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Most Wanted Salesforce Features – What’s Coming up on the Roadmap?

By Lucy Mazalon

December 17, 2021

You may have heard about the Salesforce IdeaExchange? It’s the platform that allows the Salesforce community to directly upvote which features they want to see as part of the Salesforce product. Involving customers in influencing the product roadmap has been core to Salesforce’s ethos – what better way to develop products customers crave?

IdeaExchange Prioritization takes users’ wish lists and marries them up with reality – how Salesforce product development actually happens and taking complexity into account.

With each prioritization cycle, we celebrate the winners that make it onto the roadmap, which then are added to our roadmap overview. Hopefully, you will spot an enhancement, or two, that you are anticipating!

The Idea Lifecycle

There are two sides to the Idea Lifecycle:

  • Ongoing: anyone can submit ideas they think of to the IdeaExchange. Anyone can upvote these.
  • Prioritization Cycle: the product managers create a prioritization list from the most-upvoted ideas. Everyone spends their allocated ‘coins’ on the ideas, those that get the most votes go on the product roadmap!

The Prioritization Cycle winners have just been announced and are now ‘in development’ or ‘in pilot’. Here’s what’s new to the upcoming roadmap:

Summer ’22 (~ June 2022)

Report Math Functions

  • Median Summer ’22, and Standard Deviation (TBD), possibly more.
  • Median is a very popular request.
  • Functions are currently available via a dropdown – Sum, Average, Max, Min – for number fields. The new functions would be added here.

Winter ’23 Release (~ October 2022)

Experience Site A/B Testing

  • Make your approach to layout/styling changes data-driven. “I want to know whether a given change will result in the behavior I’m trying to drive before I introduce the change to all of my users” (said the requester)
  • Just as is common practice in marketing, Experience Cloud (formerly Community Cloud) admins and designers will be able to test user interface tweaks with a subset of users before rolling these out to all users.

Spring ’23 Release (~ February 2023)

Pardot Engagement Studio Wait Times

Currently, Engagement Studio can either move on to the next step in the sequence immediately or ‘wait’ for X number of days. This change will enable Pardot users to have more flexibility to set wait times.

Content Approvals Using CMS

  • Draft content will be submitted via Salesforce CMS to be reviewed and approved before allowed to go public on an Experience Site (formerly Community Cloud)

Winter ’24Release (~ October 2023)

Limit Increase for Report Subscribes

  • Currently users can only subscribe to 7 reports (previously was limited to 5).
  • Subscribing to a report means that users receive updates as email notifications at a specific date and time. Optionally, conditions can be set to only send notifications when certain conditions are met, eg. when the number of records in the report goes above 10.
  • “The long term solution will use our headless browser service, which will require rearchitecting the way subscriptions work.”

Full Salesforce Product Roadmap

We have moved all previous ideas that made it onto the roadmap to our ‘full roadmap’ post. When each cycle passes, we will transfer those ideas there.

The Author

Lucy Mazalon

Lucy is the Operations Director at Salesforce Ben. She is a 10x certified Marketing Champion and founder of The DRIP.

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Comments:

    David Claiborne
    August 26, 2020 4:11 pm
    Show zeros in reports when grouped by time periods - I submitted this one 11 years ago - https://trailblazer.salesforce.com/ideaView?id=08730000000Br5LAAS It has been merged into this one - https://trailblazer.salesforce.com/ideaView?id=08730000000ks47AAA Salesforce says it can't be done, but you can do it in Tableau. And then there is the votes for a developer edition of Exact Target, aka Marketing Cloud - https://trailblazer.salesforce.com/ideaView?id=08730000000l1yFAAQ. It has been around since Salesforce acquired Exact Target.
    Reply
    Daryl Moon
    September 22, 2021 12:13 pm
    My issue with the Idea Exchange and the prioritising process is the users do the prioritising by submitting the ideas and voting on them. The product managers pick which ideas to put up for the final round of prioritising. They don’t just pick the ideas with the most points or the oldest ones. The result is lots of high scoring ideas still sit there with no attention and users give up on them ever getting fixed. The latest round was a joke with virtually nothing for Sales Cloud - the core product. More resources are needed to get things moving and the product managers need to apply greater priority to the user votes.
    Reply
    Lucy Mazalon
    September 22, 2021 6:42 pm
    Agreed. There were ideas that made it on to the roadmap for the (more niche) products like FS Cloud, NPSP, and EDA. Having said that, Salesforce have to take votes proportionately to the number of users these industry products have. I did extra research to dig up core features that went into development 'under the radar', which is why you will see some of the features here that were (admittedly) never part of the prioritization. I find this whole area fascinating, so thank you for your comment.
    Reply
    Stacey C
    September 22, 2021 9:23 pm
    Yes, I was just about to comment the same thing. The current idea prioritization is a joke! I literally only care about two items on the list (analytics). True to the CORE means focusing on their CORE product. We are being asked to prioritize ideas about the AppExchange now? I'm baffled.
    Reply
    Mark Bruso
    December 20, 2021 4:26 pm
    Yes, I agree. By the Product Managers picking which ideas make it to prioritization, they are effectively putting "their thumb on the scale". If they really want to do this right, they would have separate prioritization by Category. For example 10 ideas each for Sales, Service, Platform, and the niche stuff.
    Reply
    Terry Cole
    December 20, 2021 5:30 pm
    Agreed... and it's a false choice, too. Resources for one solution aren't interchangeable with human resources for another solution. How about giving us what we have asked (over and over) for over, for example, things we haven't asked for at all. Never happen but it's a real question. Especially in the core.
    Reply

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