Being a Resilient Salesforce Architect: A 5-Part Framework

“Do I know enough to be making this decision?”, “Isn’t someone else more qualified for this job?”, “There’s too much to learn, but not enough time!”. If any of these sound familiar, you’re not alone. Salesforce Solutions Architecture is a tough job. The role is both broad and deep, technical and human-centered, changing all the time, and requires us to take responsibility for the outcome of high-value projects (and often many at a time!). 

Burnout and impostor syndrome happen to the best of us, but left unaddressed, they can undermine otherwise promising careers and, more importantly, impact one’s physical and emotional well-being. Some years ago, after reaching the end of my burnout tether, I sat down with a mentor to discuss a healthier pathway forward for my work. Together, we crafted a five-part framework for practicing healthy detachment from work outcomes. 

Why This Job is Burning People Out

Imposter syndrome and burnout mutually reinforce one another; the self-doubt imposed by imposter syndrome exacerbates compensatory overwork, leading to burnout. Increased burnout again stirs up feelings of inadequacy associated with imposed syndrome. 

Solutions Architecture can feel like a pressure cooker, but like the systems we design, the role is mutable. Some of the key pain points to solve for in this reconfiguration of the Solutions Architecture role include: 

• High degree of complexity and ambiguity: Business needs are constantly shifting, stakeholders come and go, and the platforms we implement continuously become more complex. This combination of complexity and ambiguity can feel overwhelming and make the consistent delivery of value to clients under highly changeable conditions extremely challenging.  
• Juggling too much as the “expert”: As SAs, we’re responsible for delivering high-quality systems on time and within budget. We’re responsible for technical integrity, but we’re also often responsible for team and stakeholder management, change management, technical project management, and – for the consultants amongst us – managing multiple clients and workstreams simultaneously. Constant task switching between contexts where you are expected to be the expert is draining and a frequent source of burnout among Architects. 
• Learn or get left behind: Given the rate of change in the Salesforce ecosystem, Architects need to stay abreast of an increasing volume of new features, functionality, and shifting best practices. Balancing work and professional development, without working around the clock, isn’t easy. 

During the first year of my architecture career, I experienced significant burnout and impostor syndrome. I got consistent feedback to be less of a perfectionist, to build stronger boundaries, and to just say “no”. 

While valid points, none of these common suggestions moved the needle for me: I felt (and still feel) that the devil is often in the details for architectural work, and saying “no” often meant dropping work that gave me energy or cutting professional development opportunities – not reducing client deliverables that were the source of my stress. I needed a better underlying framework to change my own relationship with my work.  

The Resiliency Framework: 5 Practices to Sustain Your Role

Resilience is about being able to withstand and bounce back from shocks and setbacks. Resilient people don’t avoid conflicts or challenges, but rather have an established conceptual framework to manage these risks elegantly when they inevitably arise. 

The 5-part resiliency framework focuses on letting go of ego, being equanimous towards your work, treating everything like an experiment, developing narrow expertise, and managing energy instead of just time. Let’s unpack what these 5 “E”s mean in practice.

1. Letting Go of Ego

Letting go of ego at work means taking the work seriously, but not yourself seriously. Humans have deep-seated and emotional motives, and letting go of your attachment to work, especially when it forms a part of your identity, is challenging. However, dropping ego frees you to be honest about your own shortcomings and to lean on your teammates to make you stronger and help you grow. You don’t always have to be the best, fastest, smartest person in the room. Delivering on what you say you will to a degree of quality is enough. 

Put it into practice by:

• Saying “I don’t know, but I can find out!” (and actually following through).
• Asking more questions than you answer.
• Normalizing feedback loops and proactively seeking out informal peer reviews.
• Admitting when you’re wrong and making an effort to improve.
• Critically evaluating your past work to identify areas for improvement and areas where you are strong. 

Remember that you are not your work. 

2. Practicing Emotional Equanimity

Practicing equanimity means approaching inevitable career ups and downs with composure and emotional indifference. Being equanimous towards your work can help you cultivate a sense of calm and perspective, even under pressure. 

This kind of healthy detachment helps you stop over-identifying with every crisis and challenge, opening you up to interrogate your work more critically, and learning more effectively from your mistakes. 

Put it into practice by:

• Being explicit about what you can control and what you can’t – let go of things that you can’t influence.
• Assuming positive intent in stressful situations.
• Doing post-mortems on failures, but only once. Don’t “churn” on past mistakes, learn from them, and move on. 
• Not rushing sensitive conversations or engaging in conflict discussions while you are feeling heated. 
• Soothing tensions by practicing radical empathy with the other person’s perspective.
• Developing safe professional relationships with mentors whom you can go to for critical feedback and advice on stressful situations.

Remember that at the end of the day, being kind is more important than being right. 

3. Being Experimental

Intellectual safety is the bedrock of innovation in teams. You can’t innovate if you’re fearful of failure. Treating initiatives as experiments allows your team to change from approaching problems and decisions with fear to approaching them with curiosity. 

As an Architect, it’s your job to be innovative. It’s also your job to foster a safe space for innovation on your teams, clearing space for your colleagues to learn, iterate, and fail without fear of consequence. Be experimental in what you try, but ruthlessly critical about evaluating what works and what doesn’t. 

Put it into practice by:

• Using language like “Let’s pilot this” or “Let’s try and see…” 
• De-risking experiments through quick POCs and MVPs with robust feedback loops.
• Understanding failures as a crucial part of the process, and celebrating useful failures as learnings.  
• Using sandbox environments, Dev Orgs, and other safe spaces to encourage yourself and others to try, fail, and break things–safely. 

Remember that all decisions and outcomes are changeable. 

4. Building Focused Expertise

Architects, especially in small teams, are expected to be jacks-of-all-trades and masters-of-all-trades. This expectation is unrealistic. Building focused expertise is about going deep, not broad, and doing less, better. 

As one progresses in their career, beyond the early-career phase of building a transferable breadth of skills, developing a niche – whether that be a functional industry/sector niche or a technical specialty – can help alleviate the stress of delivering outside your core competency. 

Developing a niche narrows the playing field for what you need to learn and what you can confidently deliver. Once you find your niche, be radically honest about it. Let your peers, managers, and clients know the boundaries of your knowledge and where they will need to rely on other resources. 

This kind of radical honesty about your skillset can also demonstrate humility and help to build relationships of trust with your colleagues and clients. 

Put it into practice by:

• Saying things like “That’s not my area of expertise, but I’d be happy to connect you with a specialist in that field!”
• Developing a network of trusted professionals with complementary skill sets that you can refer clients or projects to.
• Having direct conversations about your areas of interest, your strengths, and your weaknesses with your manager.
• Developing an anti-professional development plan that contains a list of topics that you don’t want to spend your time learning more about.
• Developing a professional development plan that contains a list of topics that you want to spend time upskilling in.

Remember that building focused expertise frees you to be absolutely explicit about what you can and cannot do to the required degree of quality. 

5. Managing Energy

As consultants, time is our currency. We are under constant pressure to spend it carefully and save as much as possible (just like money). However, our hyper-focus on quick value delivery may undermine our ability to sustain our roles over time. 

Stress can quickly become costly for the business when architects aren’t awarded the time they need to make good decisions that buffer against later rework and expensive technical debt. 

Replacing senior-level technical hires is also extremely costly for businesses. In shifting from thinking about time spent to energy spent, I suggest that we zoom out to rethink timelines and expectations more holistically.

A previous manager of mine used to say, “not all hours are the same”, meaning that some hours are “hard” hours (they degrade your energy) and some are “easy” hours (they give you energy). A discussion with a client to resolve budget overages may be hard hours spent, whereas working on an exciting new design with a happy client may be easy hours. 

I suggest that we start thinking about our output per week in energy expenditure instead of just time spent, with a focus on capping the volume of “hard” hours and prioritizing “easy” hours. This could entail:

• Rethinking the 9-to-5/5-day work week and the expectation of consistent hourly output week over week, allowing ourselves time to immerse in work.
• Or, for the consultants who bill by hour, explicitly tracking energy expenditure in addition to time expenditure to create transparency surrounding your level of stress and to justify breaks or even compensatory leave with managers. 

In the same way that you balance effort and recovery for physical exercise, we should be able to create a professional environment that allows you to immerse yourself in work and then take generative breaks at a cadence that suits your individual energy management needs. 

Put it into practice by:

• Identifying tasks and people that give you energy and proactively requesting more of that work. It’s probably what you deliver to the highest degree of quality, too.
• Identifying tasks that drain or frustrate you, and trying to delegate these tasks to people who enjoy them.
• Establishing clarity on your energy peaks and dips and protecting your naturally productive time for your most challenging work.
• “Shifting left” work to avoid quick value delivery “traps” that cause expensive technical debt later.
• Pushing back on rapid responses and notification distraction. Set clear expectations on your response times, set predictable times to manage communications, and deliver on those expectations.
• Under-promising over over-delivering on timelines; setting realistic delivery timelines that take your personal life into account.
• Tracking energy expenditure by hour to get a clear picture of your “hard” vs “easy” hours per week (and the associated tasks that degrade and enhance your energy levels). 

Remember that predictability is often more important than speed when it comes to delivery. 

Final Thoughts

Building resilience is a consistent work in progress. This framework isn’t a panacea, and may be difficult to implement in a work environment bound by constraints like timelines and budgets. 

However, finding a way to practice resilience that works for you isn’t about major changes or perfect solutions, it’s about identifying small practices that help you manage self-doubt and deflate challenges and conflicts to what they are – just work.  

Call to Action: Take a moment to interrogate which part(s) of the framework you are already excelling in and which parts need help. If you are struggling with burnout, imposter syndrome, or just not enjoying your work as much as you could, try implementing the tactics above one by one over time, asking your peers and managers to hold you accountable.