Salesforce developers play an integral yet often overlooked role in helping businesses unlock productivity and efficiency gains across departments.
But what exactly does their day-to-day work entail and how do they contribute to business growth?
Let’s break it down.
Customizing Platforms to Streamline Work
Salesforce developers spend time customizing and enhancing Salesforce to meet their company’s specific business needs. This involves activities like:
Creating customized apps, workflows, and automation processes to coordinate work between sales, service, and marketing departments
Building intelligent forms and data fields so teams can capture rich customer information
Designing intuitive interfaces using tools like Lightning and Visualforce to improve ease of use
The goal is to boost teams’ efficiency by creating tailored solutions that fit company workflows, not the other way around.
Integrating Systems for a Unified View
Salesforce developers also stitch together all the tech a business needs. They build tight integrations with essential systems like:
Marketing platforms to align customer outreach with contact history
Payment solutions to centralize billing and invoicing
Support and eCommerce tools to deliver excellent post-sales care
This connectivity provides employees with a comprehensive 360-degree customer view within Salesforce, enabling them for smarter, more personalized interactions.
Collaborating Cross-Functionally to Solve Business Challenges
Delivering these customized solutions requires close collaboration with stakeholders across departments including:
Product managers to spearhead enhancements that drive adoption and ROI
End-users to continually gather feedback for future iteration
Executives plan in alignment with overarching business objectives
This cross-functional teamwork ensures every Salesforce project tackles core business challenges — not just IT priorities.
Providing Ongoing Maintenance and Training
Finally, a Salesforce developer maintains existing deployments while continuing user education through:
Resolving issues, troubleshooting errors, and improving performance
Testing each Salesforce update and new functionality thoroughly before pre-release
Running ongoing training sessions to foster employee adoption
This balancing act between maintenance, innovation, and education is crucial for extracting maximum value from the Salesforce ecosystem long-term.
Hard and Soft Skills
Let’s explore the core competencies — both hard skills and soft skills — that allow Salesforce developers to not just survive, but also thrive in their roles.
Owning the Salesforce Platform
First and foremost, Salesforce developers need to intimately understand the Salesforce ecosystem. This entails gaining expertise across:
- Core development languages like Apex and Visualforce to build custom apps and logic
- Integration tools like APIs and ETL to enable data flows between Salesforce and other business systems
- Emerging technologies like Lightning Web Components to craft responsive user experiences
Mastering these technical competencies allows developers to customize and tailor Salesforce platforms to align with each company’s unique workflows, processes, and data infrastructure.
Collaborating Cross-Functionally
While technical knowledge is mandatory, Salesforce developers also have interpersonal and collaborative skills for delivering solutions tailored to business needs.
Specifically, Salesforce developers must master the art of:
- Actively listening to different stakeholders during requirements-gathering sessions
- Translating complex business goals into technical solutions everyone can understand
- Conveying technical recommendations clearly to executives and cross-functional partners
Developing these “soft” skills leads to building trusted relationships, securing buy-in across teams, and ensuring all solutions drive shared objectives forward together.
Approaching Problems Creatively
With businesses relying so heavily on their Salesforce ecosystems, developers also need to become adept creative problem solvers able to troubleshoot issues and prevent costly disruptions.
This involves competencies like:
- Logically diagnosing complex technical issues across integrated components
- Designing comprehensive test plans before each deployment or upgrade
- Conducting root cause analyses of problems to prevent future recurrence
By taking ownership of quality and uptime, developers reinforce reliability while unlocking more strategic value from Salesforce investments.
What does a typical Salesforce Developer day look like?
Salesforce developers juggle an array of technical and strategic responsibilities that empower organizations to transform customer engagement. But what does a typical day entail for these unsung heroes working behind the scenes?
Let’s peek into the daily rhythm driving success within Salesforce development teams.
- Kicking off Core Projects
The Salesforce developer starts their morning by grabbing coffee and reviewing the sprint backlog or queue of projects tied to business objectives. They scope out tasks, from building a customized lead-scoring algorithm to crafting an intuitive UI for service agents.
After prioritizing requests with stakeholders, they map out a game plan for tackling coding projects — documenting edge cases, planning testing protocols, etc. — before diving into development work.
- Collaborating Closely with Cross-Functional Partners
Around mid-day, our developers break from their latest creation to sync up with administrators, end-users, and executives overseeing organizational change management.
In this meeting, they demonstrate an early version of the customized workflow and gather feedback from cross-functional perspectives. Colleagues share on-the-ground challenges, flag additional use cases to cover and help fine-tune requirements.
Afterward, armed with this 360-degree input, the developer fine-tunes technical specifications to ensure the solution streamlines processes for every intended user.
- Maintenance and Monitoring
Later in the afternoon, when focus wanes, developers shift to less intensive but equally important work – conducting overdue platform upgrades, researching innovations soon to be released by Salesforce, or resolving pesky bugs reported recently.
This maintenance ensures continuity for colleagues who rely on Salesforce infrastructure day-to-day. It also guarantees stability before launching new projects.
By the end of the day, the developer had made substantial progress customizing Salesforce to drive business priorities through cross-team collaboration. They wrapped up by outlining the next steps to carry momentum into tomorrow’s objectives.
While intense focus and technical prowess drive individual contributor success, Salesforce developer effectiveness stems from blending strategic alignment, user empathy, and quality assurance into daily work.