybe he got to inspire some stuff, but I thought it was really neat. I know I have a lot of fun. I secretly love all of my 80s toys at heart, so I would love for you to share with us on social. Tweet me a picture, do you still have a childhood toy that you play with? I do. In addition to some of my Transformers, I also have this big yellow semi that I got as a kid that I hang on to, but I would love to see the toys that you still have from your childhood. They’re just kind of fun things to bring back memories and hang around with every now and then. Oh, that’s right, I’ve still got this really fun tractor that I used to play with his kid.
Mike Gerholdt:
Anyway, I could do a whole podcast on toys. But really, you’re here to learn more about all things Salesforce Admin, and to do that I want you to go to admin.salesforce.com. There is so many resources there. And a reminder that if you love what you hear, be sure to pop on over to iTunes and give us a review. It helps iTunes bubble up the podcast so that more Salesforce admins find it, it helps them listen to it and enjoy all the fun stuff and learn fun facts about the people that are creating all the amazing tools that make us awesome admins like Jason.
Mike Gerholdt:
You can stay up to date with us for all things Salesforce admins. We are @SalesforceAdmns, no I on Twitter. You can find me on Twitter. I am @MikeGerholdt, and Jillian who also hosts the podcast is @JillianKBruce, so be sure to give us a follow. And with that, I want you to stay safe, stay awesome, and of course, stay tuned for the next episode and we’ll see you in the cloud.
Mike Gerholdt:
Everybody has different experiences growing up.
Jason Teller:
Yeah, that’s true. I did not learn how to surf. It’s actually a common misconception. At least when I was growing up, most people in Hawaii don’t know how to surf.
Mike Gerholdt:
Really?
Jason Teller:
Yeah.
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