The Salesforce Skills No One Teaches: Decision Making, Trade Offs, and Ownership

Why These Salesforce Skills Matter More Than Ever

Salesforce roles have matured. Orgs no longer need people who can just “make it work.” They need professionals who can make decisions that scale, adapt, and survive change.

Poor decisions in Salesforce don’t always fail loudly. Sometimes they quietly create:

• Automation that’s hard to debug
• Data models that block reporting
• Security models no one fully understands
• Technical debt that slows every future change

This is the point where making decisions as a Salesforce professional is essential. Skilled professionals know that each configuration choice is a long-term commitment. They look beyond current needs and consider how the organization will manage the consequences of that decision six months or two years later.

Skill 1: Decision-Making That Starts with the Business

One of the biggest mindset shifts in a Salesforce career is moving from solution-first thinking to problem-first thinking.

Less experienced professionals often ask:

• “Should I use Flow or Apex?”
• “Can Salesforce do this?”

Experienced professionals ask:

• “What problem are we solving?”
• “Who is impacted by this decision?”
• “What happens if this changes in six months?”

A Simple Decision-Making Framework

Before touching a tool, seasoned Salesforce professionals typically follow a mental checklist:

1. Clarify the business outcome
   What should be different after this is built?
2. Understand constraints
   Time, budget, data quality, team skill set, and platform limits.
3. List viable options
   Declarative, programmatic, hybrid, or even “do nothing.”
4. Evaluate impact and risk
   Performance, maintenance, scalability, and user experience.
5. Decide and document
   Capture why this choice was made.

For example, selecting Flow over Apex could be ideal right now, but documenting the reasoning helps future teams grasp the context rather than reversing the work without thought.