Discover The Power of Console Apps with John Kucera

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with John Kucera, VP of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us to learn about the power of Console Apps, revamping Setup and Object Manager, and what’s coming up in the future.

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

Becoming the Secret Alfred

John started out building access databases in supply chain, “because my job was to figure out how to make sure we didn’t run out of 2,000 different brands of Pepsi.” Yes, with all the different sizes, brands, Kosher laws, and recycling laws, there are actually 2,000 different brands of Pepsi at any given time. John’s job was to negotiate pricing for the labels for all of these different brands, but the problem was they didn’t know how many they were buying at any given time.

After that project, John ended going to business school, but after doing some consulting realized that he didn’t like doing that at all. What he really enjoyed was building software, and that’s how he ended up at Salesforce. “The company is just so innovative and so willing to take big bets,” and over 9 years he’s got to be there for everything from Chatter to mobile and Salesforce One. “Now, with Lightning and Einstein, it’s just continually fun and interesting opportunities to build tools that people care about and use.”

John has 181 logins for Salesforce Orgs, and those are just the ones that he’s saved. As Mike says, he’s the secret Alfred for all the Salesforce Admin Batmans that are out there. He started with a free lead scoring app, back in the early days of marketing automation when that kind of thing cost at least $1,000 a month. The latest app is the Lightning Adoption Tracker (also free), which tells you how many people in your Org can use Lightning, and how many people are using Lightning and not switching back.

The Power of Console Apps

Being the Product Manager of them definitely influences his opinion, but John is a huge fan of Console Apps. “They’re the fastest way to work.” You used to have to pay for them, but in Lightning, they’re free. You also used to have to check a bunch of permissions boxes for each user, but now you just add profiles.

John’s team adds a lot of polish to everything they do, and for Lightning Console Apps they’ve had the opportunity to rethink the little things. One example he brought up is tabs. In classic, when you had too many tabs open you had this weird scroller that you’d need wait on, but in Lightning they’ve created a popup menu and added keyboard controls. There’s no more right-click-new-tab necessary, either. If you left click it automatically opens a new tab, and both stay loaded.

Why Lightning is Always Getting Better (and Faster)

John is also on the Lightning Now Tour, so he’s had a lot of chances to talk to customers from all over. “Our customers are geniuses, they always have new and interesting ideas and new and different questions,” John says, and the one thing he’s come away with a new appreciation for just how many different ways that people use Salesforce. From those who dive deep into Translations to others who dig into the Data Model or Components.

This diversity of uses and thinking is possible because, ultimately, Salesforce is a settings-driven platform. Instead of writing code, an Admin can just use Setup to make things happen, and they’ve tried to emphasize that in Lightning. As John says, “We give you the power so you don’t have to write code.” They’ve also added Aliasing in the Setup Tree, so you can find everything by its name from Classic: “You no longer have to speak Classic and Lightning.”

The Winter Release also comes with new Trailhead styling, which even extends to Setup. They’ve also used the redo as an opportunity to tighten up the visual presentation of information, making things just a little bit better everywhere. But most importantly, it’s even faster: “In every single release there are hundreds of people whose who job is making Lightning faster.”

For more insights, make sure to follow John on Twitter (@nothackedjk)

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