Did you know that Salesforce has somewhere north of 2,000 patents? It just so happens that October’s Woman of the Month, a Koa member who’s been part of Salesforce for nearly 13 years, has her name on three of them. Although, she is quick to point out that they were all team efforts. Congratulations to Kavitha Musthyala, Principal Software Engineer at Salesforce on our Lightning Platform team.

Kavitha grew up in India with dreams of becoming a “working woman” like her mother.

“Working women were not very common in our small town. My mom was one of the women who started the trend. I was impressed with how she would run the business and make powerful decisions. My father supported her and both of them never treated me or my two sisters differently because we were girls. They encouraged us to do whatever we wanted. Going to engineering school — in a business-oriented family — is one example.”

Kavitha joined Salesforce while in grad school. She’s grown in our engineering team to her current, fourth role, as a Principal Engineer. What’s remained consistent through each position, though, is a focus on our key Salesforce value of Customer Success. In fact, Kavitha sees “the focus we have on customer success” as one of the reasons she’s remained at Salesforce for this long.

“The features that are our main focus on this team are targeted towards Admins and Developers. That’s why I love going to the True to the Core session at Dreamforce. There, I can hear directly from Admins themselves about things they find problematic on our platform. They’re very vocal about what we do wrong. At the same time, we also hear lots of praise on the things we do well. The session really helps me get a sense of the customer’s pulse. It’s easy to focus on solving big problems — but small enhancements increase customer productivity which means great ROI — and happier Admins.”

One of the teams with which Kavitha received a patent (patent US 8.914422 B2) created a Salesforce tool called Schema Builder, a key component of the Salesforce platform. Schema Builder allows a visual approach to creating database objects connections. For our non-tech readers, Schema Builder is one of the tools we refer to when we talk about Salesforce’s “low-code” software development tools.

Kavitha’s customer focus finds its way into many aspects of her life. She’s a frequent participant of company hackathons. “My focus is always on solving customer pain points — one of the hacks we developed was a debugging tool that helps analyze customer issues better and faster.” And hackathons have become a family affair in the Musthyala household.

“My 10-year-old son gets very excited when it’s hackathons time. Last hackathon he brainstormed with me on ideas. His suggestion was to do something with AI (I was surprised he knew what AI is). He knows our product, Lightning app builder. His other suggestion was to add a QR component to our Lightning app builder. Both of my sons love to know all about our product, technology, and the fun things we do at work. They love to visit the Salesforce offices and talk to my team. They feel they are part of Salesforce too.”

When it comes to personal hacks, Kavitha doesn’t need a hackathon. She lives by a few simple, but powerful, philosophies.

• Do what you like to do.

• Your work should speak, not you.

• Learn from others but don’t imitate them.

• No one knows you better than you yourself.

• Take 5 mins at the end of the day and think about what you could have done better.

• Don’t be disappointed if progress is small, just keep trying with a positive attitude.

With Kavitha’s focus on helping customers, we predict more praise from them, and perhaps more patents, in her the future.

To hear more from Kavitha Musthyala, make sure to connect with her on LinkedIn – and stay tuned for our next edition of Salesforce Woman of the Month, coming your way in November.

The Salesforce Woman of the Month campaign turns the spotlight on the amazing women who help make Salesforce one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies according to Forbes and one of Fortune Magazine’s Best Companies to Work For. Honorees are nominated by fellow employees and selected by a dedicated committee that works to ensure a variety of roles and regions are honored.