Salesforce Architects work directly with customers who're looking to transform their business either by modernizing business processes, implementing solutions faster, or improving the user experience. At every point of the business, they’re helping customers become Trailblazers.

Architects help customers launch strong and stay strong — “Salesforce Strong.” But what do our Salesforce Architects actually do every day? This blog post will help you discover what top Salesforce Architects are doing, thinking, and getting excited about. Below, six Salesforce Architects share how they ensure project success in their role.

1. Define your vision of success.

"The first step to ensure success is to identify and define the criteria for success. All too often projects start without any measurable criteria for success, or if they do, the wrong set of success criteria. Success may be measured in terms of schedule, budget, quality, maintainability, or a combination of all these and other factors. Once the key criteria are defined, it is my job to minimize the risks in each of those areas."

Karishma Lalwani, Program Architect Director, Salesforce Advisory Services, Certified Technical Architect

2. Match technical skills with business needs.

"I work to ensure that we have the right skills in the architect to meet each customer’s needs, and I also work to ensure that we have the proper oversight model for the architect to ensure that they can be successful in that particular engagement. Architects are only as strong as the community that they belong to, and we have a global architect community of 500+ architects who bring a very wide range of skills and backgrounds. There has never been a situation where the community has not had the experience with a business or technology challenge."

Anand Narasimhan, Senior Director, Advisory Services, Salesforce Certified Technical Architect

3. Plan and communicate.

"I always believe that communication and smart planning are keys to success and help ensure that we have the sponsor’s commitment and support to create a successful engagement. It’s my job to keep all stakeholders and all members of the project team informed so everyone has a common understanding and can work collaboratively toward the same goal. I truly believe that ownership and responsibility empower an individual to deliver their best, and create a truly motivated environment focused on success."

Kristine Amarillo, Senior Program Architect, Salesforce

4. Engage the entire architect community.

When customers engage a Salesforce Architect, they are actually engaging the entire architect community, Success Cloud, and their account team in a focused, collaborative effort to drive value and accelerate delivery. This is especially important in greenfield implementations where knowledge of capabilities and skills are new. We work together, with our customers, to build consensus and create a game plan to achieve success via foundational, strategic, and transformational initiatives that follow best practices and implement lessons learned from past customer successes."

Marc Braga, Program Architect Director, Salesforce Advisory Services, Certified Technical Architect

5. Ensure alignment and partner for success.

"While there’s no magic solution that guarantees project success, there are a few recurring themes I’ve noticed about the engagements I’ve been a part of that have been most successful:

• "Ensure alignment early on: Getting up-front alignment with leaders and key stakeholders on what the project is targeting to achieve is probably the #1 contributor to success that I’ve seen. It helps create clarity of focus, ensures time, resources, and budget are appropriately prioritized to drive achievement of desired outcomes, and starts to build the organizational awareness and buy-in that is paramount to the success of any change effort.

• "Partner for success: Cocreation (of strategies, plans, solutions, and so on) with our customers is incredibly important; it ensures that we’re working together in lockstep throughout the engagement — and that alignment continues from project kickoff through closure."

Kaitlyn Davitt, Business Architect, Salesforce Advisory Services

6. Own it.

"I choose to own the success of a project or program for my customer. I cannot guarantee the future, but I move toward the future with a positive attitude. Success is a team sport — we are successful when all members of a team produce their best work based on their strengths.

"Before a project kickoff, I try to have a high-level architecture and design position as early as possible. I constantly observe all aspects of the project and try to think a few steps ahead to uncover potential points of failure and work with team members and leadership to close any gaps. I work with everyone involved to minimize possible friction so we all work together to deliver as a high-performance team."

Syed Talha, Senior Director, Salesforce Advisory Services

Salesforce Architects demonstrate the knowledge, skills, and capabilities to design and build high-performance solutions on the Salesforce Platform.  Their technical knowledge, combined with years of experience working with top enterprise customers, is just one of the ways we ensure project success for our customers.  

Want to join our Salesforce Strong cohort? Check out our Salesforce Architect Certifications page and register here for more information about how to launch epic Salesforce implementations.