Being a CTA and Maintaining Humility

A poignant topic, but something that is really important to keep in mind. We never know everything, and despite reaching what one would think is the pinnacle of a Salesforce career, there is always more to learn. The moment we think we know everything, the journey stops, and we become a brick wall to ourselves, the clients that we serve, and overall the world around us.

So, having gone through the Salesforce CTA journey, and having spent the last few years architecting solutions with the CTA badge, here are some of the lessons I have learnt.

(1) Salesforce as a platform keeps evolving. Since passing the review board, new integration patterns / approaches have come out such as Change Data Capture and External Services. I recently did a presentation on the topic of integration, and was delightfully asked by an audience member, so why not 'External Services'. Hadn't come across this approach before, which highlights the importance of staying up to speed with the developments occuring in the ecosystem. 

(2) Read the Release Notes / View the Release Webinars: These contain nuggets of information, and a key feature might make it easier to solve a client challenge either today or in the future. It's super important to know what is coming and see if there is a new and better way to solve a client challenge.

(3) Accept that someone else may have deeper knowledge in a specific domain. Whilst the CTA trains you to have a depth of knowledge across all the architecture domains, there will no doubt be specific areas that you are not the smartest rabbit on. It's important to accept that and to know how to work with the talented folk around you to do architect the best solution for the customer. 

(4) Old is gold, and with age comes wisdom and experience. Those seasoned enterprise architects who have been in the trenches with older skool technologies, they really do know a thing or two about enterprise architecture challenges, best practises and how to apply them. Common concepts such as indexing and DB performance and row locking often get seen to as an afterthought when considering solutions -> lesson here is keep those at the front of your mind when thinking about how to piece the adequate solution together.

(5) Refresh, revamp and re-invogorate your domain knowledge often with new Salesforce developments, and challenge yourself to use new Salesforce features when considering solutions. That is the best way to quickly get up to speed on a new technology, by applying it hands on and seeing how it unfolds to deliver a certain capability.

(6) Lastly, be humble. Even as a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect, accept that you are not going to know everything, and keen an open book to learning from other people, other experiences and other things around you. By maintaining this degree of open-ness and humility it will make you a better architect going foreward and make you a super asset and individual to the clients that you serve!