Last year, we asked our community to help us rethink how we can provide them with a more actionable voice about the future of our products. In true Trailblazer fashion, you rallied and gave us a tremendous amount of feedback about what is and is not working with our primary feedback platform, the IdeaExchange.


At the True to the Core session at Dreamforce ‘18, we introduced our initial thoughts - shaped by many of you - on how to help us take top ideas from the IdeaExchange and prioritize them for a future release. As a proxy for an online exercise we aim to do with our entire community in the future, we launched a live poll and asked those in the room to prioritize features for the Summer ‘19 release.

As part of our IdeaExchange Top Hits: Where Are They Now? series, with the help of Jeff Davis, Director, Product Management, let’s get up to speed on two of the top three items prioritized at True to the Core: features for related lists.

More is More: 4+ Fields on Related Lists

Varun Pilla, a self-proclaimed avid Salesforce fan, pointed out that you can’t see more than four fields of data in a related list in the Lightning experience. For example, if you open up an account record and want to see the related contacts on the same page, you can view the name, phone, email, and country, of the contact, but not extra information like the state or status. While workarounds exist, the True to the Core attendees channeled the community and prioritized this as the number one feature to address.

Taking the spirit of this idea to heart, Jeff and the product team are adding the ability for an admin to enable an “advanced” display for a related list. This aims to bring more consistency between a list view and a related list, including the ability to display up to 10 fields, resize columns, wrap text, sort, and select records for mass actions. More fields, more information, more happy fans like Varun.

Less is More: Filtering on Related Lists

While going wider with more fields can be better, going longer with too many list results can be cumbersome. The second item prioritized at True to the Core was the ability to filter related lists, a longstanding request from the community, initially articulated by Ralf Stehle.

The delivery of this feature, through the Lightning experience, will allow users to quickly select a variety of filters such as picklists, date ranges, and number ranges to easily narrow the view of related information.

When Will These Be Delivered?

Good news! After scoping out the features in more detail, the product team anticipates they’ll be generally available in the Summer ‘19 release. But what happened to the other ideas that didn’t rise to the top? Even though we committed to delivering what ended up being the top 3 features (more on the third feature in a future post), the various product teams are paying attention to what other features were prioritized. This has and will continue to help them refine their backlog of features, especially if they find more capacity to address community-submitted ideas. And there will be more opportunities for you to help.

How Can I Prioritize Features?

The exercise at Dreamforce was just the beginning. We’re about to plan the Winter ‘20 release. Once again, we want your input at the beginning of this planning cycle - no trip to San Francisco required this time. Join the IdeaExchange Reimagined Chatter group to:

• Learn about and provide feedback on our plans for the IdeaExchange

• Access an online survey (January 21 - February 3) where you can prioritize features for Winter ‘20 and beyond

Throughout 2019, we’ll need your partnership in refining our plans for the IdeaExchange and these prioritization cycles. Engage with us online in the community group and in person. Look for posts about when the IdeaExchange team will be in a city near you.

Let’s reimagine the IdeaExchange and how we plan products together. #roadtoIDXr

Reminder: the feature information in this post is subject to our forward-looking statements.