Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Nick McOwen, Senior Salesforce Administrator at Alpine Intel. Join us as we chat about his path to Salesforce and the TDX workshop he gave about the development lifecycle, sandboxes, and data masking.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Nick McOwen.
Nick is the second touring musician I’ve had on the show this month—I promise I’m not raiding a recording studio somewhere just to find podcast guests. He was waiting tables in between gigs when a guest called him over to ask if he might want to try something different. A chance encounter turned into an entry-level job and, eventually, an admin certification.
I caught up with Nick fresh off his workshop at TDX, where he shared how he uses sandboxes and data masking to build new agents and apps for his organization.
They say every warning sign has a story behind it, and the same goes for best practices in Salesforce. Luckily, Nick had Salesforce MVP Kelly Bentubo around to show him the ropes. He learned about the importance of consistent naming practices, managing user expectations, and having a structured deployment process instead of building in production.
Recently, Nick was tasked with building a new recruiting app for his organization. He was able to spin up a sandbox with an app they had already built and, using that foundation, quickly reconfigure it to meet the new requirements.
Once the app was in good shape, Nick moved it up to a staging sandbox environment for testing. There, he could copy data over from production and use data masking to keep everything secure. Once everything was thoroughly vetted, it was finally ready to be deployed into production.
Recently, Nick’s been taking advantage of Agentforce Vibes to work more closely with his dev team. He was able to write an Apex class and, while the code isn’t perfect, he was able to go through it with a developer to learn what was working, what wasn’t, and why. “It was a great launching point,” he says, “something that would have taken days was written in an hour.”
For Nick, the most important thing admins need to do to get the most out of Agentforce Vibes is to learn the basic underlying principles of Apex and coding. It’s just like using a calculator—you still need to have some way of knowing if the answer you’re getting is in the right ballpark.
Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Nick for more on sandboxes, data masking, testing, and why AI is a new opportunity to grow. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.
Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, I’m joined by Nick McOwen, which means now I’ve started a trend of having former musicians who become Salesforce admins as guests. Anyway, Nick is going to show us how he went from touring in a band and waiting tables to leading Salesforce projects that involve sandboxes, data masking, deployment processes, and AI assisted development. We talk about the early build it in production and hope for the best admin days, how Agentforce Vibes is changing the way admins approach coding and why today’s Salesforce admins are becoming orchestrators of systems instead of just builders of features.
There’s also a little Apex talk and surprisingly deep analogy involving semi-trucks and AI because you know my analogies and a confirmation that developers will always think their code is prettier. So hit subscribe, share this episode with your favorite Salesforce admin and let’s get Nick on the podcast.
So Nick, welcome to the podcast.
Nick McOwen:
Hey, Mike, it’s great to be here.
Mike:
Well, I was introduced to you through a couple product managers at Salesforce that are always on the hunt for finding good Salesforce admins and you were also presenting with them in the admin track. So before we get to that, let’s learn a little bit about Nick. How did Nick get started doing Salesforce and be in the ecosystem?
Nick McOwen:
Well, it was a complete fluke. I had been touring in a band and we just kind of stopped playing music and I was waiting tables at a country club and one of the members was, “Do you want to keep waiting tables?” I said, “Not particularly.” So got me a job doing the entry level position at the company and I realized I didn’t want to be doing that either.
So I went to the developer at the time who was also the CIO and the CTO and said, “I’m going to learn Salesforce.” And he kind of looked at me in the way that an adult might look at a middle schooler who said, “Watch me hit this three point shot.” And I eventually learned it after a few misses, but they decided to take a risk on me and many, many years later here I am working with Agentforce agents writing a little bit of Apex here and there. And yeah, it just didn’t intend to get here, but here I am.
Mike:
I mean, people are going to think I went down and raided the local music festival because not but a couple weeks ago I just had Adam Stark on who was also a musician that became a Salesforce admin. So apparently it’s a trend.
Nick McOwen:
Yeah, that’s the track. That’s the track line for most musicians, I guess.
Mike:
Yeah. I mean, let’s see. Should I be like an ’80s metal hair band or an admin?
Nick McOwen:
Oh, that’s a tough call.
Mike:
I know, right? Let’s talk about some of the stuff that you presented at TDX because you covered a lot of things in terms of development life cycle and sandboxes and I felt like you were in that area for stuff that admins are interested in and kind of that next level of their career building apps.
Nick McOwen:
Yes. It was a talk that focused around seeding sandboxes masking data and my experience with that and it’s funny because prior to the presentation at TDX, shout out to Allie and Sam, I was talking to them and they were running a booth and they were saying how many people that they’d talked to who didn’t use sandboxes or didn’t quite see the value in sandboxes. And so I realized that this talk probably had a lot more impact than I thought it was going to be. My particular use case was how we had rebuilt an app that our recruiting team was using for our field agents and how we spun up a sandbox specifically for it, rebuilt everything using the foundation of the app that was already there and got to test in a secure environment, move it up to our staging environment and then production. So it was an interesting experience and an eye-opening one too, getting to talk to everybody.
Mike:
I mean, to be fair, I don’t think when I started as an admin, I really had to pay attention to what my organization’s life cycle for app development was because you’re kind of, and in this case, and I don’t know about your company, but you’re kind of a small scrappy unit and maybe they got Salesforce for like 20 or 30 people. I mean, nine times out of 10, I was just building stuff in a dev org to make sure it worked and then literally just not even deploying it, rebuilding it in production and Monday afternoon being like, “Okay everybody, so there’s a new field on the account.” I think back to those days of like, “Wow, what was I doing?”
Nick McOwen:
100% identify with that because that is exactly how I more or less learned when we were first starting out because like I said, it was just the developer and then me and we had to get things done because it was a startup environment, things move fast and so it was tested in the sandbox and then move it. And I didn’t want to bother him so I wasn’t using change sets and so I would make a field or whatever he asked me to make and then rebuild it in production when nobody was working and just, yeah, it was loose and fast.
Mike:
I mean, nine times out of 10 when I was building things in my dev org, I wasn’t paying attention to naming. I was just trying to like proof of concept and so I never wanted to package anything up because I didn’t want to move it over because I was like, “Well, when I get to production, that’s when I’m going to make the names nice and shiny.”
Nick McOwen:
Yeah, I remember we brought on Kelly Bentubo, MVP. She sat me down and was like, “All right, we’re going to start fixing some of these habits,” which totally warranted. And I mean, she was great at helping me understand the value in the consistent naming, the process aspect of everything. So she really elevated my abilities and my use cases and everything.
Mike:
So as somebody that just started, obviously went from waiting tables, which by the way, 20% tip is not excessive. It just means that you got everything good and on time, you should tip more. Thank you for attending my waiter tipping TED Talk. Just getting into this and thinking, okay, I guess these are bad habits. I bet you had the same bad habits I did. What was the first things that she kind of tackled? You mentioned some of it was naming. Did she help you set up sandboxes and kind of a deployment life cycle?
Nick McOwen:
So we had the sandboxes and she came on at the time when the dev team was starting to grow and the company itself was starting to grow. So we needed more organization and she kind of sat me down and helped me with these processes, like how to move it up through the environments, the value of making sure that everything is tested within the sandbox environment and then user management, which I think is something that I relied on when I first started. It wasn’t necessarily that I knew what I was doing a lot, but I knew how to put on like a waiter attitude so to speak. And if somebody asked for something and I didn’t know what I was doing, it was just that kind of like, “Oh, I didn’t burn your steak, but let me make this better for you.” And so through talking with Kelly, I kind of like refined how to shape expectations for users.
If I couldn’t figure something out, then she would kind of help coach me through the deployment issues or level setting and expectations with users, which that was a big one.
Mike:
I mean, I think that also we’ve talked about order taker admins before and it’s very easy to sit across the desk from somebody and listen to them be like, “Oh yeah, this is totally easy to do,” or, “I have no idea what I’m going to do.” And then say, “Yep, let me just work on it and kind of forget that maybe there’s bigger things in the organization they need to pay attention to as opposed to everything that comes in front of me right away.” Let’s get into that recruiting app that you built. Was that your first kind of get your hands dirty in the org per se, building something new for the organization?
Nick McOwen:
That was my first project that I led from start to finish. I got the specs from the higher ups. They said, “This is roughly what they’re asking for, figure it out.” And immediately went to the recruiting manager and said, “Okay, let’s figure out how we want this to look.” And we had an app that was already built and I knew that the foundation of that app was great. And so it was really a matter of building off of those blocks and reconfiguring it, re-imagining how it could be used and then future-proofing it so that it could scale as the business grew. And it was definitely a lesson in organization and communication, which is good. Always want to keep learning and growing.
Mike:
Yeah. So let’s dig deeper into that organization communication. What organizationally, do you mean the way that you organized stuff, understanding your company’s organization, a little bit of both?
Nick McOwen:
A little bit of both. For me, it was keeping track of everything that was getting worked on, making sure that we were trying to document the change in processes and communicating those changes to the business side so that they would know, you might not interact with this functionality, but this is what’s going to happen to get you this result. And that it sounds pretty straightforward, but I think that can get lost sometimes on people, especially in larger projects where it seems peripheral and intuitive, but it might be what’s intuitive to someone who built it might not be for the person that’s going to end up using it.
Mike:
Yeah, which leads into communication. I always feel you can’t communicate enough. I feel with every project I’ve ever worked on, you always learn more about communication. What did this first jump in kind of give you in terms of maybe some best practices that you follow now or stuff that you learned really quick?
Nick McOwen:
I think the accountability aspect maybe was if you presented an idea and it’s kind of your child and you say, “What do you think about this, huh?” And then the end user going, “No, that’s not going to work for us.” There’s like a little bit of an ego bruise where you think, “That was a really good idea though.” Maybe it wasn’t, but then kind of absorbing that critique and then using it to build something that you know is going to work and not being stuck ruminating on the fact that your idea didn’t get accepted, that was kind of a lesson because prior to that it was somebody else’s idea or I was building something that was given to me. It wasn’t as personal, but that was the first time I got told, “Hey, I don’t like that.”
Mike:
Yeah, that can always… It’s funny because you almost want your cake and eat it too, right? I don’t want to take the rejections personal, but you 100% take the wins personal and it’s like you can’t have both. You really do though because it does feel like, “Well, no, I know how this thing works and I promise this will really work for you, but you’re just not seeing it.” And that can be the frustration that I always ran into.
Nick McOwen:
Exactly. And then even after I built it, my bosses came up and they said, “What is this object?” Oh, well, I made that because that was giving the solution to the end user and they said, “Hmm, well, why didn’t you do this?” I was like, “Ah, I don’t know why I trusted my gut and stuck to it.”
Mike:
Right. Well, this is the way it is now. Let’s talk about, I feel like that’s always the first part. Your path into Salesforce, they always talk about individuals that grew up and like I was in high school in the 90s just to date myself, but I remember in middle school there was no internet and when I got to high school, you could go to the library and check out the internet for 15 minutes on a computer. I bring that up to say, obviously now everything’s online and I don’t know how I even got anything done in 15 minutes with dial-up modems back then, but apparently I did. You kind of came in to the Salesforce ecosystem at about the same kind of inflection point with AI in that there’s really best practices and development aspects to learn, but then, oh, hey, by the way, now we’ve got a lot of new stuff coming like Agentforce Vibes.
How did you kind of balance those two that learning path? Because I think it would be very easy to, “I don’t need to learn this. Vibes can do it for me.”
Nick McOwen:
I think that’s something that is incredibly important in this time with the ubiquity of AI and how many people are using it. I think people need to become literate in AI. I don’t mean learning how to program large language models or even write agents, but just understand how it functions. And in the context of Salesforce, I remember I first started getting into the predictive analytics for Einstein and thinking, “Oh, this is super cool.” We didn’t end up going that route, kind of kept my eye on everything going and then Agentforce came out and started learning that. And it feels like every couple weeks something’s getting rolled out, which is exciting because there’s always something to learn and I don’t know, I would hate to be stagnant and have to do the same thing over and over for 20 or 30 years. So it’s a blessing and a curse to have a product that constantly evolves for you to learn. So it’s exciting.
Mike:
I think you covered Agentforce Vibes in your TDX workshop. What have you done in Agentforce Vibes?
Nick McOwen:
Shockingly, I made an Apex class and a test class that-
Mike:
Hey.
Nick McOwen:
If you had asked me…
Mike:
It’s kind of what it’s there for, right?
Nick McOwen:
Yeah. The musician that could barely string sentences together is all of a sudden writing Apex classes and test classes. I mean, if you asked me even a year ago, “Hey, Nick, would you think you could write an Apex class?” I was like, “Yeah, give me a couple years so I can write it line by line over days.”
Mike:
Sure. Let me put an ad out on Craigslist and see if I can get a developer to do it.
Nick McOwen:
Yeah. I would’ve laughed if somebody said that and then all of a sudden this product comes out, which actually Allie and Sam, when we were doing our … We did a webinar for the sandbox seating and data masking and they were talking to me about the Agentforce Vibes and I said I hadn’t really looked into it. And so after that talk, I started to and that kind of encouraged me to look into the foundations of Apex and coding languages. So it wasn’t just learning Agentforce Vibes and how to use it. It was also getting a base understanding of the underlying principles. And so through that journey, I was able to use Vibes to write an Apex class and then I could take that class to the developers and then the developers would look at it and go, “Well, my Apex is better, but we’ll use yours.” And corrected a couple things because…
Mike:
Wow, you really nailed the developer intent like mine’s better, but we’ll use your…
Nick McOwen:
It could be flawless code and still, mine’s prettier. No, I do. I enjoy working with all those guys and they were great helping walk me through everything and showing me, “Okay, this is where Vibes made this. This is the intent but it doesn’t quite hit. Here’s how we’re going to fix that. Walk me through.” And it was a great launching point. Something that would have taken days was written in an hour.
Mike:
Oh, wow.
Nick McOwen:
We’re not talking thousands of lines here. It was-
Mike:
No, but still.
Nick McOwen:
150. Yeah. And then the test class on top of that, it saved us a ton of time.
Mike:
If you threw me in jail and said, “You’re out when you write 150 lines of Apex class,” I’ll be like, “What’s for dinner?”
Nick McOwen:
I’ve been be here for a while. Let me get some furniture.
Mike:
We’re going to be here for a few years. Do I get a shave every now and then every few weeks to keep me from looking scruffy? I mean, I was so impressed getting the admin track ready for TDX this year with the submissions that admins had. I watched them demo vibes and just use the planning tab and really kind of have vibes spell out like, “Here’s everything you need to do and here’s kind of an action plan.” And I felt like natively some people had that, but for a lot of people, wow, this was really helpful because I had this monster of an application but I didn’t know where to start and it wasn’t just, “Oh, I have to vibe code this super hard application.” It’s like, “No, this is actually just helping me get my steps down.”
Nick McOwen:
I’m excited for the future of the vibes and Salesforce integration, specifically with your organization’s metadata and being able to find, where are these fields referenced? What would happen if I did this? I think when that becomes a reality, it could be something that’s really cool. And I imagine that’s something that’s possible if it’s not already. I’m not a vibes connoisseur just yet, but I think something like that would be incredibly beneficial. How many times have you tried to figure out where an error is coming from on the admin side and you just go, “Well, I hope a developer has time to help me figure out this error.”
Mike:
That, or how many times do you go to delete something and you can’t because there’s a dependency and then you spend the next four hours chasing all of the dependencies just to get that one thing done. I mean, the benefit the listeners have is last week on the podcast they heard from Khushwant Singh who was literally leading our Headless 360 development. And I mean, I asked him, I was like, “Do you envision a world where a Salesforce admin sits down and talks to Salesforce to build the application?” And he’s like, “Yes.” I mean, not forward-looking statement, not by Dreamforce, but that’s the rubber band that I think everybody with AI is going to is, “Well, if we make the AI smart enough that it can actually build and rebuild the applications that it’s running, why wouldn’t you?”
Nick McOwen:
Yeah. And being on the other side of the wall, so to speak, to be frank, it can be scary on the tech side because you think, “Oh, is this something that’s going to replace me?” But having talked to people, it’s also an opportunity to learn and grow. And if that’s something that you want to do, then you grow and you adapt. I kind of think of it like painting and photography when the photograph came out all the painters like, “Oh, that’s poo, poo, poo, throw it out stinky cabbage and it’s a tool.” And then it kind of grew into its own path and now it’s a separate form of art for most people, I’ll say, but I kind of see similarities in that sort of mistrust of this new technology and maybe not everybody wants to be an admin for the rest of their life and they’ll go and be an artisan baker or make candles or something. I think that’s great. That’s the beauty of life.
Mike:
Yeah. No, I mean, I’ve had the very same discussion too of, well, is AI going to take your job? And I think of it like I happen to think of it as you see a lot, you look out on interstate, you see a lot of big semis go down the road and is it really cheating that the guy’s driving the semi to move 80,000 pounds? If he has to get some steel from California to Pittsburgh or Pittsburgh to California, it’s kind of silly to think that a person would pull that. No, they’re going to use a vehicle that is optimized for moving that kind of capacity and payload. And I look at the way we use AI in the same ways. It’s not cheating for me to use AI. It’s I’m using my skill to navigate and move and maneuver the AI to produce the product that I want the same way that the truck driver navigates the semi through traffic and road construction and busy city streets to get the product from A to B.
Nick McOwen:
And to that point, exactly like you said, you’re using the tool to build what you’ve envisioned and it is a tool and I think people need to be careful not to rely on it as their brain and we need to keep learning the foundations of Apex so that if you do use Vibes to write 2020 lines or something, you can sit down and look at it and see, okay, where might this be going wrong What do I actually know about this? So using it as a tool and not your brain replacement, I guess, be-
Mike:
Right. It’s the same way we had to, your math teacher was telling you to use a calculator. You should know the answer before it tells you.
Nick McOwen:
I mean, I look back now and how frustrating that was as a kid to be told, can’t use your calculator and now so many years later it’s, well, now that makes sense. Now I see why they said you can’t use your calculator.
Mike:
And it does help. I think the irony is I didn’t realize how much I needed a calculator until I sold shoes for a living because people always wanted to know, well, how much are these? They’re 10% off or they’re 25% off. And I learned the little trick of how you find 10% of anything because once you find 10% of a number, you can literally find any number. And so somebody would ask you like, “Well, they’re 39.99, but they’re 25% off. Well, how much is that?” And you’re like, “Okay, so 10% is 390 and 20 would be 390 times two, and then 25% would be 390 times two and then half of 390.” And you do the math really quick in your head, which I’m not going to do right now, but it’s around what, like six, eight, 10 bucks, something like that. And you tell them like-
Nick McOwen:
They can work for that.
Mike:
“Wow, how’d you do that so fast?” And you’re like, “Because I can do math in my head.”
Nick McOwen:
This is going to turn into a math hacks podcast.
Mike:
No, never. It’ll be a food podcast before that, but I did want to cover… So one thing you did talk about that I haven’t covered on the podcast is data masking. And I feel like it’s because I’ve never really ran into it as a use case for me anyway, but it’s not that I don’t understand it, but what was kind of the use case that you guys ran into for really needing to make sure that you used data mask in… I mean, you used it in a sandbox, right?
Nick McOwen:
Yes. So very relevant to me at the moment. We’re in the process of a big build and to get prepared for that we spun up a sandbox and needed accounts and contacts and we could have made it one by one. That would’ve just been cumbersome. We didn’t really have the time for that. So we seeded it and then masked all of the data. So now we’ve got dozens of contacts for each account and we needed to be able to test email deliverability, but you don’t want to send a test email to your clients.
Mike:
No.
Nick McOwen:
“Why did I get this test? What test-“
Mike:
“Oh, it’s just us testing things. Thanks.”
Nick McOwen:
Yeah. And then all of a sudden you get a pink slip in the mail, but no, nobody wanted that for anybody. So we changed and masked all the data, removed all the personal information, made scrambled emails, phone numbers, anything that could potentially link to a client and all of a sudden we’ve got a fresh sandbox with no real contacts and information. We were able to go in there, test the email deliverability safely and then once we proved out our process could move it up to the larger sandbox environments and eventually into prod. So without that masking feature, we’re spending time one by one creating contacts and filling out information.
Mike:
Yeah. And I mean, the goal is when you’re building something, you always want to… I want to test it on as real of data as possible and or if I’m bringing in a consultant or somebody, they also don’t need this data. They just need it to act like data. They don’t actually need to understand what that data is. I think that’s always incredibly valuable.
Nick McOwen:
And in the context of training agents, you don’t want to just unleash an agent in your production environment and go, “Well, I hope this works.”
Mike:
Oh, very true.
Nick McOwen:
If you start testing it in a sandbox environment but you’re skewing the data or you’re giving it biased data, then you’re not going to get a representation of how it’s going to function in the production environment. So to be able to seed it with randomized realistic data, you have a better environment to then build and train that agent to move to production.
Mike:
Yeah. You don’t want it thinking that you have 15 random widgets that you sell.
Nick McOwen:
This is working great. Wow.
Mike:
Yeah. Look at it. It’s going to build the widgets for us and then you put it in production and the agent realizes everything’s a lot more complicated.
Nick McOwen:
Yeah. Then you’re sweating.
Mike:
Yeah. Well, the agent’s not, you are. I guess as we kind of wrap things up, if you were to go back to the Nick when he was learning Salesforce and getting into this, is there anything you would tell yourself to do differently that you wish you’d done at the beginning?
Nick McOwen:
That’s a tough one. I think what was important for me learning was having the ability to create a sandbox in Trailhead and really just explore the things that interested me and follow the paths of the things that interested me. I mean, if I’m going to be real nitpicky, maybe spend some more time trying to learn the foundations of Apex because it can be frustrating as an admin to have this brilliant idea and then not have a developer have time to be able to help flesh out that idea although there’s a product now that’s kind of doing that. But that would probably be if pie in the sky, do it again, learn a little bit more about coding.
Mike:
Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, for as much as every application builds front end usability stuff, there’s still always code running somewhere that somebody’s going to have to upkeep and build more of too. Well, very cool, Nick. Thanks for coming to speak at TDX. I know sandboxes and data seating and data masking can fall farther down on people’s popular list in terms of cool fun stuff to see, but it’s very important. I’m glad you also came on the podcast and talked about it and gave people some tips. So thanks.
Nick McOwen:
It’s been a blast. Thanks for having me.
Mike:
Huge thank to Nick for joining me this week and proving that sometimes the path to writing Apex starts with playing in a band and waiting on tables. We covered everything from the startup style deployment chaos to Agentforce Vibes, data masking, AI literacy, and the universal admin experience of chasing dependencies for a few hours just to delete one field. What stood out to me most is how the admin role is evolving into systems of thinking and understanding not just what gets built, but how humans and automation and AI all interact together.
Now, if you like this episode, please subscribe, share it with another Salesforce admin that you may know or maybe spin up a sandbox before making changes directly in production tonight. Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.
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