Salesforce recently celebrated its birthday, turning 25 on March 8, 2024. Throughout its 25-year history, Salesforce has practically defined the modern startup success story. Becoming a pioneer in the cloud space and achieving market dominance in multiple software categories
But despite this, many are unhappy with their Salesforce implementations – citing technical debt, rubbish implementations, and Salesforce just getting too damn complicated. Let’s unpick what is currently going on with implementations in the Salesforce ecosystem.
Winding Back Time
Salesforce was once a nimble startup that had a basic sales CRM tool to accelerate a company’s sales cycle. Back in the early 2000s, Salesforce was a very different tool from what we are used to today.

The AppExchange was only released in 2005, Apex and Visualforce in 2006, and the Force.com platform (or Salesforce platform as it is now known) was only released at Dreamforce 2008. Before these major releases, you would have had a pretty basic, out-of-the-box sales CRM with limited customization options.

It was only in 2009 that Salesforce and its CEO, Marc Benioff, really started to accelerate its vision to create a software company that allowed you to create a 360-degree view of your customer, allowing you to use the sales CRM as the first touch point of many throughout the customer lifecycle. It was in this year that Salesforce launched Service Cloud, their customer support product built on the same platform as Sales Cloud.
Over the next 11 years, Salesforce went from a company with two flagship products to an absolute behemoth of a company that snatched up over $60B dollars worth of companies, including Slack, Tableau, MuleSoft, Demandware, and ExactTarget, establishing them as a company with multiple market-leading solutions across multiple categories.
The Salesforce platform also drastically changed. Salesforce Classic was phased out as the primary user interface for Salesforce. This automatically meant Visualforce was practically retired in favor of the component-based Lightning framework that is what Salesforce is based on today.
The Salesforce Lightning user interface also ushered in a new wave of no/low-code tools, such as the Lightning App Builder for designing highly customized user interfaces, Flow that nearly matches the power of Apex when it comes to designing complex automation across your org, as well as brand new tools like the Einstein Prompt Builder.
Salesforce is no longer the agile startup it once was.
It’s also important to note that many companies have used Salesforce throughout these many changes to the system and the additions to the platform. Salesforce has talked for years about its penetration into the Fortune 100, and in 2017, they said that 95% of the Fortune 100 run at least one app from the AppExchange.
This suggests that many Salesforce enterprise companies and smaller companies across the globe have run Salesforce for close to a decade, dealing with an initial implementation, many changes and improvements, new feature releases, as well as implementing new Salesforce products that aren’t always on the same platform.
Is Salesforce Getting Too Complicated?
Whether Salesforce is getting too complicated or not is, of course, completely subjective. However, according to our first annual SF Ben Developer Survey, 53% of Salesforce Developers would agree that Salesforce is becoming increasingly complex to work with, 34% of people were feeling neutral towards the statement, and only 13% disagreed.
Of course, every Salesforce professional is going to have a different sentiment towards this question, depending on their own personal experience. This could include factors such as the size of your Salesforce implementation, the support you receive from team members or a consultancy, how old your implementation is or how successful the initial implementation was.
Or, perhaps, the skill level of the professionals involved in the implementation and ongoing maintenance of the org. As the old saying goes, you don’t know what you don’t know…
Now, Salesforce has got to a point where it’s impossible to know absolutely everything about the platform. Even if you are a solution or technical architect, which is considered the pinnacle of Salesforce titles, you will be hard-pressed to keep up to date with everything on the platform – as well as staying up to date with large adjacent topics, such as DevOps, Artificial Intelligence, Flows, Data Cloud, etc.
This is why, over the past ten years or so, roles have expanded out from the classic admin, developer, and architect trio to include designers, business analysts, technical and functional consultants, as well as specialists in each type of product, such as Tableau, OmniStudio, etc.
So maybe the question we should be asking isn’t “Is Salesforce getting too complicated?”. As any system matures, the scope of features and use cases will naturally increase.
Maybe a better way to look at the problem is what we can do to better support development on the platform as it exists today.
This isn’t to say that Salesforce is perfect. 24.5% of developers did list “platform limitations and challenges” as something that is an issue when working with the Salesforce platform. However, a more common theme across issues/challenges within the report focuses on more business challenges.

For example, 27% of developers agreed that the biggest challenge with Salesforce development is working on top of years of technical debt, and 20% listed that gathering the right requirements was a challenge. In terms of more issues, 20% listed a learning curve and skill gap with the platform, 20% also listed development processes and tools, and 10% noted adoption and governance.
Whilst it’s within Salesforce’s power to better support some of these issues and challenges, such as further building out the DevOps Centre and SFDX, and ensuring that Trailhead is kept up to date with the latest features and best practices, naturally, a lot of these issues are simply general IT-related challenges that have been present in any project since the dawn of the information age.
Salesforce has also successfully rode the wave of digital transformation over the past ten years, where companies have rushed to stay relevant in the digital age by adopting many of the companies’ products. For Salesforce, this resulted in a nearly ten times revenue growth from $4B to nearly $40B, but for some implementations, this has left a skill and technical debt gap.
5 Focus Areas in 2024 and Beyond
Do you remember the days when every Salesforce release seemed to bring new and innovative features with it? The Lighting Experience era was one of the most exciting times for me, with new standard Lightning components, the upgrade from Workflows to Process Builder, and a totally new way of working in Salesforce for us and our users.
Whilst these days are firmly behind us, and Salesforce releases nowadays seem to focus on gradual improvements rather than drastic changes, I see this as a good thing.
We are firmly in the maturing phase as Salesforce seeks to tweak and improve the Lightning platform that superseded the classic UI.
With this in mind, there are many ways we can ensure we draw a line in the sand with our implementation and seek to mature our implementation in the same way that Salesforce is maturing its platform…
1. Salesforce DevOps
In 2015, Salesforce was voted the most dreaded platform to work with amongst Stack Overflow users. Granted, most of these users wouldn’t have been Salesforce professionals, but it shows you how far behind Salesforce was at this time compared to other platforms and languages.
One of the most common theories behind the voting on this survey was due to the limited capabilities of the Salesforce platform to integrate with modern DevOps processes and tools.
Whilst the Salesforce DevOps world in 2024 couldn’t be more different with the introduction of SFDX and third-party AppExchange providers, there are still some frustrations among our respondents of the survey – with 20% citing development processes and tools as an issue working with the platform and 13% citing deployments as a challenge.
However, on a more positive note, it was extremely encouraging to see that 70% of respondents are using some kind of DevOps tooling. With the majority using SFDX and CI jobs with version control, followed by people using a third-party vendor.
Whilst DevOps is presumably much more widely adopted in 2024 than in previous years, there is still a skill gap. 20% of developers note that DevOps is an area they feel least confident in (just behind LWC at 22%), and roughly 40% of developers only understand basic commands when it comes to SFDX and Git.

I see this as a huge opportunity for Salesforce professionals. As DevOps is adopted by 70% of Salesforce orgs, those that can help lead DevOps tools and processes will become invaluable.
2. Artificial Intelligence
As well as some of the more technical challenges with the Salesforce platform, there are also other problems that persist. A whopping 44% of developers agree that resource constraints and management issues are holding their team back in 2024, as well as 28% agreeing that knowledge and training deficiencies are a big problem.
Whilst management issues can only really be solved by leadership and culture, the other two factors aren’t surprising, with widespread tech layoffs and budget tightening contributing to resource constraints.
Whilst AI is very much in its infancy, we were surprised to see that 30% of respondents are using AI tools on a daily or regular basis, and 41% are using it now and again, with only 28% not using it at all (this last statistic also aligns with those who work at larger companies).
AI has promised to revolutionize the way we work, and in a world where Salesforce has become too big to comprehend, resource constraints are putting pressure on productivity. Could AI be the savior Salesforce professionals are looking for?
In fact, 68% of those who are using AI reported increased productivity, 56% said that it enables them to learn faster, and 51% reported greater efficiency.

Whilst AI is very much in its infancy and clearly isn’t perfect yet, these initial signs are very encouraging. After all, what kind of tool would achieve this kind of adoption in less than two years of being released?
3. Technical Debt and Best Practices
Every Salesforce professional strives to ensure that whatever they are building on the platform meets agreed best practices – whether this is in writing code, building flows, or architecting a data model on the platform. However, in reality, this doesn’t happen all the time.
Gaps in knowledge, pressure on teams to deliver projects with fewer resources, shortcuts in development processes, and junior resources working on projects with little oversight can all contribute to technical debt.
As Ian Gotts of Elements.cloud puts it, “Technical debt is the cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer to develop.”
To some extent, and with the way the platform has expanded over the years, technical debt has been a natural side effect of the rapid expansion of the Salesforce platform. But now, we are entering a stage of maturity – it’s important to focus on the correct solution, instead of the quickest.
Some best practices that should be followed are:
- Salesforce Best Practices for Admins: Do’s and Don’ts
- 12 Salesforce Apex Best Practices
- 10 Salesforce Flow Best Practices
- Salesforce Well-Architected Framework
4. Change Intelligence
Alongside DevOps applications sits another type of application that could be the answer to many of your Salesforce woes. Salesforce Change Intelligence apps give you insight into your Salesforce org by providing a picture of how configuration is used and how features align to business requirements.
One common use case for Change Intelligence apps is the ability to see how a field or Flow is being used in an org. For example, if you wanted to delete a field that you thought was redundant, you could ensure it isn’t being used in any automations before proceeding with the deletion.
With the current state of play and technical debt being cited as one of the top reasons for carnage within a Salesforce org, Change Intelligence could help ensure you are getting rid of the right functionality and replacing it with something that works.
Apps to look into include Elements.cloud, Sonar, HappySoup, Panaya, and Salto.
5. The Right Team and Skills
Although the Salesforce job market is in a state of flux at the moment, it’s important to ensure you have the right support for your Salesforce org.
Whether this is supported by an in-house team of experts or by using a Salesforce consultancy or a hybrid of the two, Salesforce skills can widely vary between one professional and the next.
Ultimately, the success of your Salesforce org and its impact on meeting business needs entirely depends on your own customized implementation of Salesforce, which, when boiled down, relies on the skill and experience of the people working on it.
This may require you to bring in a consultancy to re-implement Salesforce and bring it up to modern standards or possibly hire a Salesforce Architect to oversee the implementation from a technical standpoint or even a Salesforce Product Owner to own the relationship between the business and your Salesforce implementation.
Whatever the solution, it’s important to remember that Salesforce is an expensive tool, and whilst it would be nice to put the onus on Salesforce to ensure your success, this ultimately comes down to your own decisions.
Summary
So, has Salesforce become more complicated over the years? I would say it has. The scale of the platform has vastly increased, and the number of tools we have at our disposal is huge.
However, is this a bad thing? I would say no. The power we have at our fingertips, from both a programmatic and declarative perspective, is huge. Whilst historical problems are getting in the way of delivering a truly exceptional experience for our users, the power to fix it is also in our hands.
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