Day in the life of
Solutions Architect – Michelle Lavalette
Most of my key responsibilities revolve around my clients, making sure I understand their business, their needs, use cases, and the people who work for them. I try to design solutions that will both accomplish the need they are trying to meet in the short term, but also consist of best practices, be scalable, and work for them in the long term.
After defining requirements, use cases, and designing solutions I often will build those solutions within Salesforce, or I will work with a developer to make sure they understand what we are trying to build and how the end users’ needs to interact with the feature. I do a lot of testing, to make sure the feature works as it should and that it’s easy to understand and navigate.
I typically also train users on how to use the system, so they can get the best experience from salesforce. I also do a lot of support, looking at user requests and implementing them, and/or fixing issues that arise.
Pros
The pros of my job are I get to design and build awesome solutions for people to really help them with their day-to-day business. I have great clients I work with. I get to work from home (or anywhere I feel most productive). I work with super talented people who take everything to the next level, which helps me grow as well.
Cons
There aren’t a lot of cons to my job, the snack pantry is poorly stocked.
Advice to aspiring Solutions Architect
Learning how to program: I don’t do a lot of programming in my day to day, however, I do wish I had taken more programming classes in school (I took 3 or 4 classes, which I don’t think was enough). It is helpful to be able to talk to developers and know their language a bit. It’s also helpful to know so that you can weigh the pros and cons and feasibility of a solution. You don’t have to be a pro or even have any sort of plan on programming as a career.
Identifying trade-offs: I’m not sure how this is best put or what kind of classes would be involved, but identifying a list of solutions and strengths and trade-offs of each is needed. For example, A and B are both solutions to consider, however, B makes more sense in the time and budget. We could do X, but it would give us Y as a tradeoff, however, X is more saleable to future business needs so it is worth the trade-off.
Soft skills: Good listening skills, people skills, and being able to understand what they want/need beyond what they’ve told you. Not only do you need to understand that someone might be saying one thing and not quite articulating what they really mean, but you also have to be able to state it back to them in a way that you can both understand and be on the same page on.
