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Explore Product Management

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Describe why product management habits are important.
  • Understand how the Salesforce release schedule impacts admins.
  • Create a plan for preparing your organization to implement new Salesforce technology.

What Is Product Management?

Salesforce Product Management is all about managing Salesforce as a valuable product within your individual organization. It’s not just about maintaining the system—it’s about ensuring Salesforce delivers maximum value and return on investment (ROI) to your business. This involves a multifaceted approach that includes strategic planning, a deep understanding of business needs, solution design, staying current with Salesforce updates, implementing governance, and continuously improving your Salesforce implementation.

As a Salesforce admin, your role is to manage Salesforce as a product within your own organizations, ensuring it delivers maximum value and ROI. Here’s a breakdown of your product management responsibilities:

Strategic planning and vision: Define the business objectives that Salesforce helps achieve and plan the product’s lifecycle strategically. Communicate this vision to stakeholders, ensuring everyone understands the product’s purpose and how it aligns with organizational goals.

Understanding business needs and requirements: Act as a liaison between the business and Salesforce, translating business requirements into effective Salesforce solutions. Gather information from stakeholders, analyze their needs, and determine the best approach to meet those needs within Salesforce.

Solution design and implementation: Design and implement solutions that meet business requirements, using your deep understanding of Salesforce products, features, and best practices. Make informed decisions about using standard versus custom functionality, considering scalability, maintainability, and user experience.

Product roadmap and feature adoption: Stay informed about the latest Salesforce releases and product roadmap, understanding how new features and updates can benefit your organization. Partner with stakeholders to evaluate, prioritize, and implement relevant updates, ensuring the organization uses Salesforce to its fullest potential.

Governance and best practices: Establish and enforce governance strategies to manage Salesforce effectively. Define design standards, deployment processes, and user access controls to ensure consistency, maintain data integrity, and optimize system performance. Depending on the size and complexity of your organization, you can also create a Center of Excellence (CoE) involving key stakeholders to foster collaboration and decision-making.

Continuous improvement and optimization: Constantly look for ways to improve and optimize the Salesforce implementation. Gather user feedback, analyze system usage data, and identify areas for enhancement. Proactively address issues, implement process improvements, and recommend solutions that enhance efficiency and user satisfaction.

By fulfilling these product management responsibilities, you ensure Salesforce remains an asset that supports business objectives and drives organizational success. As an admin, you act as a product champion, maximizing the potential of Salesforce and enabling your organization to adapt and thrive in a constantly evolving technological landscape.

Establish and Maintain Governance

A governance framework, sometimes called a Center of Excellence, is crucial for driving digital transformation and ensuring companywide commitment to innovation, resource optimization, and compliance. This framework focuses on people, processes, and technology to achieve specific objectives, such as improving customer experience—and admins play a huge role in bringing this to life.

As part of the governance framework, you’re able to:

  • Advocate for system updates and user needs.
  • Align Salesforce technology with business objectives.
  • Provide expertise on security and technical debt.
  • Champion change and training to promote user adoption.
  • Increase innovation.

Even if your Salesforce instance doesn’t have any custom development, establishing a DevOps process to test and document declarative changes helps you maintain releases and inform governance practice.

Get Guidance from the Salesforce Optimizer

As a Salesforce admin, you’re responsible for managing the full lifecycle of your Salesforce instance, from implementing and overseeing new releases, to addressing any optimization needs.

Salesforce Optimizer is there to help you identify areas in your instance that you can refine for your organization and your users. You can run the Optimizer report from setup to review recommendations based on responsibility type to continue to improve your Salesforce instance. Each recommendation includes a status to help prioritize recommendations, results related to your specific Salesforce org, as well as a recommendation and estimated effort so you can effectively plan your time. Each result also provides Salesforce help articles so you can do further research.

Take a look at how you can run Salesforce Optimizer and take action on results:

Manage Salesforce Releases and Critical Updates

As a Salesforce admin, you play a crucial role in managing Salesforce releases and critical updates to ensure your organization benefits from new features and enhancements while minimizing potential disruptions. Salesforce periodically releases updates that improve the performance, security, logic, and usability of your Salesforce org, but that can affect your existing customizations. When these updates become available, Salesforce shows them in the Release Updates node in Setup.

To keep on top of release updates that affect your Salesforce instance, stay informed about the Salesforce release schedule, review release notes, identify potential impact to your Salesforce instance, and test the updates in a sandbox environment.

For assistance with prioritization, open up Release Updates from Setup. This highlights critical updates that may be automatically enabled or enforced by dividing them into these categories:

  • Needs Action: Update hasn’t reached the Complete Steps By date and steps aren’t done.
  • Due Soon: Complete Steps By date is approaching.
  • Overdue: Update is past the Complete Steps By date and steps aren’t done.
  • Archived: Update is completed.

You can get information about the update(s) by clicking View Details and can take action by clicking Get Started. This gives you access to do a test run and help to understand the impact of the changes with a step-by-step guide.

By following these strategies, you can effectively manage Salesforce releases and critical updates, ensuring your organization stays current with the latest platform advancements while maintaining a stable and secure environment. Remember, proactive planning, thorough testing, and clear communication are key to successful release management.

Implement New Salesforce Products

Agentforce

Product Management doesn’t just refer to overseeing your existing Salesforce instance, but also managing any new Salesforce products or applications installed from the AppExchange. As Salesforce adds new technology such as Agentforce, it’s your responsibility to research the technology, work with stakeholders to whiteboard use cases within your organization, and successfully launch and implement for users and customers.

As with any new Salesforce product release, you should work with both IT and stakeholders to gather different perspectives, ensure a successful rollout, and to gain buy-in. If your organization has a governance committee in place, that’s an excellent starting point! This partnership supports better adoption upon go-live. Agentforce (or any AI product) can feel a little scary and overwhelming to stakeholders that don’t have hands on the technology. A great way to secure this support is to demo Agentforce functionality to your stakeholders to set the stage for a collaborative discussion on how the technology can successfully go to work in your organization, saving time for users.

Show a quick demo that captures the power of Agentforce as a jumping-off point for your brainstorming. Rather than spending tons of time creating an organization- or industry-specific demo for your stakeholders, focus on showing them how the technology works and giving a more general demo of the features. Then, you can brainstorm ways this can affect your custom business use cases. That gives you tangible takeaways to go build your company’s first agent based on your mission and priorities. It also gives your stakeholders something to be excited about. They can be your advocates when you launch Agentforce, so that you’re set up for success on user adoption.

Use the AppExchange

The AppExchange is an online marketplace of Salesforce-approved applications and technology partners that you can use. The AppExchange enhances your ability to customize, extend, and optimize Salesforce for your organization by using prebuilt solutions—which also saves valuable time.

As the Salesforce trusted marketplace, the AppExchange should be a regularly reviewed resource. Visit it often to see what’s available for your industry, get ideas about how you can optimize your own work with assets such as Flow templates and Lightning components, and grow user adoption and engagement. The AppExchange also provides trusted reviews, so admins can rely on peer ratings to select the most effective solutions.

By using the AppExchange, you can become a strategic enabler within your organization, delivering impactful solutions while maintaining agility and efficiency.

Resources

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