Reflecting back on my last 5 years at Salesforce, I’m reminded why I chose to join in the first place.  My two career passions are: keeping up with the latest and greatest technologies, and helping customers innovate.  However, at previous companies, I was impeded from exploring those passions because legacy “Enterprise Thinking” stifled innovation, held internal development back, and even prevented customers from simply running on the latest version of products. At Salesforce, I’m able to check both passion boxes at the same time. I’ve truly got a dream job at Salesforce.

Learn by Building, but use a Platform that gets out of your way

The best way for me to keep up with the latest technology is to “build stuff.” Our own Trailhead approach embraces this philosophy and includes “hands-on” areas where “Trailblazers” are required to build functionality and then tested to earn badges.  Sometimes building stuff means hacking together a quick prototype. In the past, I would have to take screen shots and then use slide animations or other prototyping tools to “fake out” screen flows. At Salesforce, I can use Lightning App Builder, Lightning Bolt, Process Builder, IoT Cloud Orchestrator, and Einstein APIs, to “hack” a quick prototype for a customer. The power of this is that these builder tools directly leverage standard and custom objects across our Sales and Service Cloud offerings – so they are immediately integrated into business context.

There are several very cool byproducts of this “hack”:

1)   If you build using these tools, your solution will scale without any work on your part!

2)   Since they all leverage the power of Salesforce metadata, any API calls you are making from function to function will never deprecate (we are currently on V40.0 of the API).

3)   Metadata-driven means that your User Experience Layer is surfaced on Mobile devices (again, with zero additional work).

4)   Externally facing partners, employees and customers can access everything you’ve built via Communities (you guessed it, with zero additional work).

Wait a minute - this doesn’t sound like much of a “hack,” does it?

But there’s more:

• Since our component framework (Lightning Components) is not only metadata-driven but also Open Source, hardcore developers are free to extend, the components as they see fit – yes, and it all continues to work.

• Finally, our new “developer experience” (SalesforceDX) is built on the same Metadata framework. This means developers can spin up all of the code, components, customizations and their IDE in about 10 minutes, and treat their entire environment as source code. Agile teams can create, develop, and destroy environments at will, and then merge code for testing and deployment, all under automated control. By the way, all of this uses tools that developers already know like Github and Ant.

Get to the Dream Job Creation, already!

So, how does the magic of a metadata-enabled platform create Dream Jobs?

1. Prototype rapidly, deploy live, take a bow.

Recently, I visited a manufacturing company that creates products out of plastic to lead an Internet of Things (IoT) workshop. The company wanted to test how Salesforce could connect their RFID tagging system into our Service Cloud. The goal was to automate their process of building things like pallets, trash cans and kegs so their finished products could be tracked thru their entire customer’s product lifecycle.

During this workshop, three distinct use cases were tested for technical feasibility. The lowest hanging fruit use case was pushed to the next round where stakeholders could test the true business viability of the idea. Within a single four-hour workshop we were able to determine whether or not it made sense to move forward with the use case to production.

As a result of implementing IoT Cloud, the company is now able to provide their customers with a new set of tools to track pallets from “farm to table.” They are also able to track trashcans as they are delivered to their customers, and eventually utilized by their customer’s customers. They are improving their customer’s experience by giving them visibility into their trashcan shipment.  And more importantly, they are improving their customer’s customer’s experience by notifying their customer that the garbage truck is approaching their business (“Hey Harry, you better get that trashcan on the street - now!”)

2. Future-proof your ability to connect devices to create customer experiences

As IoT becomes commonplace, more and more functionality will move to the “edge” and devices become smarter and more capable. For example, at the last Mobile World Congress show, we created a simple “snap-in” module for the secure Ubuntu Operating System that was able to push device sensor and error code data from a Dell gateway (edge) device directly into Salesforce Service Cloud. The same snap-in connected an elevator controller gateway to push machine state information into Salesforce to detect anomalies.

The beauty of this is that when (not if) device capabilities or requirements change, a few simple declarative modifications to the metadata will allow applications to continue to work. Dream job, anyone?

3: Convert ideas to reality and easily build Minimally Viable Products (MVPs) during Hackathons

Another part of my Dream Job is being able to attend hackathons. Some hackathons are hosted by specific customer companies while others are completely open. At a recent customer hackathon one of the teams came up with the idea to allow the parents of unaccompanied minors (and authorized commercial airlines) to track the children through the airport. Using a simple $25 ElectricImp Developer Kit, the team was able to push real-time proximity data (where is my child?) and pressure sensor data (has my child taken off yet?) to Salesforce (see the state diagram below).

Another team used the same device to connect a pet carrier to monitor the conditions of a pet in the cargo hold.

When I attended the TMForum Hackathon in Nice (Dream Job, oui?) the team that won was able to connect a moisture detector to Salesforce while feeding in real-time Twitter data to “triangulate” the validity of a claim that there was a water main break in the local area.

During both of these hackathons the teams building projects that leveraged the power of the Salesforce Metadata Platform were able to walk away with a Minimally Viable Product that could be used to prove ROI to their management teams to secure funding for subsequent versions of the project.

While leveraging a metadata-enabled platform may not guarantee a Dream Job for you, it will allow you to rapidly make use cases come to life, show your customers tangible outcomes, and focus on what’s next (instead of taking care of a bunch of legacy “stuff”).

Interested in creating your own dream job? Check out our careers page.

Charlie Isaacs is Salesforce CTO for Customer Connection. You can email him at cisaacs@salesforce.com or tweet him @CharlieIsaacs