Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jean Velonis, Senior Technical Program Manager at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the new Superbadge Cohort Learning pilot program and how you can get involved.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jean Velonis.
Improvements to Superbadges
I have to confess, I've always found Superbadges to be a little intimidating. They're locked behind requirements, without clear step-by-step instructions for how to work towards them. That's why I sat down with Jean Velonis, a Senior Technical Program Manager working to improve the Superbadge experience.
The first thing Jean wants you to know is that they've overhauled the Superbadge UI. Instead of being locked behind a list of requirements, Superbadges now have a Recommended Learning section. These Trailhead modules and badges are organized into units, giving you a much clearer path to work towards your goal.
What is the Superbadge Cohort Learning pilot program?
In addition to the UI changes, Jean and her team are launching a new pilot program called Superbadge Cohort Learning. These sessions let you connect with other learners and subject matter experts to work towards a Superbadge together, guided by a facilitator.
For now, the pilot program is focused on two of the most popular Superbadges. For admins, the Data Quality and Validation Superbadge gives you the knowledge you need to prep your org for AI. And if you're a dev or looking to improve your coding skills, there will also be groups for the Apex Callouts Superbadge.
They're running both in-person and virtual versions of these sessions, so look out for them at a Dreamin' event or community group near you.
Volunteer as a subject matter expert or facilitator
If you already have these Superbadges, Jean highly recommends volunteering as a subject matter expert or a facilitator. When you're working with new learners, you'll run into questions and situations that deepen your understanding of the topic more than you ever thought possible.
The other thing about students is that they keep learning. Teaching is an incredible opportunity to make strong connections that will last throughout your career. As Jean explains, two of her former students are now her go-to people when she has code or Flow questions.
Make sure to listen to the full episode for more from Jean about the Superbadge Cohort Learning pilot program. And make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us in your feed every Thursday.
Podcast swag
Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more
Sign up to be a subject matter expert or facilitator: Superbadge Cohort Learning Pilot Session

Salesforce 360 Blog Post: How to Stand Out in the AI Era with Superbadges

Admin Trailblazers Group
Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social
Jean on LinkedIn

Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn

Salesforce Admins on X

Mike on Bluesky social

Mike on Threads

Mike on X

Full Transcript
Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm joined by Jean Velonis to talk about the Superbadge Cohort Learning Pilot and what happens when admins stop learning alone and start solving problems together. We're going to dig into these cohorts and how they bring experts, beginners, and everyone together in the same room to work through real challenges, build confidence, and get comfortable being uncomfortable. Because for Salesforce admins, knowing how to troubleshoot, test, fail safely, and ask better questions matters just as much as knowing where to click. And as AI and agents become part of everyday platform work, well, those fundamental skills help admins validate what is correct, keep data reliable, and make sure that the platform reflects what the business actually needs.
So listen in, subscribe and share this episode with an admin who learns best by rolling up their sleeves and figuring it out. Let's get Jean on the podcast. So Jean, welcome to the podcast.
Jean Velonis:
Thank you so much for having me. I think this is the second time I've been here, but it's been a while.
Mike:
I know. Well, when you do the podcast for almost 14 years now, I try not to have guests back, only if they're important like yourself.
Jean Velonis:
Ooh, thank you.
Mike:
We were Salesforce MVPs together a hundred years ago when the internet was still tubes and wires, and now we're both at Salesforce. And you're on, I would call, what, the curriculum side, the learning side?
Jean Velonis:
Yeah, I would categorize that. It's more Trailhead, right? So long story short, certification was my jam for so long, and superbadges were part of that. But over the last couple of years, we've decoupled from certification. We're still with Trailhead and we're still considered an assessment, but we don't have all the guardrails of certification on us anymore, which is really exciting.
Mike:
Gotcha. And just for reference, if anybody thinks they might have met Jean at a Dreaming event or a Salesforce event, you tend to usually have purple hair and a bedazzled Ranger hat. Is that an accurate description?
Jean Velonis:
These are facts. These are facts. I've had purple hair probably since six months of coming into Salesforce. And if anybody knows the famous Chris Duarte out there, she taught me everything I know about bedazzling. So I made a Ranger hat.
Mike:
Yeah. A lot of people bedazzle now because of her.
Jean Velonis:
Yes.
Mike:
Well, let's talk about this new Superbadge cohort learning pilot that you've kicked off because I think you're trying to bring the best of both worlds together.
Jean Velonis:
Absolutely. This isn't a new concept either. I'll just throw that out there. We had some amazing trailblazers before the pandemic and even through the pandemic doing Salesforce Saturdays or Salesforce Sundays and they would get together in person or virtually and work on Trailhead. So this is kind of piggybacking off that concept and really bringing some of the community magic to superbadges because I think we can all look at a superbadge and be like, oh, that's kind of intimidating. There's no step-by-step instructions. This looks really hard. There's multiple steps to it, and that just looks hard and I don't want to do it. But the cohort learning brings a facilitator, like a community group leader or a Dreamin event person to come in and help bring people together virtually or in person and work on a Superbadge together.
And we've been running a couple of pilots of these. We did one at TDX and WITness Success in Indi. And it's been really successful in person just because you can pair experts and newbies together at a table and make people really uncomfortable, and then they start talking to each other and learning from each other. And I think that's what gets really excited about doing this cohort learning. And then we've done a couple of virtual events as well where we've brought community group leaders, kind of like train the trainer of like, here's how you should run this virtually to be successful, because that virtual is a little bit different beast. It's really easy to hide and stay on mute and turn your camera off where we really try and get people excited to share their skillset with each other.
Mike:
Yeah. No hiding in the dark corners. So I really like the idea of this. I've always really enjoyed Trailhead because I'm the type of learner that likes to do it at my own pace. Sometimes I even crazily go back and redo a badge just because I feel like if I've rushed through it, did I really learn it or was I just trying to get it done? And when I'm really trying to learn it, I really take my time. I will agree with you, I've written superbadges. I also enjoy the freedom. They're kind of like, "Here, go, do. " And you're like, "Oh yes." It's almost like the days of driver's ed when you get out from behind the desk and you finally get to drive the car in the real world. It's a little more of trying things out. So are these cohorts that you're doing now, are they open to any superbadge or are they just specific ones?
Jean Velonis:
That's a really good question. We looked at our whole library of Superbadges and we wanted to pick one for admins and one for developers. And that doesn't mean it's just if you have that skill set. It's more of like, here's two of the main roles we see in the community. So we have data quality and validation, which is really for anybody prepping you for this agentic ecosystem that we're in, cleaning up your org.
Mike:
I mean, to be honest with you, that's what we've needed to do this whole time. Even before AI, it's sweeping the floors, you know?
Jean Velonis:
Yeah. I mean, it's been that way for a long time. I think I made my whole Salesforce admin career of going in and cleaning up orgs, to be honest. So that was a great place for us to start. And then now we've started looking at the developer side of it and we picked Apex Callouts superbadge for all of our developers. And I was very intimidated by trying to put together a superbadge in a box for that cohort because I'm not a developer. But going through this process, I'm like, "You know what? I think I can actually do this," And that's because of all the great learning badges on Trailhead and being able to go at your own pace. Because that's a whole nother skill set for an admin to try and figure out, right?
Mike:
Right. I've often thought of, this is just how Mike's brain works. If I had children, I would for sure name one of them Apex because then you just gave them a shout-out.
Jean Velonis:
That's hilarious. I would've never thought-
Mike:
That's how I work. My brain today is like, "Oh yeah. Hey, did you hear you were mentioned on a Salesforce podcast?" "Of course I was. I'm an Apex Callout."
Jean Velonis:
I'll tell you a weird secret. I do put my children's names in superbadge content. All of us over here under the superbadge team put little-
Mike:
Easter eggs?
Jean Velonis:
Easter eggs, yeah-
Mike:
Yeah, I love it.
Jean Velonis:
... out there. It's either in the org or it's in the content. We're all moms over here, so we would like to give our kids a shout-out.
Mike:
Well, I will see your Easter egg and I will call your Easter egg. In almost every admin keynote demo, we have put our pets' names.
Jean Velonis:
I love that.
Mike:
So you can go back and figure out whose pets were whom. The only time, the only exception was we had Einstein Voice rollout and my dog's name was yet to be used and we couldn't use it because it wouldn't recognize it. It was too hard to say. And so we had to go with something easy and punchy with hard consonants in it. So anyway, yes. I think there should be, I'm sure there is somewhere, a whole forum of Easter eggs found in Trailhead material.
Jean Velonis:
100%. And I think that's what Trailhead is, where it's the weird, it's the hanging out, it's the learning something new, it's the being uncomfortable. Because it really is, learning can be really uncomfortable.
Mike:
I mean, it exposes a weakness and people don't like feeling weak. It's also the thing I always think about whenever I was doing training because you're changing something. And the person that told me how to do training gave me a very well-rounded, concise piece of advice, which is people don't like to go to work and feel stupid. And when you change something, even in a CRM, that's what that comes from. And people don't like to feel stupid. And I feel that way. You change something, you're like, "Oh, this was here yesterday. Why isn't it here?" And you blame yourself and that's not the point. You do a lot of training. So let's go through just some scenarios of I'm a new Salesforce admin. I stumbled across this podcast. Also, hello. You have a lot of episodes to catch up on. That's okay. You have a lot of time. What should they do to prepare to come to one of these learning cohorts?
Jean Velonis:
I mean, the easy answer is get on Trailhead and start earning badges, that's number one. Step two is take a look at the new look and feel for superbadges and that will bring you to our recommended learning. It used to be required to unlock the superbadge, but we've just now come onto what I would say the Trailhead UI. Superbadges are put into these units now where the first unit is like, let's get ready. Let's get your developer org. Let's do the recommended learning. Let's connect it to your superbadge now. That's all a little bit different than what we used to do with superbadges. You had to unlock it and then you had to go down all the way to the bottom of the page to hook up your org. Now it looks like a regular module or badge, which is nice because as somebody who struggles with reading and keeping my place on Trailhead, this new guy is really going to help with that.
But also doing the recommended learning I think is key even though it's unlocked now and you don't have to do it. I will tell you I am the first person to start doing something and being like, "Oh, I have no idea what I'm doing with this. Maybe I should have done-"
Mike:
I should have done those recommended modules.
Jean Velonis:
Yes. And then I will have to go back and learn and figure things out. I did that with the prompt template superbadge. I thought I knew what I was doing.
Mike:
No.
Jean Velonis:
I did not. And that's falling, that's failing forward. That's realizing I don't know what I'm doing. Let me go figure this out and then come back to it. So I think that's step number two. Go and read through the superbadges, look at them, look at the recommended learning. And then if you see that there is a Dreamin event or a community group doing one of these superbadges, join them. Even if you've done the superbadge, that's okay. You can go help the other people that are there.
Mike:
Oh, I almost think that would be the next best thing after doing a superbadge is going and volunteering to help train. Because never will you ever learn more about something than when you have to train somebody about something or walk around the room and answer questions. You're like, "Hey, I didn't run into that when I was doing mine, but let's figure it out." And it's super fun because then you're like, "This wasn't a problem for me, but now it's a problem that I get to work through."
Jean Velonis:
Yeah. I mean, bringing you all the way back to SABWA.
Mike:
Oh, sure.
Jean Velonis:
Call out, Mike. I mean, geez. Yeah, that is my favorite thing to walk around, especially I live in these superbadges every day. Our team builds them. We maintain them. We have to deal with all the product changes that are very quickly changing and trying to keep up with everything. So being able to walk around the room and see how trailblazers are doing things, that not only helps me figure out, okay, here's some of the common pitfalls or where people are getting stuck and I can write some hints to help, but also maybe we don't do that in the next superbadge or maybe we call it out in a different way or let's go update the help article and call this piece out if somebody's getting stuck somewhere. So it's super helpful. But also you get to meet a ton of different people, which we do virtually every day, but it's easy to hide behind the keyboard again. And to be able to connect with somebody and see their aha moment of where they're like, "Yes, I figured this out," that's super gratifying.
Mike:
Oh, that's almost the time that you make a friend.
Jean Velonis:
A best friend.
Mike:
Yeah. I mean, because you're always going to be like, "Well, let's continue chatting while you work through this." And then the next thing you know, they're building Apex Callouts, and you're like, "Oh, I didn't get that far." And then they're teaching you stuff. I promise you it'll happen.
Jean Velonis:
It will happen. I can say 100% certainty it will happen. I have two people that I call on all the time or that I met through a conference or doing something, and I'm like, "Okay, I know this person knows code and I know this person knows flow. I'm not good at those things, but I can text or call or Slack and be like, I'm stuck."
Mike:
Right. So I mean, I have a thousand questions, but let's go to the opposite end of that where if you're a community member, maybe you're a user group leader or a Dreamin event person and you're like, "This sounds like a super fun thing for me to include in my agenda," What would their steps be for possibly including, I know it's in a pilot, but for including this or what's your vision for it moving forward?
Jean Velonis:
Yeah. We have a facilitator signup forum-
Mike:
Sweet.
Jean Velonis:
... which I'm sure you would be happy to put that in the bio or the show notes.
Mike:
It is in the show notes as we speak.
Jean Velonis:
Perfect. But yeah, just signing up to raise your hand to be a facilitator is huge. Because I'm going to have this superbadge in a box ready very quickly for people to take to a pilot. I have two Dreamin events that are already wanting to do this in August and a community group that also wants to bring it to their local people. So signing up to be a facilitator and doing this on your own, love that. And I wish I could go to every one of them, to be honest. I looked at a couple of them and I'm like, "I might be able to make this work and just show up." But there's also a piece in that form too to sign up to be a subject matter expert and help if there's somebody locally that wants to do this. And selfishly, I put that in there that if you want to help us build superbadges, that would be awesome too.
Mike:
Right. And this sounds rhetorical, but it is honest. They should have probably already completed that superbadge that they want to facilitate or host.
Jean Velonis:
I mean, I'd advise it. And with the new UI, you can redo a superbadge. You can retake it now. So you can do the superbadge over.
Mike:
To refresher, because maybe you haven't done it in a while and want to see what's new.
Jean Velonis:
I mean, the facilitator that did WITness Success told me she still had her notes when she originally did the Apex Callouts in 2017.
Mike:
Wow.
Jean Velonis:
Right?
Mike:
I probably have notes from somewhere of 2017 I have nowhere. That's awesome.
Jean Velonis:
No, that notebook's gone.
Mike:
Yeah. I always think of admins listening to this and I don't want it to be a pitch session for your cohort, but this is really a neat way to get involved with the community. From all of your work, and this is just stepping out of your role and what you're doing in this superbadge cohort. Out of all of the work that you've done at Salesforce and what you create for Trailhead, what are some of the biggest themes that you run into that really, when that light bulb turns on for an admin, they suddenly just become, I don't want to say instantly become successful, but they really start to click and feel confidence and have that aha moment?
Jean Velonis:
I think being a Salesforce admin for such a long time, being able to fail and problem solve is probably the best skill you can have. You can learn any technical skill. I can go into a dev org and break things and figure out how products work. But if you don't know how to problem solve through something, getting to that aha moment is going to take you a long time if you're too afraid to break something. And I have broken things. And I think I've told you, I've deleted records from an org before and went, "Uh-oh, how do I get those back?" So that is one of my favorite things is to go into a playground or dev org and just break it, pull things apart, see how it works and be like, "Okay, I know where I want to go, but how do I get there? And I don't know how to get there, but if I go in and break everything, I'm going to learn a lot more than if I follow step-by-step instructions of how to do something."
Mike:
Right. If it works out perfect the first time.
Jean Velonis:
Yeah. What did you learn? Oh, I know how to do that. Okay. Well, what's next then?
Mike:
Do you find that you have to remind people that it's okay to fail when building and it's okay for things to not work the way you want them to the first time?
Jean Velonis:
Yeah. And I mean, that's how we build superbadges. I mean, we have all these SMEs and we look through different use cases and we go into an org and build it out and we're like, "Well, that's not going to work for this unit," or, "That's not going to work for this use case," or how do we find those different tasks to lead the witness basically in the challenge to get to where we want them to go, but without telling them? And you can do it 97 different ways. There's not necessarily always a right way to get there.
Mike:
Right. I know I've sat down. We used to have, it was Dreamforce long, long time ago. And I was paired up with Josh Birk and we were helping a customer through a situation. And it was interesting because both he and I came up with a solution. Both he and I came up with a very different path to the solution. Mine was using, at the time, Flows, and his was using some code and some triggers. And the customer's like, "But which one's right?" And we're like, "Both of them." I mean, never could you ever run into a situation where both solutions are equally correct. It's based on what you want to maintain and your knowledge.
Jean Velonis:
100%. And now you also have this agentic thing that will try and tell you the right path to go and you can be like, "Well, I don't want to do it that way." And it's like, "Oh yeah, you're right. Let's try it this way." So I think even having that fundamental base of an admin or a dev is really going to serve you well in this ecosystem. So problem solving, having a foundational skill set, and then also knowing where you want to go and problem solving your way to get there.
Mike:
Right. So let me ask you, you've brought up agents and AI sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, but I mean, it's definitely something that it's our every day now. From your perspective as building a lot of content and in the learning space, what is the most important thing you think admins should learn about AI and agents? I
Jean Velonis:
I think the most important... Well, there's two. Learning when to trust that the AI is telling you the right thing and knowing how to ask the prompts and the questions. Because you may not know where you want to go, but if you have your fundamental base of the system, you can ask it the right questions to get you where you're going. And as somebody who struggles with writing content, I know where I want to go, I know what the tasks are for the superbadge. And I can say, "Okay, now help me write an error message," or, "Help me write a hint for a help article that's going to help them get unstuck." And you can ask AI that too. You're like, "Hey, I'm using this Flow element. I'm trying to go here and make this system do this. It's not working. Help me untangle this."
Mike:
Right. Help me. Teach me, don't tell me.
Jean Velonis:
That's key. Teach me, don't tell me. I don't need step by step.
Mike:
I do that all the time with Wordle. Don't tell me the answer, just help me figure out what this word is. I'm stuck. Jean, last question because I know you have to go. It's 2030 and the Superbadge Cohort Learning program is out of pilot. What does it look like?
Jean Velonis:
It looks like all of our trailblazers getting together, helping each other learn something new, experts and newbies and everybody in the middle taking something away from that hour or that day that they spent with each other and everybody having their own aha moment. Whether it's I helped somebody get unstuck or I got a new superbadge or I made a new contact or I'm out of a job and I made this whole partner and I handed them my resume, those are the things that make the community go round. Those are the things that makes learning so important. And it's okay to break things.
Mike:
Right. Very well. Very well said. Thank you, Jean, for being on the podcast.
Jean Velonis:
Thanks, Mike. Happy to be here.
Mike:
Big thank you to Jean Velonis for joining us and reminding us admins that getting stuck is not the end of learning, it is usually where the useful part begins. Now, whether you join a cohort, you facilitate one, or you know what, you simply just help another Salesforce admin work through a challenge, teaching and problem solving are powerful ways to strengthen your platform judgment. Be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins podcast. Share this episode with somebody who is ready to learn and really earn that next aha moment. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jay Hurst, Senior Vice President of Product Management, and James Ferguson, Senior Director of Product Management, at Salesforce.
Join us as we chat about MFA step-up authentication and what it means for Salesforce Admins.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jay Hurst and James Ferguson.
Step-up authentication protects sensitive actions
Starting next week, Salesforce is requiring all users to use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). If you're a privileged user like, for example, an admin, you'll need to use a phishing-resistant MFA. That's why I sat down with Jay Hurst, VP of Product Management, and James Ferguson, Senior Director of Product Management, to talk about why these changes are vital to protect your org's data.
The first thing to know is that AI is making it easier than ever to launch targeted phishing attacks at scale. So while the MFA requirements provide a good first layer of protection, we want to make extra sure you are who you say you are before you're allowed to perform certain actions, like downloading a large number of records or running a big report.
Phishing-resistant MFA uses a passkey, like a fingerprint or facial recognition biometric, to verify that it's actually you and not just someone with access to your email account.
Balancing security with user friction
As Jay and James acknowledge, these changes will add some friction to your users' experience. However, with the pace at which these kinds of attacks are evolving, it's more important than ever to get serious about your security posture.
"We're trying to introduce a little more friction right now so that people start to think," Jay explains, "and start to build those habits of understanding when they're doing something that potentially could be considered a malicious attack, such as downloading that All Opportunities report."
They're also building out compensating controls that should make things easier in the future, allowing you to trust users from a certain IP range, for example.
Security is a journey, not a destination
The most important thing to realize is that these requirements are about more than just jumping through some extra hoops. Phishing and man-in-the-middle attacks are growing more and more sophisticated, and you need better protections than "Well, that hasn't happened yet."
Instead, James and Jay recommend viewing this as an opportunity to partner with other stakeholders in your org to develop a comprehensive security plan. As Jay says, "Security is a journey, not a destination. What is 100% secure today is not as secure tomorrow." The trick is to develop a security-focused mindset throughout your business that will protect you now and in the future.
Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Jay and James for more on step-up authentication and how admins can reduce friction for users. And make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.
Podcast swag
Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more
Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: What Are Security Essentials for Salesforce Admins?

Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Securing Your Org: From Reactive to Proactive

Salesforce Help Article: Prepare for the upcoming Step-up Authentication requirements on Report Actions

Salesforce Help Article: Prepare for MFA Enforcement for All Employee Users

Salesforce Help Article: Prepare for Phishing-Resistant MFA Enforcement for Privileged Users including Admins

Salesforce Help Article: Security-Related Product Updates to the Salesforce Platform: User Identity, Data Protection, and Access Controls

Admin Trailblazers Group
Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social
Jay on LinkedIn

James on LinkedIn

Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn

Salesforce Admins on X

Mike on Bluesky social

Mike on Threads

Mike on X

Full show transcript
Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're talking with Jay Hurst and James Ferguson from Salesforce Product Management about MFA step-up authentication and what it means for Salesforce admins. As you know, security isn't just a front-door login decision anymore. It's about protecting sensitive actions, understanding risk, and designing systems users can trust.
So Jay and James are going to help us unpack phishing-resistant MFA, compensating controls, IP ranges, SSO, and why these changes matter in a world where data, automation and AI are all working together. For us Salesforce admins, this is a chance to think beyond features and really look at how we steward the entire system. So listen in, click that Subscribe button, and of course I would love if you could share it with fellow Salesforce admins or, hey, you know what? Let's make some friends in that security team. So with that, let's get Jay and James on the podcast. So Jay and James, welcome to the podcast.
Jay Hurst:
Thanks for having us, Mike.
James Ferguson:
Great to be here.
Mike:
Absolutely. Jay, let's start off with you. We kind of want to get to know a little bit about you, and James, we'll call on you second, but before we get into our topic today, can you just tell me a little bit about how you got to Salesforce and what you do?
Jay Hurst:
Sure, yeah. So I have been with Salesforce for almost 22 years now. I started in our customer support department, one of the first 12 phone support reps here at Salesforce. Did that for a couple years and helped found our Tier 3 organization in support. Eventually moved over to our customer-centric engineering department, stayed in there for a while. And then in 2012, had an opportunity to join the product management group for platform, and I moved over and ran a team called Force.com Canvas. And for the last, I guess, 12-ish years now, I've been kind of weaving my way upwards through platform. Currently, I lead our platform services subcloud, so all of the core foundational pieces of platform that you might think of are schema and metadata, APIs, eventing systems, connectivity systems, and also our identity area, which is what brings us here today to talk about MFA.
Mike:
Yeah. Boy, flashback. You called it the Force.com platform.
Jay Hurst:
Well, that's what it was called back then.
Mike:
I know. I know.
Jay Hurst:
And I can't remember all of the names we've had for it.
Mike:
Oh, that's okay. I'm sure there's a website that tracks all of them.
Jay Hurst:
I'm sure there is.
Mike:
James, fill us in. How'd you get to Salesforce, and what do you do here?
James Ferguson:
Well, I am, I guess compared to Jay, one of the newer members of the team. I've only been at Salesforce for about 16 and a half years, almost 17 years. Pretty much entirely on the platform product management side, working on various things people know and love like sharing and big objects and event monitoring and those things. And most recently I've taken over responsibility for the identity product team, responsible for all the login and auth and SSO and all of the wonderful things we'll talk about today.
Mike:
Oh, wow. Okay. So then just to be clear, I'm actually the newest person on this call. I've only been at Salesforce for a little over 12 years now, so I guess I still have my rookie stripes.
Jay Hurst:
Combined we're almost at 40, or just over 40.
Mike:
Yeah, combined. We almost get our AARP discount, right?
Jay Hurst:
Yeah, exactly.
Mike:
Jay, let's kick off. I know I did a podcast ... and I'll link back to it ... not that long ago with Laura Pelke talking about some of the new things that were coming out, and of course security is always big on admins' mind. She did a wonderful job of explaining step-up authentication to me, which was basically the airport analogy of you have to show your ID to get in and then you have to show your boarding pass to get onto the plane. I thought that really made sense to me, but let's talk about the new authentication that's coming out, if you call it that, and the new step-up concerns that Salesforce admins have.
Jay Hurst:
Sure. So I think as we move into the continued proliferation of agents and AI across the industry, security is obviously top of mind for a lot of our customers and for Salesforce as well, specifically because we have to help protect our customers. And so when we're thinking of that and how we ensure our customers' data is protected, with step-up authentication, it's really focused around in that same analogy, making sure you're providing your boarding pass at the right times when you're doing things. So just like you need to show your boarding pass when you go through the TSA gate and when you're on the plane and probably to the gate agent after you're on the plane, when you're doing certain things within Salesforce, we want to make sure you are who you actually are and your session hasn't been compromised.
So when you're doing certain higher sensitivity-type actions such as I want to download 10,000 records out of my system, maybe run a report, putting that end user through another verification of, "Hey, is this actually you? Prove it with your step-up," so that we have that confidence that we can release the records. And so this kind of helps prevent some of those man-in-the-middle phishing attacks where somebody gets you to log in and then steals your credentials or steals your session in the background. So it's kind of that second or third or fourth level of protection in the runtime.
Mike:
Wow.
James Ferguson:
I think that's an important shift that's worth calling out, because it's no longer about just putting a stronger lock on the front door and making sure somebody has better passwords, or even the later stuff, the more recent stuff with verification. But it's when sensitive things happen, we need to do a little extra even once you're inside the airport, if we want to continue that analogy. And so it's a shift from that front door to moving forward.
Mike:
Yeah. James, help me understand that a little bit more, because I think one of the things that admins always fight is user friction. How hard is it to do something? And now we're introducing something when it could disrupt their flow of work, but it's for a good reason.
James Ferguson:
Exactly. I would say that we are constantly balancing that. We're constantly balancing the need for security with the friction it does. And so we aren't expecting to do every click, for example, but just when you're exporting data from a report, which is potentially pulling a large amount of data out, we want to make extra sure. We're looking at some other things in the future around maybe when you're an admin changing some security configurations, we want to make sure you are who you are. And frankly, you see this more and more even in consumer websites where sometimes you're asked. If you're going to change a phone number, change a thing, you need to go back and sort of double-proof who you are. But it is a trade-off. It is a trade-off.
Mike:
Yeah. It's like once you're logged in, it's, "Oh, if you're going to change." I was trying to order tacos the other day through an app and I needed to update my credit card. And then right after I did that, they're like, "And you need to put your password back in." I'm assuming that was kind of the same situation.
James Ferguson:
Kind of the same situation.
Jay Hurst:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And the other thing I'll add to this too is on the friction point. We always have to balance that. Like James said, we don't want people to become overly frustrated and not want to use Salesforce because it has too much friction. But the reality is over the last 20 years, we've edged so far on the line of not causing any friction that we've led admins down the path of not having that understanding of what their users are doing, and really not getting into that proper security-conscious mode. So we're trying to rubber band a little bit back on the other side, introduce a little more friction right now, so that people start to think and start to build those habits of understanding when they're doing something that potentially could be considered a malicious attack, such as downloading that all-opportunities report. So starting to get customers to think through that while we are continuing to build out what we call compensating control.
So the end goal here is not to provide friction and it's not to force you to do these one-time passwords for everything you need to do in the system. It's to give admins that layered capability of saying, "Well, if I have these five or six different controls I can put into place, then they can kind of compensate for one another." So where the most friction might be having to open up your email to get that one-time password to do the step-up, maybe we can compensate that through things like having a trusted IP range or already having a phishing-resistant authentication put in, or other controls that we will layer in. So we ultimately get to a posture where the admin can both reduce friction while choosing the proper set of controls for their needs.
Mike:
Yeah. No, that makes sense. You mentioned phishing-resistant MFA. Can you help me explain that if somebody's never heard that before?
Jay Hurst:
Yeah. So maybe I'm going to try and wiggle this airport analogy in. If we think way back in the day when you had your IDs, before REAL IDs and all of this, you didn't actually have good authentication on them. You might have a really bad picture, or in some cases IDs didn't have any pictures on them. They just had your name and your information, but they were accepted. Now, the problem with that is anybody could steal it if it doesn't have your picture, and they can pretend to be you.
So phishing-resistant MFA is kind of that same thing. Where a normal MFA might be a one-time password on your phone where you get that push notification that says, "Hey, your code is 123456, enter that code in," that's great because it means you have to have your phone in order to get that one-time password, but it's not as secure because it's sent over SMS. It doesn't really verify that you are who you say you are. It's only that you have access to that phone. Phishing-resistant adds another layer on top of that, so it's not just over SMS or in an app. It would be through what are called passkeys or other more cryptographically secure passes. So think of your face ID, your touch ID, some of those passkey-type implementations that you might see, where it's not just getting a code, but you have to unlock a vault that has your information in it and then you provide that information out.
So it's taking it from that ID that anybody can use if they just happen to steal your wallet into more of a REAL ID that also has some biometrics attached to it. So you can actually guarantee it's not just that you have the thing, but you have the thing and you are the person that should have the thing that identifies you. And so that's what we're implementing today that's starting to roll out tomorrow in production. We've already started pushing it into sandbox for admins where we want all of our administrative users across the system to enroll and use these phishing-resistant MFA capabilities, so that they're more secure.
Mike:
Yeah. I never even thought of that. All the time there's apps I log into and they send me a one-time passcode and I'm like, "Well, of course I have access to it." Never did I think that, "Oh, what if somebody already has access to my email, requests that code, and now they're essentially spoofing me?" And it never dawned on me until you think of, well, they're not really verifying that it's you, Mike. They're just verifying that whoever requested that code also has access to your inbox. And you're like, "Oh."
Jay Hurst:
Exactly. And that may not be a nice person.
Mike:
Right. So James, what are some questions that admins are asking online that we can kind of help answer for them, or equip them for when they get this rolled out to them?
James Ferguson:
They're certainly asking questions about phishing-resistant MFA versus regular MFA and the different sort of authenticators that are out there. I'll shift this around a bit. One of the things they aren't asking about, it's actually something that Jay mentioned in passing, which is the alternate controls. And for things like step-up, if you have login IP ranges on the org or on the user profile, or there's some session settings which force you to always be coming from the same IP address in your session, which is the case for most of us who are at a laptop at work or whatever it is. Those avoid step-up entirely because we have more certainty about who you are and where you're coming from. If your session's bouncing between Eastern Europe and Middle East and North Carolina and keeps hopping around, we start worrying more.
So you can do some things around IP ranges, which takes that friction away from the user altogether, and so those are some of the things that I would encourage admins to look into. Now, sometimes it doesn't work because of mobile providers or other network infrastructure, but it's also potentially a low-calorie way of really sort of avoiding at least the step-up part. They'll still have the MFA requirements.
Jay Hurst:
And one thing I'll add to that. When we add these types of controls to ... admins are human like the rest of us and we always want to make it as frictionless and easy as possible, but we don't want to trade off the security for it. So IP ranges specifically have been a little bit of our bane for the last six months, because we have a lot of customers who have said, "Well, I will just put in the entire internet range of IPs and go 000 to 255, 255, 255, 255. And then no matter where I'm coming from, I'm not going to get challenged and it's going to be great." And that works, or worked, but it's not secure. And so we don't want to trade off security for just checking the boxes. There are reasons for us doing this.
Now, with that one specifically, we have put in changes in place where we won't let you use such a broad internet range to get around it in that respect, where you actually have to put though into like, "Well, what is the internet range that I'm actually coming from and using?" And we have some friction still with that, I would say, with admins using very global deployments or salespeople that travel around a lot and using different VPNs. So we're working through that as one of those compensating controls rather than the primary control. But again, it is up to all of our admins to really think through.
We don't want you to just do the check the boxes that we're telling you to check because we want you to check a box. We really want you to think about these changes and what it means to your organization, why we're actually trying to implement these, and ultimately determine what makes the most sense for you and your company. And include your security officers and your CISOs to really validate what meets the requirements that your company has, so that everybody is protected both from a security perspective and ultimately a legal perspective as well.
Mike:
Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, we did a security day at TDX, our team did, and we had a CISO in there and a Salesforce admin as one of the kind of breakout topics, and they were in lockstep with each other, and I've always said that. I remember the instance I was managing, once it grew beyond 10 users, I was like, "I really need to figure out what our security posture is and who's in charge of this, who sets password complexities," at the time and stuff like that, and it's not adversarial. It's you want to be in alignment with what the rest of the company's doing and also fall in line if there's a SSO requirement. Boy, I was quick to jump on that, because it also made logging in simpler for my users.
Jay Hurst:
100%, and that's the other side of this. All of these things do play with SSO. If you have implemented SSO that has phishing-resistant capabilities already built into it, great. We will take advantage of that from the Salesforce side. We'll trust your provider. We'll trust that your security team has already set up what is needed for your company and we'll let you log in. So we don't want to add these additional duplicative type of controls for you, but we also recognize that a lot of our customers, maybe they're smaller customers, maybe they're not the enterprise size of Salesforce and don't have as structured of a security posture. So in those cases, we want to partner with our customers and really help them define what this should look like when they're thinking about internet security and their data in the cloud.
Mike:
Jay, I'm going to continue with you because James brought up a really good point. I was thinking of, "I'm going to ask him the common questions that admins are asking online." And James, you flipped the script, and it's, "Well, here are the questions that worry us that they're not asking." Jay, I'd ask kind of the same question to you, is you've seen a lot of the questions that our community's asking online. What are the questions they aren't asking that you really hoped they would ask, or you're there to provide an answer for?
Jay Hurst:
Yeah, I think the biggest ones, James talked about the compensating controls. That's a good one. I think a lot of our customers, as they're approaching it from the first standpoint is really they're looking at this as a Salesforce tax. They're really looking at it as like, "Oh, gosh, this is another thing Salesforce is putting me through. I don't know why. Why don't you just let me get my job done?" That type of attitude, which is completely understandable, but I do think one of the things our admins aren't seeing at that first cut is really the threat landscape that exists out there. I think if you haven't been attacked, if your org hasn't been compromised, it's very easy to fall into complacency and just think, "Everything's perfect, I'm secure, nothing's going to happen." And like everything, security and protection is a spectrum and it's a journey. You are never 100% perfectly ready for every outcome, and you also can't assume that what worked yesterday will continue to work tomorrow.
So what I would love to see more of our admins and customers look through is how do I build the security and the continuing advancement of my security posture into my day-to-day, into my development scenarios, into my admin scenarios, where the first thing we should always be thinking about is, "Is this change I'm doing helping or degrading my security posture? And if it's degrading, how do I increase it? What do I do to make it better?"
So I would love to get to a point where our very wonderful and vocal admins out there are also pushing us to do even more things to help protect them. What are the other controls that they're seeing across other enterprise systems that they want to take advantage of? How can Salesforce make it easier for you without lowering that security posture? How can we make it so that the friction can be lowered faster because you acknowledge the acceptance of the controls, or something like that around really getting back to a true partnership with more of our customers that I wouldn't say we've lost, but it's easy to forget about when you're focused on the headless 360s of the world or how can I get more agents into my system. And we also still have to think about, "And how do I keep it protected and managed?"
Mike:
Right. Yeah. I mean, it's more people in your house, but also making sure that everybody shuts the door and locks it.
Jay Hurst:
And wipes their feet.
Mike:
Right. Takes shoes off.
James Ferguson:
I think Jay also touches on what maybe I would consider the elephant in the room, because I think, when going back to the original question you asked in terms of what are admins asking, most of them aren't asking the why. Most of them acknowledge the value of these things and the need to do it, but they do push back on the why immediately and why under these compressed timelines and why, and sort of those kind of questions. And I will acknowledge that the rollout of some of these controls has not been as smooth as we all would've hoped, and so there's been some schedule things bouncing around from a timing perspective, and so we're definitely working on all of that. But it does play to that level of risk, and these are the things we really felt we needed to roll out sooner rather than later, and so that's why some of these timelines are compressed.
I will add another, the flip side of that, to your point about what should admins be doing. We do find when we give notice, of like advanced notice of asking people to change things, they tend not to do it until the week before the enforcement date.
Mike:
Imagine that. Procrastination? Come on, now.
James Ferguson:
And so that's sort of, when our executives are looking at adoption rates or whatnot, it's sort of blunted. The desire to extend those out is blunted because, well, people are just going to wait anyways. But that said, I don't want to sort of ... We are pushing fast. We acknowledge that. We are making people a bit even uncomfortable, I would say. And we acknowledge that, but this is something, again, in the balance of the security posture we feel is important for the overall trust in the Salesforce platform and product.
Mike:
I mean, the one thing that I've always learned through all of the work that I've done with various teams at Salesforce is for every time you roll something out, another lock, there's always 10 people there trying to pick it, if they haven't already picked it. And so you both have mentioned that unfortunately it's compressed timelines, but it's timelines because we need to make sure that you're building locks and putting that stuff in place before people just have it to where they can blow through it, you know?
Jay Hurst:
Absolutely. The best defense is a good offense, I think is a very adequate app saying in this instance. We want to continue to make sure everybody is at a baseline security level, which is the phase we're in right now. It's this horizon zero of how do we get everybody to the minimum baseline, where we feel very comfortable that your data is going to be protected on the Salesforce platform? And it is painful, and it will be painful for the next couple months as these changes really roll out.
Once we get there, we start thinking about what's our horizon one and our horizon two look like where we can start to add in the extra controls, give customers more levers to pull for their specific use cases, really focus on the experience around this, because I will also fully admit and not try and gloss over the fact that sometimes the wordings of things in the UX that we provide you to turn them on and turn them off is confusing and it's not as easy as it should be, and we're sacrificing some of that ease of use right now for speed of deployment. But the efforts that we have with the Salesforce Trust platform, which is an expanded group that we now have here that is purely focused on how do we not just get everybody secure, but continue to add more and more security features to make sure that Salesforce is the premier example of how an enterprise SaaS company secures their customers' data.
So that is the journey we're on, and we're taking our customers with us. And as painful as it is, James and myself and the whole team here, we are looking for active feedback. We're engaging with the community on a day-to-day basis just to try and sand down these rough edges as much as we can until we can get the front door built, locked, and then we can really talk about how do we decorate our house now.
Mike:
Yeah. But also you mentioned, well, we're doing it and it's going to be painful. I guess I'm on the flip side of that, thinking, "Boy, if I had other applications and they're not going through this as well, that actually is more of a red flag to me," because then now I'm thinking like, "Well, do they not care as much about making sure all of my data on their platform is as secure as possible?"
Jay Hurst:
Absolutely. Like I said, it's a journey, not a destination. What is 100% secure today is not as secure tomorrow. With all of the new attack vectors that come out and these capabilities like Mythos and Fable and all of these really, really smart and frankly scary AI capabilities, we have to double and triple down even harder to make sure that we stay as far ahead of that as we can.
Mike:
Right. And as I've been reminded, security isn't always about being scary. Security is about being informed and making the right choices so that you have that protection and that understanding, which is really good.
James Ferguson:
It's risk management. It's risk management.
Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. James and Jay, I want to thank you guys for coming on and walking us through some of this. I know anytime that we offer anybody in our community, whether it's developers or architects or admins, a change, it's always extra work. But I feel like you're right there in answering the questions and helping through some of the hard parts, because I'll be honest, there's not a day that goes by that I don't learn something in security, at my current job and even when I was a Salesforce admin.
Jay Hurst:
Absolutely. And thank you, Mike, for helping amplify the message. One of the challenges I think we have at the product side is making sure our customers understand and get the information. We have our blog posts and our help documentation and we send out emails, but any extra we can do to megaphone this and get people aware is definitely valuable, so thank you for this opportunity.
Mike:
You bet.
James Ferguson:
And thank to all the admins who are out there who are also helping amplify this and helping support the rest of the community. It's one of the great things about Salesforce from the very beginning. It's the huge community support that exists. We couldn't do it if it was just the six PMs on my team. We need everybody involved.
Mike:
Yeah. And I think the part of that you take away is while I'm glad there's so many questions online that we had the idea to do this podcast, because that means there's so many people that are engaged and caring, as opposed to rolling something out and, "Hey, did anybody have any questions," and it's crickets. The reverse of that would also be kind of scary too, is there's questions because people care and because they want to understand. And also I think the one thing that I always had to do as an admin was I had to translate all of that from whatever the document said, or the podcast like this or the blog posts, to my users and to my executives, and it's a lot different once you have to take something in and digest it and then be ready for a Q&A. So there's always more to learn, but thank you guys for coming on. We'll definitely have to have you back on.
Jay Hurst:
Sounds great.
Mike:
Talk more security.
James Ferguson:
Appreciate it. Looking forward to it.
Mike:
Big thanks to Jay and James for helping us understand MFA step-up, phishing-resistant authentication, and the role admins play in protecting business systems. Now, of course, we know security is a shared responsibility, and admins are right in the middle of making it real for users, executives and, well, everybody in the organization. So be sure to listen, subscribe and share this episode out, and work through those security changes. You got this. Don't worry. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Mofeyi Oluwalana, Director of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about MuleSoft, Flow, Agentforce, and what happens when agents need to take action beyond Salesforce. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Mofeyi […]

The post How MuleSoft Helps Salesforce Admins Build Better Agents appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Mofeyi Oluwalana, Director of Product Management at Salesforce.
Join us as we chat about MuleSoft, Flow, Agentforce, and what happens when agents need to take action beyond Salesforce.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Mofeyi Oluwalana.
MuleSoft creates agent-friendly business processes
Agentforce can be truly transformative for our business processes, but sometimes it's easier said than done—especially when multiple platforms are involved. That's why I sat down with Mofeyi Oluwalana, Director of Product Management for MuleSoft.
As Mofeyi explains, a problem many businesses run into when they're trying to implement AI is how to enable an agent to engage with something like a process that starts on a payment platform, goes through an OMS, and then ends up with a request to a warehouse for shipping. You can't just hand them the APIs and expect them to figure out the rest.
That's where MuleSoft comes in. It gives you the building blocks you need to codify your workflows into something an agent can understand.
Data mapping for real-time app integration
Building an agent-friendly business process begins with data mapping. What do you need and where is it located? You also need to understand the triggers that kick off each part of the process. Does it start with a Slack message, or when an order is created?
Often, these types of business processes don't start in the Salesforce ecosystem. MuleSoft allows you to translate these business requirements into APIs that an agent can use to take action.
How to present to stakeholders
As a product manager, Mofeyi frequently gives presentations to stakeholders, so I wanted to know if she had any advice for admins. "The most important thing when I walk into any room, regardless of the stakeholder, is who are they and what do they care about? Your ability to persuade and influence is largely due to your understanding of the three things that the people that you're talking to care about and how you align what you're talking about with those three things," she says.
Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Mofeyi for more about MuleSoft and mapping your business processes. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast for a new episode every Thursday.
Podcast swag
Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more
Salesforce Admins Blog Post: How MuleSoft Helps Admins Get the Most out of Agentforce

Admin Trailblazers Group
Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social
Mofeyi on LinkedIn

Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn

Salesforce Admins on X

Mike on Bluesky social

Mike on Threads

Mike on X

Full show transcript
Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we're joined by Mofeyi Oluwalana, product management director at Salesforce to talk about MuleSoft, Flow, Agentforce, and what happens when agents need to take action beyond Salesforce. Now, for Salesforce admins, this conversation matters because agents are only as useful as the data, the actions, the permissions, and the business logic they can safely reach. So Mofeyi's going to explain to us why integrations are not just about moving data from one system to another. They're about helping Salesforce connect to the real processes your business depends on. We'll talk about the questions that admins should ask when working with other platform owners, how to think about triggers and data mapping and why business context is so important when you're designing actions for humans and agents. So give this episode a listen, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, share it with another Salesforce admin who's maybe thinking about how Salesforce could connect to the rest of their business. And with that, let's get Mofeyi on the podcast. So Mofeyi, welcome to the podcast.
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Thank you so much.
Mike:
I'm excited. We don't do a whole lot of episodes outside a core platform. And I know my Salesforce admins ... My ... The Salesforce admins of the world work everywhere and especially now with Agentforce and agents and really just the whole bringing people together and giving a complete view of data, integrating data and working with MuleSoft and tools like that are super important. So I'm glad to have you on. I'm glad we got connected, but let's start off and learn a little bit about you. What was your path to Salesforce and becoming a product management director?
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Yes. So I started at Salesforce a little over four years ago. I actually came through the APM program, also known as the Associate Product Manager Program. It's a two-year rotational program for folks coming out of university, getting their start in product. So I was able to come in through that program. I did three rotations all across Salesforce. I spent some time in Commerce Cloud working on how to run promotions on Black Friday.
Mike:
Oh, holy cow.
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
And I spent a lot of time in experience services, thinking about how we can make it easier for marketers to build nice looking emails. And I ultimately landed in MuleSoft, which is where I continued working with the MuleSoft team on how to make it easier for our customers to connect the systems that they need to, both for traditional use cases, but also for the agentic ones as well.
Mike:
Yeah. It's funny, for the longest time in my career, I worked retail and the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday was always the busiest day. And then I got into tech and I was like, "I don't have to work Black Friday."
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Guess what? [inaudible 00:03:17].
Mike:
And then realized that like, "Oh man, I was a retail associate. There's still computers that have to be had." So I have a soft spot in my heart for all of the people that on Black Friday have to sweat it out and make sure that servers don't go down so that checks and barcodes and everything can happen on the other end.
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Yeah. I never realized how complex it could mean to calculate hundreds of thousands of carts when there were promotions running on Black Friday, but certainly it's more complicated than one may think.
Mike:
Right. And then there's people like me that add stuff to a cart and I'll come back to it a little bit later like, no, there's somebody ... You're using up the last bit of ... I don't know. He probably doesn't know that. And then I'm also old school retail when you used to have to verify checks and put them through little check readers and now everything's a credit card or a tap or thumbprint.
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
All of the above.
Mike:
All of the above. But it's all of the above because we're integrating data and we're doing stuff with MuleSoft. So I threw together some questions, but let's start off with where should admin start when thinking about products like Flow and MuleSoft and Agentforce together?
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Yeah. The journey with MuleSoft starts the moment that your agent wants to do anything outside of Salesforce. I think MuleSoft is the connector, so to speak. If you have data that your agents need to reach in your ERP, if you have actions your agents need to be able to take with your payment provider, how exactly will they be able to do that? Now when agents and agentic technology became a thing, a lot of people were of this opinion that, well, agents are smart enough to just understand platform APIs or where agents can read the specifications, figure out the commands that they need to execute and do all the things that they need to do to be successful. We very quickly realized that agents are really smart, but at the end of the day, they're limited by the information that they know and the tools that they have access to. So it's not sufficient to just give your agents a platform API spec. That's not going to cut it. Your agents need integrations and APIs that they can directly invoke that map to your business logic.
They need this because not every organization operates the same. For one retail provider, creating an order is very different from other retail providers. And understanding that business vocabulary is really important when building agents that actually bring value. And that's really where MuleSoft and Flow come into the picture. You have actions that your agency to be able to take in order to execute a certain business process. Well, that action is really just an API and we serve those APIs so your agents are able to do those things.
Mike:
Yeah. I've always thought of Josh who's on my team keeps us in check with helping us understand stuff. And what you just described would be like as if you brought somebody new on and said, "Well, here's a phone and a phone book. And if you have problems, the phone number's in the phone book." And the agent's the same way. If you're just saying, "Here's all the specs and the APIs you can call, go figure it out." It's almost like handing them this giant phone book and just saying, "Well, you're smart. You'll figure it out."
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Yeah. Exactly. And the thing is that for a retailer, creating an order may not just be creating that order record. Creating an order may be, oh, I create the order record and then I send a notification out via email that says, "Hey, this is your order." And then after that, I create an invoice. There are a number of steps that happen. And how do you codify those steps? Well, it's not enough to just give an agent, again, the phone book and the numbers. It's much better and much more reliable to give them the actual workflow or the API they can use to execute that entire process.
Mike:
Yeah. Now, one thing that I've run into, so back when I was doing some integrations as an admin, we had different third party tools that were being used. One thing that I didn't know to ask ... And I'm hoping you can help Salesforce admins like, here's the questions you need to ask. We had an instance and we need to connect it to our financial backend, which ran not on Salesforce. I had to find the owner of that, which I didn't know existed. The other thing I didn't know to ask was I didn't know what to ask. And so as we work through different scenarios, you brought up like, well, they want to take the cart and order the stuff. The orders could be fulfilled in a different system. There could be a warehouse system. What are some of the questions that when the admin's sitting down with a business owner and they're saying, "Here's what I want in Salesforce and I'd really like to be able to pull up the orders." And the admin's like, "Okay, now I need MuleSoft because I need to integrate another system and I got to go talk to that systems' owner." What are some of the questions they should ask and what is some of the information they need to provide so that they can start setting up that relationship?
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Yeah. I think it first starts with defining what data are you actually looking for? A large part of building integrations between these two systems is I have some data in the financial system. I have my CRM data in Salesforce. How do those two things map together? So I think the first step is what data are you looking for? And what is the mapping between what you're trying to do from a CRM perspective with whatever may be happening in that financial system? So to me, it starts with the data. I think the next question to ask is what is the trigger? It starts off this process. Is it someone sending a message in a Slack channel? Is it this order being created within your ERP? What is it that triggers this process to happen? You build the trigger, then you identify what the data mapping is between the source being that financial system and the target. And that's really how you get towards that working integration.
Mike:
Now, when I sit down with another platform owner and I talk about using MuleSoft, we can bring ... And so this is where you're going to quickly hear Mike's knowledge run out of gas because here's where Mike's knowledge hits the wall. But we can bring that data in and it can be like a pane of glass. We can just view that data or we could actually copy that data over so that we can use it in reports. And then we could also extend that conversation with the platform owner and say, "Well, if somebody wants to change something, they could change that in Salesforce and then Salesforce with MuleSoft can push that data change back to that platform." How'd I do?
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
I think you're almost there.
Mike:
Okay. Fill me in because what I don't know is what I don't know and I feel like there's other admins that may not know this as well.
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
I think the best way to think about MuleSoft is that real time app integration layer. So not necessarily the data that you want to live in Salesforce. Getting that unified customer view is really important. And so you'll need the data connectors in place to get data from external systems into Salesforce. That is one use case and one that Data Cloud solves really well. The problem that MuleSoft solves really well in tandem with Agentforce is the agent needs to take real time action. Again, so let's say we're going back to the retail example where I create an order. If order management doesn't happen in Salesforce, creating an order doesn't necessarily mean starting that process within the Salesforce ecosystem. I just want to be able to kick off that process with my OMS, my warehouse, my shipping provider. Then in that case, it's real time app integration. It's using the APIs that MuleSoft has to be able to kick off that workflow and that process using your agents. So it's a little bit different than moving data just from one place to another.
Mike:
No. I think that's also very important because companies have spent money on those systems. And I remember when I was sitting down with our finance team, they're like, "Well, if this data lives here and in Salesforce, what's the source of truth?" And we set it up so that we were just viewing the data because we really wanted sources of truth within the organization. But sometimes the user lives and dies within one interface and where that data comes from, we don't need that exposed to them.
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Exactly. And I think it's the use case for consolidating data into one place is a little bit different from the use case of making sure that your agents can take action. And so I think as part of that rationalization that admins and IT teams have to do is what data do I need to drive what? And what actions do my agents need in order to be successful? And this part of that then can separate it into those two camps and then move forward with the tools that help them do so.
Mike:
Cool. Now, when you connect MuleSoft with other systems, does the admin need to ask for, can you provide a certain API? That's how it's set up, right? Or walk me through it because I've never set it up and I feel like I'm completely happy being the host of the podcast that asks the questions that admins are like, "Oh, I'm so glad he asked that because I didn't know to ask that question and I didn't want to look stupid in front of my IT people."
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Yeah. So I think from the business side, we set the requirements about, okay, this is what I need. This is the process that I need done. These are the steps that should happen. This is what should trigger that. You do that definition. Then you can work with the IT team or the API developer to actually make that happen. Now the API developer has access to a number of connectors within MuleSoft that enable them to build these APIs and integrations without relying on what is the API specification for my OMS system or what is the API specification for my [inaudible 00:15:07] system? There are connectors that have a ton of different actions that you can orchestrate within a MuleSoft integration to get a certain job done.
So one example that I like to use is the Salesforce connector. The Salesforce connector has a ton of different triggers. Let's say when a new object is created or on when a record is modified that can trigger the integration. The Salesforce connector also has a bunch of actions or operations. So I can create a record in Salesforce. I can delete a record in Salesforce. I can create a topic in Salesforce. All of the different actions that you can execute through Salesforce APIs extrapolate it into a connector so that it's easier to build and then manage these integrations. So the API developer is in charge of translating those business requirements into the integration composed of those connectors that allow you to achieve exactly that.
Mike:
Gotcha. Boy, there's a lot. It feels like there's a lot to it and we make it look so simple in demos.
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Yeah. I will say it's much easier looking at a screen and hearing an audio podcast of what this really is. But I like to think of them as MuleSoft gives the tools, those building blocks. You can compose those building blocks in a certain order to create a workflow. Those are the integrations that you can use and your agents can also use to take action.
Mike:
Yeah. I always think of it as admins are managing users and agents and agents are just like users. They have to have instructions and guardrails and guidelines for how to operate and what they can and can't do same way that people have as well. I'd love to know, so as a product manager, you got into the program. How has being a product manager helped you understand the product, but also given you a different perspective of working through explaining different customer stories or use cases?
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
I would say the best, and I'm obviously biased, but the best part about being a product manager is just the sheer amount of data points that you see. One of the things that I think is really important as part of being a product manager is meeting with as many customers as you possibly can because it's through those customer conversations that they're very clear themes that you can draw, not only of how people use the product, but what the product doesn't quite solve for yet. And so going through those conversations has helped me not only understand those customer pain points better, but then understand the things that we need to do in the product to make it even easier for our customers to use.
Mike:
Yeah. No. I often feel when I was exposed for a brief six months as a consultant that a lot of the pain points customers have always felt the same. I was like, "Man, they have the same problem that XYZ has." And at the end of the day, you'd look at all the customers you manage and you're like, "They have these five problems." And then brand new somebody would come in and you're like, "And you have completely different use case and requirements and they don't fall into those same five problems that I've been solving all day, which is nice." So I'd be curious, as admins are looking more and more at building ... They build agents and apps on the platform and they extend the platform and they use MuleSoft. What are things that you're thinking about as a product manager for, wow, I have to be a year out or two years out. How should admins be thinking about their building and management of the Salesforce platform as a product?
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Yeah. I think the most important thing is not just building for where we are today, but building for what's coming. I think one thing that agents in AI technology has taught us is that the technology market is changing so fast. It's going to be a new model. It's going to be some new capability that you want to be able to leverage. And in order to do so, the foundation and the platform that you're building on has to be interoperable. It has to be able to withstand some of those changes that you want to make. The example I always like to give is if having to change a model is going to disrupt your operations, that is an issue. And we know that is an issue because LLM models, a new one comes up every day, another one is deprecated every other week. So I think the most important thing thinking about the platform is how do I make the platform resilient and flexible so that as these new capabilities come into play, I'm actually able to use them and really take advantage of them within my organizations.
Mike:
That's very good advice. I'm just going to guess and maybe I'm wrong and we can move on. As a product manager, you probably do a lot of presenting both to customers and probably internally. I know admins have to do that as well. What would be some advice you would have for admins that are presenting either a new solution or proposing something to their stakeholders?
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
The most important thing when I walk into any room, small or large, regardless of the stakeholder is who are they and what do they care about? It's easy to get lost as a product manager. It's very easy to get lost in, I actually think this is an amazing idea and I talked to 10 customers and I know it's going to be valuable for them. But your ability to persuade and influence largely due to your understanding of the three things that the people that you're talking to care about and helping them align what you're talking about to those three things.
A great example is that when you talk to your COO, I will guess that it will come down to how much does it cost the organization and how much money is it going to make me? So talking to your COO is not the same conversation that you'll have with support. Who cares about, okay, is this going to make it easier for me to support my customers? Does this make us more reliable? So you need to change the delivery to really match the things that you're being evaluated on when you're presenting to an audience, when you're presenting to internal stakeholders and external ones as well.
Mike:
That's really good advice because I can tell you right now I'm guilty as charged of walking into a room thinking I have the answer and this is the most important thing that they're ever going to want to hear and forgetting that they probably had their own goals and I just blew right past them and kept talking about something else entirely. Bad. So one thing that I find talking with people that work in tech is we always have hobbies or things that we like to do on the side that are very tactile. I know I've interviewed a product manager that smelted pewter.
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Wow.
Mike:
That's the extreme case. I always bring it up because it sounds interesting and who hasn't walked past some sort of pewter chessboard with its little figurines and thought that would be cool except I'm not going to pay a few hundred dollars for it. I'm wondering if there's anything interesting that you have as a hobby that you would love to share with people.
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Unfortunately, I'm not nearly as interesting as the guest that you just mentioned.
Mike:
It's not a contest. It's not a contest.
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
It feels like one. Just kidding. I won't say I'm tactile as I'd like to just stay mobile. As a lot of the folks who work in tech, we sit on our butts all day looking at computer screens. So wherever possible, I like to just go outside, get some fresh air, do some movement, whether that be running, yoga or similar. That's my anchor. Again, not as interesting, but it helps me. It regulates me nevertheless.
Mike:
It's still super valuable. I was just talking with a coworker the other day about our grandparents and so-and-so's grandparents lived to be 89 and they were outside in the sun all day and they had bacon and eggs for breakfast. And I thought to myself, "Well, yeah. And then they probably worked it off all day because everybody was thin back then. And the worst thing they could do is sit down at a desk like I do." And so who would've thought that there was ever a need for a treadmill desk? I think that back to the future quote, "You run for fun."
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Exactly.
Mike:
So no, that's really good. And what's great, I've had a few colleagues as well take calls while they're walking. I think the benefit of being in tech is that you can do calls like that and work through. As long as you're not working through maybe architecture diagrams for Microsoft integration, that would probably be pretty bad.
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Or if it's windy outside and you don't have a great mic. I'm also a big proponent of just walking outside and taking as many meetings as I can moving.
Mike:
Absolutely. Yeah. No. Well, I would just say windy at all because I have yet to find a mic that doesn't make it sound like you're walking through a NASA wind tunnel.
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Wait, that's the next startup.
Mike:
I'm telling you. The fuzzies that come on mics, there's got to be something better. There's got to be something better.
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
I agree. I agree.
Mike:
I don't need to have a big mustache just to talk into the microphone. Well, it was great chatting with you. I learned a lot. I feel like I tried to ask some of the silly questions that I know admins would want to ask. There's probably plenty of admins out there that have done some MuleSoft integrations, but I know when I had to sit down with other platform owners and be like, "I need your thing to plug into Salesforce and I don't know how to make you do that, but you figure it out." I always wanted to ask the silly questions so that when they sit down, they know what to say and can have a better relationship because in every aspect of the sense, there's other platform owners within organizations and they're all trying to do right by each other. So that being said, I appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing that with us and we'll have to come back and talk more MuleSoft maybe after Dreamforce for sure.
Mofeyi Oluwalana:
Yeah. Thank you so, so much for having me. And again, I'm biased obviously, but always love talking the world of MuleSoft and integrations because it truly feels even more relevant than ever with agents and the technology.
Mike:
Absolutely. Big thanks to Mofeyi for joining us and really helping make MuleSoft flow and Agentforce feel more approachable. I wasn't afraid to ask the questions that you shouldn't be afraid to ask. The big takeaway for admins when agents need to act outside of Salesforce, your understanding of the business process, the data, the triggers, and the right system of truth matters now more than ever. That's how you keep Salesforce accurate, current, trusted, and useful for the business. Now be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins podcast. If you haven't already, share this episode. Hey, share it with your team. And then keep asking those questions that help your org connect the right systems in the right way. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kacie Molina, Salesforce Consultant at Kawaii Cloud. Join us as we chat about how admins can start small with Agentforce and still make a big impact. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kacie Molina. Why […]

The post How Can Salesforce Admins Find Simple Agentforce Use Cases? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.