This post has been edited for clarity purposes.
Salesforce has recently confirmed that the Well-Architected program – a program dedicated to helping teams design, build, and maintain high-quality Salesforce solutions – will be relaunched at this year’s Dreamforce conference.
Salesforce Ben revealed exclusively in February that the program had ended “in its current form,” according to a Salesforce spokesperson, receiving considerable backlash from the community.
What Is the Well-Architected Program?
The Salesforce Well-Architected program (internally known as the Architect Relations team) was an initiative designed by Salesforce to support customers, partners, and internal teams in planning, building, and maintaining scalable, high-performance, and maintainable Salesforce solutions.
It provided best practices, principles, and evaluation criteria to ensure Salesforce implementations are secure, maintainable, and aligned with business goals. In its previous structure, it acted as a central clearinghouse between product and architecture experts inside Salesforce engineering and the Salesforce implementation community. The program was a notable source of truth, particularly for architects, developers, and technical leaders alike.
Formally, this information had been delivered through a guided framework, collaborated-on best practices and reviews, architect resources and training, and a real investment in community efforts where architects could discuss and refine best practices.
Why Did the Program End?
Earlier this year, a spokesperson from Salesforce confirmed that the Well-Architected program had ended in its current capacity – something that the ecosystem feared was true when the site ceased to receive updates after Dreamforce 2024.
“The Well-Architected Program in its current form has ended,” they said. “We’ve appreciated the engagement from the community to learn architectural best practices. Architects are a key part of the Trailblazer Community, so we encourage them to continue engagement, access resources, and build connections there.”
Although it was important to finally get clarity on the program’s future, many community members criticized Salesforce’s dismissive response on the matter up to that point. Although it could be argued that the state of affairs was well-inferred across the ecosystem (with notable Well-Architected team members sharing they had left or had been removed from the team), a perceived lack of transparency from Salesforce had left some members of the ecosystem feeling uninformed.
With this reversal, there is bound to be positive sentiment from all users of the Well-Architected framework resources. However, community members will likely still be feeling apprehensive about this turn of events, especially after the way the program essentially faded into the background.
It was initially alluded to that costs and budgets were a factor at play, so it will be interesting to see the future that Salesforce has planned for the program.
What Can We Expect Next?
So far, we can only confirm that the program will be relaunched at this year’s Dreamforce in San Francisco. Details on a new team behind the program or updates to the framework have not currently been made public.
However, we do know that Salesforce has been listening to the feedback of its ecosystem, as Ariel Kelman, Salesforce’s President and CMO, recently confirmed during the July 14 community town hall that Dreamforce 2025 would be featuring a new Community Keynote, dedicated to sharing the news and updates most important to the community.
“We said ‘let’s go big on our space for the community’”, he said. “So we’re going to have the entire third floor of Moscone West be a 100% community area, where we have those sessions, where we have that networking space, and we have that buddy program for first-timers.”
When asked about Well-Architected, his stance was clear: “I apologize for taking so long. We should have done that sooner”.
Summary
The day many members of the community have been wishing for is finally on the horizon, and here at Salesforce Ben, we could not be more thrilled at the news.
This turn of events also signifies the importance of something larger, too – the importance of advocating for and speaking up for the things that you believe in. Salesforce’s community is arguably the most powerful tool it has, and although it has taken some time, Salesforce has shown that they are listening.
Continue to give feedback, show up at events, and push for change. It all starts with you.
