Dawid's Newsletter: No. 1
This weekly newsletter is about what I thought was interesting in the last week. Usually includes Technology, Salesforce, innovation, ways of working.
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️✏️ My blog posts
Salesforce Summer ‘20 Highlights for Designers. Link
🚀 Innovation
Design Thinking vs Grand Design: How WeChat used the Grand Design principle. Link. There is a shift in thinking that Design Thinking may be too incremental and requires high levels of effort (lots of people, workshops). The alternative view is the Grand Designer view. A Steve Jobs type mindset where one person owns the vision from end to end and is in the detail. Design Thinking can still support the journey. My own Design Thinking practice has scaled down from large bodies of motion to very small groups and more independent work, so far I have found this better.
☁️ Salesforce things
Salesforce Code Builder: Web based IDE powered by Visual Studio Code Spaces, in pilot from 25 June. Replaces need for desktop app. Link
Salesforce CDP, Interaction Studio, Thunderhead and Evergage: Last year Salesforce announced Customer Audiences 360, the Salesforce CDP solution. In February Salesforce acquired Evergage, a market leading personalisation and CDP solution, holding #1 spot on the “Personalisation Engine” Gartner Magic Quadrant. This replaces Thunderhead as the engine for Interaction Studio. Customer Audiences 360 is the Salesforce CDP, with Evergage handling personalisation and activation. In short, Customer Audiences 360 will unify all your data, and Evergage/Interaction Studio will handle the decisioning, AI, and channel activation. Note, Evergage can do stand alone CDP if needed. I’m currently working on a CDP/Personalisation for dummies post. GA for Customer Audiences 360 is scheduled for October.
Summer ‘20 - For Designers: Production releases by July 18. Key highlight for designers is dynamic forms and actions. These replace page layouts and allow fine control of where and when fields are displayed on a lightning record page. Fields are able to be placed on individual components, so you could have different fields on different tabs and columns. You also specify the criteria of when fields should be displayed, eg. if a status is ‘in progress’, only show certain fields. This combined with flow, in-app guidance and path guidance should dramatically increase usability and adoption of Salesforce. My full post here
Summer ‘20 - Others highlights:
Einstein Search - use natural language queries in global search, eg. “Open Cases assigned to Bob”.
Flow - Launch flow from record change, makes this a replacement for a trigger, enhancements to sharing options.
Salesforce Optimiser - tool that recommends things to tidy up your org, eg. unused reports.
📗 Reading/Watching/Listening
Great interview with the founder of Wordpress on the 5 levels of remote work and how most companies are at level 2 right now. Link
GitLab’s remote work playbook. Link
Interesting interview with Marc Andreessen. Link
The kind of creative thinking that fuelled WeChat’s success. Link
🦝 Random (but cool) stuff
For those with existential angst about living up to your full potential, apologies for this… By the time Winston Churchill was 25 he’d fought in 4 wars, been elected as an MP, published 5 books, written 215 newspaper articles, escaped spectacularly from prison in South Africa, and had fought on more continents than any other solider in history bar Napoleon. I’m currently reading the excellent Churchill by Andrew Roberts. Link.
See you next week.
Dawid