Closing out the longest vacation of my life to date (3 weeks), I stopped for a few days on the way back from India in Chicago, where I was able to attend not one, but two, Salesforce conferences (and enjoy some Chicago Deep Dish pizza)! The first conference was the one that started all the community events, Midwest Dreamin’, and the second was the first ever Salesforce conference focusing on Women in Tech, WITness Success.

Even though Midwest Dreamin’ had many other focuses other than WIT, I found myself drawn to the ones that focused on it anyway. It included a keynote by Ayori Selassie speaking about AI/Einstein and a session that really made me focus on my privilege, led by Shonnah Hughes and Rakia Finley. This session had each attendee fill out a privilege card, and then asked you to try to form a group subject to some rules. It was definitely a unique experience as I checked more and more boxes and realized how many things I take for granted, that other people don’t have, and how many things I don’t even think about that affect people negatively on a regular basis.

After the conclusion of Midwest Dreamin, it was time for the first ever WITness Success, a conference focused on Women in Tech across the Salesforce community. After an Allies dinner, the opening keynote was none other than Ayori once again! She shared some of her experiences and talked about how she is passing on lessons to her daughter about how to thrive in society.

Later we heard from Nora Poggi, who produced a documentary on tech companies founded by women.

We also heard from Cheryl Porro, SVP of Technology and Product Delivery at Salesforce, who shared a truly inspirational and personal story, of her journey to get to where she is today. She also shared some insightful statistics on why gender diversity is so imperative.

While all of these women had things in common both with me and with each other, it was clear that in their own ways, they had to fight far ever than I ever had to in order to accomplish what they had achieved. I left after the speakers, having been truly inspired.

In the afternoon, I attended a few other sessions, and in more than 1, experienced what it felt like to be the only person of my gender in the room, something I imagined was a frequent occurrence for many of my fellow conference-goers. While it was uncomfortable at first, I’m glad I got to experience what that was like. It definitely opened my eyes a bit and gave me a much better appreciation of what women in tech probably experience on a regular basis.

I attended a few different panels where women shared their unique experiences of achieving success in the male dominated tech industry.

It is so exciting to see the increasing number of success stories across the Women in Tech community. Also amazing to know how powerful the community is within the Salesforce Ohana. This conference was also important as it took place the same day as the violent riots by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia. If nothing else, that proved that it is more important now than ever to continue supporting diversity and inclusion. I am thankful for everyone that had a hand in putting the conference together as well as giving me this very insightful experience. Without a doubt, I truly WITnessed success!

As the conference was wrapping up, and I realized I had picked up a shirt that was a bit too form fitting for my taste (again giving me empathy for what many at the conference experience on a regular basis) I had a few take-a-ways.

1. We have a long way to go in the fight for gender equality
2. Walking in someone else’s shoes for even just a couple of hours will give you a tremendous insight into where they’re coming from
3. There are many things that everyone can do to help today

If you are interested in learning more about helping in the fight for gender equality, there are a few things I would suggest. If you’re in a position of influence, consider following Salesforce’s lead and looking into the gender pay gap at your company. Think about different recruiting pools you can tap into in order to help make your workforce more diverse.

If you’re more of an individual contributor, consider looking at your own professional network and see if you’re getting influenced by a diverse group of people. One way to help with this, may be to play Mary Scotton’s Diversity Your Feed Bingo.

If you’re really inspired, you can even be like Abhilasha Singh and many other amazing WIT leaders and help organize your own WIT events, as they did across India one week after the WITness Success conference!

After attending the first ever WITness Success conference, I would love to be able to attend in 2018 and hope you’ll all join me! It’s taking place in Denver, Colorado on July 27th-28th. Be sure to follow @WITnessSuccess for all the updates. Hope to see you there!

It’s been a crazy few months for me! I had the pleasure of presenting at a User Group for the first time in my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona and also achieved a few new certifications on my road to become a Certified Technical Architect! I’ve even started tracking my progress here! I also got recognized by Salesforce on their blog! Probably the most amazing thing that I’ve had the privilege of participating in during the last few months though, was speaking in the first ever Latin American Salesforce Community Conference, Punta Dreamin!

In my first ever trip to South America (or international travel on my own), I was eager to experience as much as I possibly could. I had the great fortune of running into Angela Mahoney at the airport who was a tremendous tour guide in Montevideo! I also had the privilege of meeting my co-coach for RAD Women who was in from Bolivia, Nadim Diaz!

The conference itself was located in beautiful Punta del Este and included a packed house with people from all over South America. A few others along with myself also joined from the United States. Some of the incredible people I got to meet were some of the developers in Uruguay who have done tremendous work with Salesforce directly (helping to develop the Success Community and developer.salesforce.com backends).

Knowing that Spanish was the native language, I had to brush up on my Spanish beforehand and actually enjoyed preparing a slide in Spanish and communicating in a foreign language. It also gave me a much greater appreciation of anyone who comes to America where English is NOT their first language. Given how many grammar mistakes I made, it will definitely be easier to be more forgiving of it now.

After the conference, I traveled with Lyric Hartley to Buenos Aires, Argentina where we met up with Dario! While I was unsuccessful in finding a tango partner, I had a great time exploring a few of the beautiful places (and delicious food) that South America has to offer.

I’m truly blessed to have the opportunity to travel around the world and share my love of Salesforce and technology with people everywhere! Even though our cultures may have some differences (we arrived at a club that was just opening at 1:30am), it’s wonderful to be able to share experiences and values that unite us. The #Ohana is truly present everywhere you go.

Special shout out to the organizers of the event: Aldo Fernandez, Andrea Morales, Bruno Diaz, and Fernando Israel for their incredible work to make the event a success!

I highly recommend you to check out highlights of the event and consider making a trip down to Uruguay for #PD18! Details to come at Forcelandia!

To start off the new year, I had the pleasure of being invited to the Salesforce Analyst Summit 2017 in San Francisco. You can check out the full coverage at the hashtag #SalesforceAR but I’ll do my best to provide a good recap!

Unbeknownst to me, Salesforce has an entire Analyst Relations team that puts on their Analyst conference every year. Think the folks from Gartner, Forrester, etc. that analyze all types of software out there to compare them. This is their chance to hear about Salesforce directly from Salesforce!

Intro Overview

The first day was relatively short as most of the analysts were just arriving in town but it started off with a tremendous summary by Polly Sumner, Salesforce’s Chief Adoption Officer. She started off strong with some summaries of what she’s seeing from customers out there and what direction Salesforce is going to meet those customer needs. She had several great points such as “The person that responds to me the fastest has the highest chance of winning my business” and that companies are now asking themselves the question “What is our strategy so we don’t get Uber’d“. While many people, myself included, are doing our best to make predictions for 2017, Polly had a great summary with the overall Salesforce direction for the coming years.

Among the things that Salesforce is focusing on for the coming year shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone:

• Intelligence – in the form of Salesforce Einstein
• Speed – in the form of the Salesforce Lightning Platform
• Productivity – in the form of Quip
• Mobility – in the form of Salesforce1
• Connectivity – in the form of IoT Cloud on the Thunder platform

Polly also pointed out that while Salesforce has primarily focused on B2B (business to business) in the past, they are going to be taking a larger focus on B2C (business to consumer). She also raised the notion that all the products that the clouds focus on won’t be separate, but rather there will be customer specific specialists. “We’re in a world where people are going to cross over very quickly, the tools will enable them. You’ll have to become one of these modern companies or you may not be a company soon.” This notion of connecting all the products would become a common theme that I was happy to hear!

Equality

It wouldn’t be a Salesforce conference without a focus on Diversity and Equality. Salesforce invited none other than Chief Equality Officer Tony Prophet to speak about his story and his mission. “How great to be a company to write these words and actually mean them… A corporation can be a platform for good in society. What is the magic of Salesforce? This is a big part of it.” – Tony Prophet

Tony also shared some Salesforce transparency statistics and answered some questions from the crowd. He also shared that he believes that while Salesforce is nowhere near the finish line, they have made progress in diversity.

Some highlights from the Tony Prophet Q&A:

Q1: How far Salesforce will to go in their equality stand in terms of investors and customers given the current political climate and not having everyone agree with you?

A1: “Over the arc of time, nothing bad can come from standing for good…These have been our values from the beginning of the company and they aren’t going to change based on politics” – Tony Prophet

Q2: Do you have any target numbers you’re looking to get to in terms of diversity?

A2: “We’re not done and there isn’t really a goal of setting a finish line but rather continual progress” – Tony Prophet

Einstein, Internet Of Things, and Commerce

The full day of coverage started off with 3 key components, starting with an overview of Salesforce Einstein by Einstein GM, John Ball. At a high level, they’re creating a bunch of different models for each customer and determine the most optimized one for that specific customer!

John also shared some of the current and future Einstein features coming down the road! I’m definitely excited to start getting my hands on some of these things and to see them in action. As Salesforce continues to develop this technology, I’m excited by its potential.

Next up was EVP and GM of IoT Cloud, Woodson Martin, to talk about what’s coming from Salesforce regarding the Internet of Things. The biggest take I got out of it was the tagline “Know your device. Know your customer. Connect the two”.

Since the devices don’t have the right context to make the right decisions for the customer experience, IoT Cloud seeks to bridge the gap between devices and customers. They also showed off a pretty sweet demo!

Salesforce then brought up CEO of Commerce Cloud (formerly DemandWare) Jeffrey Barnett and SVP of Product and Engineering Rohit Goyal. The biggest highlight for me was learning what Commerce Cloud really is and does!

It shocked me how many customers are already using it and their observation that in today’s environment, 1/4 of all transactions are touching multiple devices before completing.

To put it into perspective, Twitter averages a little over 300M users per month. John and Rohit also shared that they plan to add more opportunities to integrate Commerce Cloud with all the other clouds (continuing that theme of uniting the platform) as well as make more APIs public and leverage the existing Salesforce Developer community! I talked to Jeffrey and he said at this time there are no free Developer editions but hopefully that will change in the future.

A couple other topics that were discussed that weren’t of as much interest to me (but may be to you) were the focus on the different industries Salesforce is taking, the renaming of ISVs to AIPs (Application Innovation Partners), the notion that Salesforce is expecting a 10X increase in consultant demand by 2020, and the Salesforce Ignite program, that allows Salesforce to differentiate the customer experience by focusing on the human factor in addition to the business and technical sides that others solely focus on.

Salesforce Clouds

The final part of the day was dedicated to sharing info on the 6 key clouds, providing both an overview with some of the product leaders as well as drill down on the specific clouds. Here are my highlights on each one but you can check out more slide details on the #SalesforceAR hashtag!

Adam Blitzer – EVP and GM Sales and Service Cloud (@AdamBlitzer)

• Taking what used to be manual and rules based and making it intelligence based
• Sales Cloud Roadmap: Focusing on Lead to Cash, Intelligence, Inside Sales, and Productivity
• Service Cloud Roadmap: Intelligence, Lightning, Conversation, Field Service
• Q: What’s your hardest challenge?
• A: A lot of directions we can go in. Hardest challenge is probably making the right bets. AI is the biggest opportunity we have, and business software in general has. Releasing AI is going to be a v1. It’ll be interesting when you put it in the hands of users to see if it meets expectations.

Matt Tippets – VP Marketing Cloud

• Marketers will become the most responsible for managing customer journeys

• Marketing Cloud Roadmap: AdTech and MarTech, Intelligence, B2C Transformation, Cross-Cloud Journeys

Ketan Karkhanis – SVP and GM Analytics Cloud (@karkhanis)

• “No human being can analyze all the data out there. We can’t even ask all the questions”
• “Analytics needs to be actionable and shape behaviors”

Mike Micucci – SVP and GM Community Cloud (@mikemicucci)

• How do we extend the core of CRM and connect to customers and partners?
• Community Cloud Roadmap: Personalized Experiences, Answers Einstein, 1:1 Engagement, Productivity

Adam Seligman – EVP and GM App Cloud (@adamse)

• “Want to deliver a unified customer platform”
• “Want Salesforce to be an incredibly friendly platform for programmers”
• 1.6M Trailhead badges earned
• App Cloud Roadmap: Lightning, Meta-tenancy, Data & Events, Developer Experience

One of my biggest takeaways was from the App Cloud drill-down. They talked about SalesforceDX and how they’re focusing on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for Developers right now, but the goal will be to developer an #AwesomeAdmin experience as well! It will be using Git and have the ability to rollback behind the scenes without having to expose the command line. I’m very excited for this to become a reality!

The day was concluded by talking with some of the Salesforce partners and talking about how much the Partner ecosystem has grown!

Summary

Last but certainly not least, the day was concluded with a fireside chat with none other than Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris. He took some Q&A that I unfortunately had to leave early for to make a work meeting but I got some good insight from him before I left!

“We do have these clouds but Engineering is one unit for us. We’re well positioned to get the people to work together. My job is to get the people to work together and execute the architecture across all of the business units” – Parker Harris

“It’s not just the products we’re creating but the culture that we have” – Parker on how Salesforce is so successful in recruiting in the competitive Silicon Valley

He also came back to the theme of unifying all the clouds to create one end-to-end experience. This is something that really excites me and reinforces the notion that Salesforce can be a complete customer platform rather than just specific products. Parker is confident that this will help sustain Salesforce’s growth as they hope to reach the coveted $10B mark in fiscal 2018 (Feb ’17-Jan ’18)!