10 Tips When Hiring a Salesforce Release Manager

A Salesforce Release Manager is a professional who oversees the planning, scheduling, coordinating, and managing of all activities related to the release of a system – in this case, Salesforce. This role is critical in ensuring the system’s stability while delivering new features and improvements to end users.

An effective Salesforce Release Manager can make the difference between smooth sailing and rough waters in your Salesforce journey. Getting the right person on board can mean a seamless, efficient release process and a turbulent, disruptive one.

So, when should you hire a Salesforce Release Manager? The decision to hire a Salesforce Release Manager often depends on several factors. If you have a large development team, a complex environment, are implementing CI/CD, or have frequent Salesforce releases, then hiring a release manager is a must-do.

1. Only Hire Those With Relevant Experience on Their Resume

Let’s dive straight into our first crucial tip: always prioritize candidates with relevant Salesforce experience.

A Salesforce Release Manager manages the process from development through production, ensuring the successful, stable, and controlled transition of new software, updates, and configuration changes.

Key Responsibilities of a Salesforce Release Manager

• Organizing and overseeing steps for software deployment.
• Coordinating with various teams to ensure smooth software releases.
• Identifying and mitigating potential release risks.
• Making sure releases comply with organizational standards and regulations.
• Maintaining and sharing release notes and deployment plans.
• Overseeing and synchronizing Salesforce environments.
• Collecting feedback and analyzing release success for future improvement.
• Reviewing and tracking the progress of change requests associated with a release.
• Operating tools used for deployment and version control.

Why is relevant experience in these areas so important? A release manager with hands-on Salesforce experience will understand how to navigate its complexities, enabling them to ensure a smoother and more efficient release process.

Moreover, relevant experience is a testament to a candidate’s ability to adapt to changes within the Salesforce platform. Remember, Salesforce updates its software three times a year. A candidate with significant experience will likely have navigated these updates in the past, proving their ability to adapt to new features and changes quickly and efficiently.

So, what kind of experience should you be looking for on their CV? Here are a few key areas to focus on:

• Experience with Salesforce releases: Candidates should have experience managing Salesforce updates or releases. This could involve managing the update process, mitigating risks, and troubleshooting issues.
• Environment management experience: The release manager also typically has a role in managing the Salesforce environments. This could involve setting up and maintaining development, testing, and staging environments and controlling the flow of changes between these environments.
• Risk identification and assessment experience: Experience in identifying potential risks in the software release lifecycle and assessing their potential impact. This could involve analyzing technical risks, such as potential software bugs, and logistical risks, such as schedule conflicts or resource availability issues.
• Change implementation experience: Experience in implementing changes in a structured and systematic manner, reducing the likelihood of issues or disruptions. This includes knowledge of change implementation methods and best practices.

Remember, the goal isn’t just to find a person who knows Salesforce, but a professional who knows how to leverage their Salesforce expertise to manage releases effectively. This will ensure that your organization can continue to reap the benefits of Salesforce’s powerful features without the headaches of a bumpy release process.

2. Your Candidate Needs to Have Familiarity With the Salesforce Ecosystem

Moving on to our second tip, one of the essential qualities to look for in your prospective Salesforce Release Manager is a comprehensive understanding of the Salesforce ecosystem. This knowledge is vital for your release manager to deliver successful releases while preventing or mitigating any disruptions or issues.

The Salesforce ecosystem encompasses more than just the Salesforce platform itself. It includes a suite of development tools, environments, and methodologies in which your release manager must be proficient to ensure successful and efficient releases.

Key areas of familiarity include:

• Salesforce DX (Developer Experience): Tools facilitating Salesforce app development and management throughout the entire platform lifecycle. This provides a modern, integrated approach to development, aligning with industry standards and best practices.
• Salesforce Sandboxes and Scratch Orgs: These testing environments enable developers to devise and evaluate changes without affecting the live Salesforce production environment. Sandboxes are integral to the release management process.
• Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) tools: These aid in automating app development and deployment stages, which is crucial for efficient release management.
• Version Control Systems (like Git): These tools are used to track source code changes over time – essential for managing codebases in team environments.
• Deployment Tools (like Change Sets or Metadata API): These tools help move metadata from one environment to another.
• Knowledge of Various Salesforce Products: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Experience Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Tableau CRM, and Salesforce IoT.

Here are some questions you can ask to suss out your candidate’s familiarity:

• Can you explain the key differences and use cases for various Salesforce Clouds (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, etc.)?
• How would you approach migrating a complex set of customizations from a Sandbox environment to Production?
• How would you describe the role and functionality of Salesforce DX in the Salesforce ecosystem?
• How have you utilized Salesforce’s testing and debugging tools in your previous roles?

3. Check for an Understanding of DevOps Principles

Our third tip brings us to DevOps, which has revolutionized how organizations think about software development and operations. A strong grasp of DevOps principles is essential for any Salesforce Release Manager.

DevOps is a set of practices that shorten the systems development life cycle, provide continuous delivery with high software quality, and promote a strong collaboration between the development and operations teams.In the context of a Salesforce Release Manager, a good understanding of DevOps principles can dramatically improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the release process. These principles guide the way towards automated deployments, comprehensive monitoring, effective communication, and swift resolution of issues – all critical factors in a successful Salesforce release.

A candidate familiar with DevOps would understand the importance of:

• Collaboration: Good communication between all involved teams is a must. Your release manager should be comfortable working with developers, operations, and business stakeholders and able to facilitate effective dialogue between these groups.
• Automation: Automation is key in DevOps for ensuring speed, accuracy, and consistency. A release manager should be comfortable automating tasks in the Salesforce release process, such as testing and deployment.
• Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): CI/CD is a cornerstone of DevOps. It involves merging all developers’ working copies to a shared mainline several times daily and automatically deploying all changes to the main branch to production.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): With IaC, infrastructure is defined and provisioned using code, allowing it to be versioned and treated like any other code. Familiarity with IaC concepts and tools can be a major sales release manager asset.
• Feedback and Iteration: DevOps involves constantly gathering feedback and making iterative improvements to the system. In a Salesforce context, this might involve regularly gathering user feedback, monitoring system performance, and making adjustments based on this information.
• Monitoring and Logging: Monitoring system performance and logging changes and events is crucial for identifying and addressing issues quickly. Salesforce provides various tools for this, such as the Debug Log for tracking code execution and the Performance Monitoring Tool in Salesforce Shield for tracking system performance.

You can check for Salesforce DevOps understanding with these questions:

• What Salesforce DevOps tools have you used in your previous roles, and how did you find them in terms of effectiveness?
• Can you discuss the benefits and challenges of implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in Salesforce?
• If you had to improve the Salesforce release management process in an organization, what steps would you take?
• Can you discuss your experience setting up a CI/CD pipeline for Salesforce?

To effectively manage the Salesforce release process, a release manager should have experience with various DevOps tools that are commonly used with Salesforce. These tools help automate and streamline the process, making it more efficient and less prone to errors. 

Here are two of the key tools:

1. Copado: A native Salesforce DevOps solution that manages the entire development lifecycle, from planning and coding to testing and deployment. It supports version control, automated deployments, automated testing, and more. Copado integrates with tools like Git, facilitating streamlined tracking of changes and version control.
2. Gearset: Another popular Salesforce DevOps tool, Gearset simplifies the management of changes, testing, and releases. It provides features like comparison and deployment of changes between Salesforce orgs, automated tests and monitoring, rollback capabilities, and more. Gearset also has robust support for version control systems, notably Git.

Experience with Git-based development is particularly important for a Salesforce Release Manager, as Git is the industry-standard tool for version control. It allows multiple developers to work on the same codebase without overwriting each other’s changes. It also provides a history of changes, making it easy to revert to a previous version if necessary.

Furthermore, using Git with Salesforce aligns with the broader shift towards modern development practices in the Salesforce ecosystem. Git-based tools make it easier for Salesforce teams to adopt these practices by providing a familiar interface and automating many manual tasks in managing a Git repository.

Here are two Git-based tools worth taking note of:

1. Hutte: Hutte is a no-code Salesforce DevOps tool that makes Git-based development more efficient and also accessible to non-technical team members. Effortlessly create and manage Salesforce scratch orgs and sandboxes with a user-friendly visual interface.
2. Blue Canvas: Leverage the power of Blue Canvas to streamline your Salesforce development cycle, empowering you with modern CI capabilities, automated source control, and seamlessly integrated release management workflows.

4. Look for Project Management Skills

For our fourth tip, we emphasize project management skills’ crucial role for a Salesforce Release Manager. Here’s why these skills are vital:

• Coordination and Oversight: These skills enable managers to effectively plan, organize, and supervise multiple tasks and teams involved in a Salesforce release. This helps in efficiently managing resources and timely completion of tasks.
• Effective Communication: Project management skills enhance a release manager’s ability to facilitate clear and efficient communication among various stakeholders, such as developers, administrators, testers, and business teams. This promotes alignment and collaborative working towards common objectives.
• Risk Management: Identifying potential risks and taking appropriate measures to mitigate them is a crucial aspect of project management. This approach can prevent minor issues from escalating into major problems, keeping the release process on track.
• Adaptability: Given the dynamic nature of Salesforce releases, managers must be able to adapt to changes and implement alterations to the project plan when necessary. This flexibility helps to navigate unexpected challenges and keep the project on course.

Familiarity with project management methodologies, such as Agile, Scrum & Waterfall, is beneficial. These methodologies offer different approaches to managing projects, and a good manager will understand which one to use based on the situation at hand. 

Furthermore, proficiency in using project management software like Jira is an asset, as these tools can aid in planning, tracking progress, and managing tasks efficiently. When it comes to Jira skills to look out for, custom field management is a big one, as Salesforce also uses custom fields. You should also ensure that your candidate knows how to manage workflows in Jira to align with the corresponding Salesforce process.

Did you know that you can integrate Jira and Salesforce? A commonly used tool for this integration is the Salesforce & Jira Cloud Connector. It is available on the Atlassian Marketplace and allows bi-directional syncing of information.

If you’re looking to test your candidate’s project management skills, here are some questions you can ask:

• Can you share an example of a project that did not go as planned and how you managed it?
• How do you determine project priorities and delegate tasks?
• How would you handle a critical issue arising just before a planned Salesforce release?

5. The Importance of Proper Certification and Training

For our fifth tip, we turn to an integral factor when hiring a Salesforce Release Manager – proper certification and training. The ever-evolving Salesforce platform demands a continuous commitment to learning, with certifications as important milestones on this educational journey.

Why are these certifications crucial? They validate a candidate’s knowledge, skills, and expertise in specific areas of the Salesforce platform. Possessing relevant certifications is a strong indicator that a candidate has the technical prowess to navigate and manage the complexities of Salesforce releases.

Notably, these certifications are typically tied to continuous learning requirements. This means certified professionals must keep their knowledge up-to-date by learning about the latest updates and best practices in Salesforce. This commitment to lifelong learning is a massive asset in the rapidly changing world of CRM technology.

Here are a few preferred certifications for a Salesforce Release Manager:

1. Salesforce Certified Administrator: This certification demonstrates a candidate’s understanding of Salesforce configuration, management, and administration.
2. Salesforce Certified Advanced Administrator: A step further than the Administrator certification, this one validates advanced knowledge and skills in user management, security, and process automation.
3. Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder: This certification validates a candidate’s knowledge of designing, building, and implementing custom applications on the Salesforce platform.
4. Salesforce Certified Development Lifecycle and Deployment Designer: This highly relevant certification showcases expertise in environment management and deployment on the Salesforce platform.

While these certifications are preferred, it’s important to remember that the perfect candidate might not have all these certificates. If that’s the case, but they show a strong understanding of Salesforce and a willingness to obtain them – they should not be overlooked. 

This eagerness to learn and grow can often be just as valuable, if not more, than a long list of current qualifications.

6. Proficiency in Automated Testing

Our sixth tip focuses on a crucial element of effective Salesforce release management: proficiency with automated testing. As the scale and complexity of Salesforce deployments grow, manual testing becomes increasingly time-consuming and prone to human error. This is where automated testing comes into play – serving as a powerful tool for ensuring the functionality and performance of new releases without overburdening your team.

Automated testing brings several key advantages to the Salesforce release process:

• Efficiency: Automated tests run faster than manual tests, allowing for more frequent testing and faster feedback on potential issues.
• Reliability: Automated tests reduce the risk of human error, offering consistent, repeatable testing procedures.
• Coverage: Automated testing can cover various scenarios, including edge cases, ensuring that new features and updates work as expected in different contexts.

A Salesforce Release Manager with experience in automated testing will be able to implement and manage testing procedures effectively, ensuring that any issues are caught and addressed before the release goes live.

Here are some questions you can ask to test this proficiency:

• Have you ever set up an automated testing framework from scratch for Salesforce? If so, can you walk me through the process?
• What are the key factors to consider when deciding what tests to automate in a Salesforce environment?
• If an automated test fails during a release process, how would you approach troubleshooting the issue?
• How would you integrate automated testing into a CI/CD pipeline for Salesforce?

In terms of tools, the Salesforce ecosystem offers several options for automated testing. A release manager should be familiar with tools such as Selenium for web testing, Jest for Lightning Web Components, and Apex for server-side testing. Knowledge of CI/CD tools such as Jenkins or Travis CI is also beneficial, as these can automate the testing process further.

In addition, the release manager should understand the principles of Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), which strongly emphasize testing throughout the development process.

7. Make Sure They Have a Knowledge of Regulatory Compliance

Navigating towards our seventh tip, we underscore a fundamental necessity for a Salesforce Release Manager: a thorough understanding of regulatory compliance. As Salesforce is often entrusted with sensitive data, ensuring compliance with data security standards and other relevant regulations is paramount in the release management process.

A knowledgeable release manager can play a crucial role in maintaining your organization’s compliance standing in several ways:

• Data Security: Salesforce Release Managers should be well-versed in the data security model and its best practices to protect your sensitive information from unauthorized access, leaks, or breaches. This includes understanding encryption, access controls, data masking, and other data protection methods.
• Regulatory Standards: Different industries are governed by various regulatory standards. Whether GDPR for data privacy, HIPAA for health information, or ISO 27001 for information security management, the release manager must ensure that Salesforce releases comply with all relevant regulations.
• Audit Trails: Knowledge of maintaining and managing audit trails is crucial. These records are often required for compliance purposes and can prove invaluable in case of a security incident or a regulatory audit.
• Change Management: The release manager must ensure that changes made during Salesforce releases do not compromise compliance. This involves validating that new features, updates, or configurations adhere to established compliance policies.

In assessing a candidate’s knowledge of regulatory compliance, ask questions about their experience with data security and managing compliance in past roles. Inquire about specific standards relevant to your industry and how they have ensured compliance during Salesforce releases. 

Here are some examples of questions you can ask:

• Can you explain how Salesforce supports compliance with data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA?
• Can you discuss a time when you had to navigate a regulatory compliance issue during a Salesforce release?

8. Ask Yourself: Are They a Cultural Fit?

As we reach our eighth, we focus on a factor that might not be immediately apparent but is equally crucial: cultural fit. While a Salesforce Release Manager’s technical skills and experience are undoubtedly important, their alignment with your company’s culture can greatly influence how successfully they integrate into your team and perform in their role.

A candidate who aligns well with your culture is likely to:

• Work well with your team: They will understand and embody your company’s values and work style, leading to more productive collaborations and better team cohesion.
• Stay longer with your company: Employees who fit well with the company culture are more satisfied with their jobs, reducing turnover rates.
• Enhance productivity: Employees who identify with their company’s culture are more engaged and motivated, leading to higher productivity levels.

To assess cultural fit during the hiring process, consider the following strategies:

• Value-based questions: Ask questions allowing candidates to reveal their values, attitudes, and behaviors. For example:
  • Can you describe a work environment in which you thrive? 
  • How do you handle feedback and criticism?
• Meet the team: Give the candidate a chance to meet their potential teammates. This can offer insights into how well they might integrate into the team.
• Scenario-based questions: Present scenarios that reflect situations they might encounter at your company and see how they would handle them.
  • Our company values continuous learning and development. Can you describe a situation where you proactively learned a new skill to improve your performance or help your team?
  • A colleague disagrees with your approach to a project and believes their approach would be more effective. How would you handle this situation?

Remember, cultural fit doesn’t mean hiring people who are all the same. Diversity of thought and experience can be hugely beneficial to your team. Instead, cultural fit is finding someone who complements your team and aligns with your company’s values and vision.

9. Ensure They Have Communication Skills

With the ninth tip, we underline one of the most crucial attributes of a successful Salesforce Release Manager: communication skills. In the intricate dance of Salesforce releases, a release manager is the choreographer, coordinating between teams, conveying important information, and ensuring everything moves harmoniously.

Communication skills are not just about speaking or writing well. They encompass listening, empathy, clarity, and the ability to tailor messages to the audience. As a release manager, they need to effectively communicate with developers, administrators, testers, and business stakeholders – all of whom have different needs and perspectives.

Here are some situations where effective communication is crucial:

• Release Planning: The release manager needs to clearly explain the objectives, timelines, and responsibilities to all involved parties to ensure everyone is on the same page.
• Problem-Solving: If issues arise during the release process, the release manager must articulate the problem, its potential impact, and the proposed solution to relevant teams.
• Post-Release Feedback: After a release, the release manager should communicate the outcomes and any feedback or learning points to the teams involved, promoting continuous improvement.

During the interview, you can evaluate a candidate’s communication skills through:

• Behavioral Questions: Ask about situations where they had to manage a difficult conversation, explain a complex concept to a non-technical audience, or persuade someone to their point of view:
  • Can you give an example of a time when you had to manage a conflict within your team?
• Role-Playing Scenarios: Simulate a situation where they must communicate a delay in the release schedule or explain a technical problem to a non-technical stakeholder:
  • Let’s say a critical issue arose, and the Salesforce platform is down. How would you communicate this to your team, superiors, and potentially affected stakeholders?
• Written Communication: Assess their written communication skills through their resume, cover letter, or a written assignment (if applicable):
  • Imagine you need to create a brief for your team about new Salesforce features that need to be incorporated in the next release. How would you articulate it?

With solid communication skills, your release manager can help ensure smooth coordination, clear understanding, and successful Salesforce releases.

10. Get Candidates to Demonstrate Problem-Solving Abilities

Our tenth tip delves into an essential trait for any effective Salesforce Release Manager: problem-solving abilities. In the unpredictable terrain of Salesforce releases, unexpected challenges can arise anytime. A release manager with sharp problem-solving skills can navigate these hurdles, ensuring your release process doesn’t skip a beat.

Problem-solving abilities are vital because they allow a release manager to:

• Identify issues promptly.
• Understand the root cause of problems.
• Develop and implement effective solutions.
• Learn from these situations to prevent similar issues in the future.

This proactive approach ensures that issues are addressed efficiently and serve as learning opportunities for continuous improvement.

Consider incorporating scenario-based questions to assess a candidate’s problem-solving skills during the interview. These allow the candidate to demonstrate how they would handle specific situations in real-time.

Here are a few examples:

• Describe a situation where a Salesforce release you managed ran into a significant issue. How did you identify the problem, and what steps did you take to resolve it?
• Imagine you’re in the middle of a critical Salesforce release and discover a major bug. How would you handle this situation?
• Tell me about a time when you had to make a difficult decision under pressure during a Salesforce release. What was the situation, and what was your thought process?

Pay close attention to how the candidate approaches the problem, their decision-making process, and the actions they would take. You want clear, logical thinking, effective decision-making, and the ability to take appropriate action under pressure.

Also, consider their past experiences and how they’ve dealt with challenges in previous roles. Have they shown a knack for finding effective solutions to problems? Do they demonstrate a commitment to learning and improvement from these experiences?

Summary

Hiring the right Salesforce Release Manager demands a balance of technical skills, industry knowledge, and cultural alignment.

This includes experience with Salesforce releases, knowledge of the Salesforce ecosystem and DevOps, project management skills, proper certification, and a willingness to learn. Effective communication, problem-solving abilities, automated testing experience, and regulatory compliance knowledge are also crucial. The perfect candidate might not tick all these boxes initially.

Their readiness to learn and adapt is paramount. In the fast-paced Salesforce landscape, a dynamic, growth-oriented release manager will manage complex releases and add value to your team, driving your organization’s success.