Let’s discuss whether flows are scary for new learners this week, fresh after Halloween. Grab your pumpkin spice latte, and follow along: 🎃I recently had a meeting with Salesforce where I invited them to survey my community of new learners to understand the challenges for most folks. During that discussion, I realized, or remembered again, that Salesforce does not know how scary the flow canvas is for most admins.
Late October, I was in Orlando at Florida Dreamin’, taking a break after presenting my session, when an experienced admin approached me. “Is there a Flow for Dummies Book?” they asked. I said there was none, and I proceeded to ask questions to understand the background better. 📚This person was an experienced admin. However, they defined themselves as not that good with formulas. And they wanted to learn flow really bad and thought flow canvas was very scary for them. Throughout our discussion, I realized how emotionally charged the topic was for them. This was a very stressful situation.
😱I am sure many out there feel the same, but they don’t express it.
There is nothing wrong with expressing distress around learning a new topic. ✅
I firmly believe that everybody can learn flow to some degree and extend their admin skills. However, depending on your skills, you may never be able to tackle the advanced flows. Or it may take you seemingly forever to master just the record-triggered flows.
Everybody’s learning journey is unique. And that is OK. ✅
I appreciate this interaction immensely because I clearly remembered the target audience for my Salesforce Break site, my YouTube channel, and my Udemy course. My objective on these sites is to teach the majority how to flow and make the canvas less scary. My challenge is to gradually build your skills at an acceptable pace so that the impostor syndrome does not creep in when you follow along with the curriculum. 🧄
Hello folks. There is not a better time than now to get started learning Salesforce Flow.
Here are three reasons why you should start learning flows now.
A countdown:
You can either watch the short ebbedded video or read my message below.
3) Debug all the things: You used workflows and process builders. Have you ever tried to debug one when it does not work? You are pretty much blindfolded. You make modifications and see if the new version will work. You cannot follow your automation step-by-step to see where it is breaking. You are at the mercy of error messages that may not be very descriptive of the issue you are having. With the Summer 21 release you can debug all your flows before activating them and continue debugging after you activate them. The record-triggered flow was the only flow type that did not have all the debug features the other flow types had. They are getting great debug features with Summer 21. You can see the path your flow took highlighted on your screen before the error occurred. You can inspect your debug log that gives you many details, such as variable values and field values in your update step. The improved debug functionality is a great reason to start doing all your automation with flows.
Before I move on to the second point, I have great news for you. I just released a Udemy video course on flows that takes a very systematic approach to teaching flows. You will have lifetime access to my course with a 30 days money-back guarantee. Check the link below and the coupon code to get a great discounted price on this course for a limited time. Stay around for reasons number 2 and 1. I have some great tips for you at the end of the video on getting started with your learning journey.
2) Flow all the things: Salesforce announced last year that they would stop all development of Workflow Rules and Process Builders. Salesforce accelerated the development of Flow features and recommended this tool as the single low-code automation tool for the future.
More importantly, Salesforce is going all in on low-code automation and using flow in many other areas of the Salesforce platform. Have you heard of the Flow Orchestrator, Mulesoft Composer, OmniStudio, and Einstein Bots? If you don’t believe me check your Salesforce Summer 21 release notes website. Where are Flows listed? Under Einstein Automate. So all automation under Salesforce will converge to the same suite of solutions if you ask me. I don’t work for Salesforce; I don’t need to show you a slide of forwarding looking statements. However, please remember to make your own informed decisions. This is my personal opinion.
1) Skill up: If you are an aspiring admin, administrator, consultant or developer on the platform, you need to get flow-building skills on your resume. Check the positions that are posted online. Most of them ask for varying grades of flow-building skills. If you are building your skills to become a developer, the logic-building skills that you will gain by building flows will be extremely helpful on your learning journey. If you are a developer already, you will need to use a healthy mix of low-code and code for an easily maintained, long-lasting, and high-performing solution in your org. Check the Architects website by Salesforce for more details. If you are a consultant and you don’t know flows, you are not using the whole spectrum of solutions on Salesforce to best advise your clients.
Now, a couple of tips on how you get started on flows: – Start with record-triggered flows. You have seen and done workflow rules and process builders; these are similar to them but much better. – Use save as a new flow to change between the flow types. This feature is your friend. You will have to make changes and adjustments to your flow to make it work, but this will save you precious time. – Use real-life use cases. Start with a real need. If you don’t have a real-life scenario, get on Salesforce answers, Ohana Slack, and various Salesforce social groups. People are asking for help to build flows based on their unique use cases. Help them and learn in the process.
I will continue creating various content about flows. Subscribe to the Salesforce Break Youtube channel for free content. Give this video a like. Buy my Udemy class for a systematic approach on learning flows.
I wish you the best of luck and success on your flow learning journey.
