Making source-controlled projects an approachable activity for users that build things with their mouse and keyboard.
Salesforce was often a most dreaded platform to work on. At the time, much of the platform was proprietary.
So, we sought to fix that. Research and Design kicked things off with a multi-day design sprint on the problems space with key stakeholders from across the platform.
Extensive research was also conducted with our customers to help highlight key pains and gains.
Eventually we released a detailed report on our findings and key areas of improvement.
The main area of improvement revolved around enabling declarative users (those that use their keyboard and mouse to build apps) to collaborate with developers (those that code to do the same).
After forming and validating several hypotheses on this problem space, we gained a high degree of confidence in a direction to make a declarative change management tool.
The resulting design and research activities were some of the most challenging of my career, including the complete mapping of GitHub workflows to a point-and-click interface that non-programmers could digest.
Several rounds of wireframing and prototyping occurred over the course of approximately 2 months time.
In that time we ran 3 rounds of concept validation on the emerging directions and continued to increase our confidence in the emerging solutions.
As our confidence grew, so too did the fidelity level of the designs.
And after roughly four months of hard work, we produced a rich bundle of visual assets that painted a picture of one of the most innovative declarative tools that Salesforce has produced.
Phasing occurred and we broke the project down into chunks based on a predictable progression from MVP to vision delivery.
Design specs were written and documented and the project began to come to a close.
However, the underlying findings and related data we uncovered eventually led to a broader and more expansive vision project that continues to impact the trajectory of the platform to this day.
