Episode 112: Training for Salesforce with Don Robins Part 2

In this episode, we continue our conversation with Don Robins, a technical educator with a long history of training people on Salesforce. Don specifically explains the difference between just presenting to people versus teaching. He believes that what helps make great instructors is empathy since you’re watching for the light to come on over someone’s head and it’s a joyous feeling.

Don also talks about how specialization is becoming more and more important in the industry, a natural trend when something begins to grow exponentially the way Salesforce has. Ultimately, at the core of Salesforce is a knowledge-sharing community and the technology that they have built to support it.

Show Highlights:

The difference between presenting and teaching
The importance of specialization in the industry
The motivation behind his PluralSight courses
The impact of a knowledge-sharing community built around Salesforce
Why it’s not just translation, but localization when speaking to an audience with a different language
Don’s formula for success
The nature and dimensions of engagement
Don’s favorite non-technical hobbies

Episode Transcript

Don Robins:
And then they said, “You know anybody else?” And I started bringing my colleagues in to also those who were interested, but it was a hard sell. I tried to explain my love of Salesforce, to my .net colleagues. They rolled their eyes at me.

Josh Birk:
Once again, that is Don Robins, a technical educator with a long history of training people on Salesforce. I’m Josh Birk, your host for The Salesforce Developer Podcast. And here on the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers for developers. Today, we continue our conversation with Don. This is an experiment or for the first time ever, we’re doing a two-parter. So if you haven’t heard the first part, I highly recommend pressing pause, going back an episode and starting there. Now we will continue, where Don and I were talking about the difference between just presenting to people and actually teaching them.

Don Robins:
Oh, that’s definitely true. It is multidimensional. The first thing is what domain are you in. Teaching admin type content versus teaching developer content are two very different things, because they’re two very different audiences and they learn very differently. So that’s, I think one aspect, but let’s just focus on the developer side. You’re absolutely right. It’s more than just presenting and it’s more than just being book learned.

Don Robins:
I’ve gotten to know the material. I can walk through the slides and I can explain what’s on the slide and I can help people into the exercises because I’ve done the exercise and I know the exercise and I even understand the key point. It’s more than that. It’s understanding how to help your students connect the information that you’re presenting with what they know.

Don Robins:
I mean, that’s just a really key aspect in my book. And also there’s a trait which I believe helps make really great instructors, which is empathy. You have to know if you’re understood, you’re watching for the light to come on over someone’s head. And let me tell you, it’s a joyous feeling. And I know that somebody… It’s funny because I recruit people to work on my team or to work as subject matter experts or to work as instructors. And I always ask them, why do you want to do this? What is it about this that intrigues you and what’s your passion. Yeah. And when they said, I love to see the light come on. That’s really what it is.

Don Robins:
But to get that light to come on can be really challenging when you’re delivering content that is very complex, very technical. And it’s not intuitive. That’s the thing about Salesforce. It, it isn’t really intuitive. I mean, sure, everything’s out there and the screens are all there, but there’s just, what, thousands and thousands and thousands of switches and pieces of metadata and dependencies and it’s an incredibly intricate animal. So it’s not intuitive.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. One of the things I would start every workshop with was going to the setup screen and letting everybody know that that is a filterable search. And if you can’t find the thing, because trust me I’ve been working on it for a long time, I frequently can’t find the thing. Just go do that. Otherwise you’ll get mad at me at [crosstalk 00:03:18].

Don Robins:
You have to know what to search for. You have to know the terminology and it’s challenging, I like to say. I don’t like to say hard because it isn’t necessarily hard. It’s challenging.

Josh Birk:
Well, and Salesforce has, I think a kind of a very… I mean, I know other companies do acquisitions and they grow and they change, but Salesforce is kind of famous for the rate that we’ve had acquisitions and those acquisitions-

Don Robins:
Over 60.

Josh Birk:
Over 60 and it’s like statistically speaking, not seeing it slow down. And so between acquisitions and the three release cycle and the kind of the constant growth, the other joke, I used to talk about my workshop, it was like, I have the same amount of hours in the day to teach you. And every time I do a workshop cycle, I’ll have to figure out what’s getting removed and what’s getting added kind of thing. So that list, it only gets bigger. And I think your term is correct. I think more challenging as well.

Don Robins:
Well, I was going to say specialization is becoming more and more important in the industry. And this is not a new trend in technology. Once upon a time software products. When I was an early FoxPro developer, you could master the software. I mean, you really had mastery. You knew how to do whatever it could do. You would know how to do it, or you could find out how to do it. And if you think about Salesforce development in the earlier days, and I mean like, 10 years ago, you could do that in the core. And it was mostly core. I mean, they were just beginning to really sort of spin off other projects.

Don Robins:
You could have mastery. Well, you can’t anymore. Nobody can master the Salesforce platform. I mean, architects really are sort of probably the ones who would fit that concept the most, they’re supposed to know everything about the ecosystem and all of the products and all of those acquisitions and what that platform landscape looks and where you should or should not go to get done what it is you need to do, and know what the trade offs are, et cetera. But specialization is becoming even more and more important even in architecture. Now we have eCommerce architecture. Now we’ve got the eCommerce architects and we’ve got integration architects, and we’ve got this, et cetera. So specialization, it’s just a natural trend when something begins to grow exponentially the way Salesforce has.

Josh Birk:
Absolutely. So you’ve got is it Force Mentors or Force Mentors, the partner you have with Salesforce.

Don Robins:
This confuses everybody. So my corporation, which has been around for 25 years, my business partner is Out Formations Incorporated. And Out Formations was our software development company. And we built custom app… We were a boutique software development shop. Until about 2008, when the bottom fell out of the market and my business partner, David Chilcot. David is a process wonk. He’s an agile-ista. He’s been involved with agile methodology, absolutely fanatic about it since, before it was named agile. I mean, he really was very, very early.

Don Robins:
He’s a bit of a thought leader and he coaches agile coaches and that’s what he does. And he turned Out Formations towards agile for his practice, about the same time that I turned my practice in the company towards doing Salesforce instruction and Salesforce related first actual implementations, and then consulting and then mostly instruction and actually really helping Salesforce with resourcing. So Out Formations is the corporations, it’s the corporate shell. And if you go outformations.com. You’ll see this blue section. And if you click on it takes you to a website that looks very similar called forcementor.com. It was just sort of a brand. We call it a division. So Force Mentor, that’s just sort of the brand having to do with Salesforce, technical education.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Love it. But tell me a little bit… So you have Pluralsight courses, but you also at one point and you have like, I believe 50 or so of them now, moved very specifically to a format that you called play by play. Tell me a little bit about the origin story there and what was the motivation behind it?

Don Robins:
Sure. I built my first Pluralsight course, I think we published in 2013 and that was the force.com, the big picture. I wanted to share my perspective for developers because I felt that there was nothing out there that really explained why did I fall in love with force.com? And that’s what it was about. It was really a love song to force.com. That’s what it was.

Don Robins:
After I did it and I was teaching Salesforce, I was teaching 401 and 501. I was teaching integration, 502. And I thought this is a great platform for being able to build recorded content distributable to the world. Scalability, I felt was really important globally. A lot of people can’t afford to take the Salesforce classes, but Salesforce was not building… This predates Trailhead. So Salesforce education in those days was whatever we taught and it was very limited.

Don Robins:
And I felt that even the content in even the advanced developer course, it was limited because you can only teach so much in five days, you can teach a lot. But you only teach so much. So I felt more was needed. So I said, I know what I’ll do. I’m going to build a whole bunch of Pluralsight courses on all of the topics that I feel aren’t available anywhere to easily learn. And I did the force.com big picture and I love doing it. It took forever. It’s very laborious to build an online course. It took me months. And it’s only an hour long and it took me months, but I got it done. So I said, “Okay, I’m going to go build a bunch more.” And my next target actually was mobile. I was fascinated with mobile, and Salesforce. This predates touch, it predated bunch of things.

Don Robins:
And I was using [Senta 00:09:12] tools and I was experimenting and I realized I can’t do this. I don’t know enough. I’m not expert enough. And even if I could build one or two courses, I just, I don’t know enough and I don’t have the time and it just didn’t make any sense. I said you know what, I really need to focus on teaching Salesforce and working with Salesforce and doing anything I can to help community grow, to cultivate knowledge sharing, which I’m very big on, and always have been. For the 20 years prior to that, I was always big on developer community. Developers need to learn from other developers, period. That’s just a very strong philosophy of mine that the people who’ve been over the mountain are the ones who can mentor the ones who haven’t and help lead them past the quick sand.

Don Robins:
I mean, it’s just that simple. And Salesforce was definitely going in that direction. So I thought this isn’t going to work. So I abandoned it. I still tried to get… So what I tried to do, I worked with Pluralsight and I worked… Dan Appleman was also very involved in this. He published his first course the same year. And at Dreamforce, we would do presentations with Pluralsight. Come build a Pluralsight course and put your expertise out there. You don’t have to be an all round expert, just be an expert in what you’re expert in. Build a course, share your knowledge. It’s a great platform to do that. And I tried that for a few years. And one of the challenges is that, as I said, it is extremely difficult to build a standard Pluralsight course.

Don Robins:
It takes an enormous amount of time, effort and expertise. You’re producing it yourself. I mean, they help you. And there’s many more assets than there used to be, but it’s just enormously laborious process to do a good job. I mean, you could slap something together, but to do a really good job. I think their estimate was you want to record one minute of content. It’s going to take at least one hour of time, probably more than that, I would say two to three hours. So anyway, this was not working well. In 2016, Pluralsight… Over the years, Pluralsight had acquired a number of other companies. And this model, play by play was something that was appearing on a number of Pluralsight courses, where they would take one of their authors, a very well known author.

Don Robins:
And they wanted to be able to show off their thinking process. So they would have one of their internal folk, bring them into a studio, put them in front of a camera and say, I’m going to give you a challenge. And then we’re going to talk about how you will address the challenge. And you’re going to code it in front of the camera. And maybe we’ll be successful, maybe we won’t. We don’t care. The objective is that the audience who follows you as an instructor wants to know what your thinking process is. Because all those instructors for the most part, the very popular one, they’re really knowledgeable guys. I mean, guys and gals, not just men. Many women. They were mostly Microsoft MVPs. They worked with a variety of technologies and people wanted to know, not just how they would teach their course. They wanted to know how they thought as developers.

Don Robins:
And it would come out in conversation with the interviewer. And I saw this and I said that model could work really well with Salesforce technologists for two reasons. One there’s minimal preparation time. You’re not building a course. You’re not focusing… I mean, sure you might have to present something or you might have to show a demo, because the whole point is a show and tell. But it’s not scripted. So all the production effort goes away. Because Pluralsight [inaudible 00:12:48] production effort, I mean the negotiation of the business model, you make less money, but you have a ton less work. So I said the intelligence, the knowledge, the wisdom of Salesforce lives in the practitioners. So if I wanted to create content around topic ABC and I had a whole back lot of topics that I felt needed more exposure, educational content.

Don Robins:
If I could find someone who was an expert in that topic X, and I could get them to put in 15, 20 hours to sort of prep. Then I could get them into a studio. We record it. We do some little post-production editing. I get to record a voiceover, which is the fun part.

Josh Birk:
Full circle.

Don Robins:
And I get to play student. I get to ask them questions. I get to shape real world challenges. I only wanted to do something that was something that in the real world, people were facing a problem and they didn’t have opportunities to hear how somebody else had done it. When I used to run user groups for .net or even user groups earlier than that, other Microsoft technologies, then that’s what the developers who came to my meetings wanted to see. They wanted to see someone present on something that interested them, or they were struggling with. They wanted to see how somebody else did it.

Don Robins:
That’s sharing the wisdom. So it was basically, okay, well, if I can get people to do all these different topics, I can essentially crowdsource education and they don’t have to put in all of the effort front. That’s where it came out. And in 2017, Bonny Hinners, David Liu, Dan Appleman and I flew into salt lake city and spent two days, we recorded four play by plays, the original four. And I interviewed all four of them. And I swear, I walked out of those sessions, I said, “This is it. This is how we can crowdsource the wisdom and actually capture it.” And since then, a number of those play by play authors got bitten by the bug and have gone on to build their own courses, which of course helped to populate the rest of the catalog. That’s where it came from.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Now it’s just something that kind of seems to keep coming up in a beat. You’ve been involved in community groups, you’ve worked with a lot of people in community. How would you describe community is sort of a value add for Salesforce?

Don Robins:
Oh, God, community is everything and Salesforce and I’ve said this publicly, I’ve said this in numerous presentations. I said this in my keynote, I did at Punta. The Ohana is what makes Salesforce different. And it’s not just for developers, certainly in the develop and space. But across the board, the concept of a community… I mean it’s a brilliant concept. And I like to be careful, I know people are sensitive about using terminology that comes from a particular culture. And I don’t want to offend anybody, but the concept of Ohana, which is family in the Hawaiian culture. And I probably don’t know anywhere near about it, as much as I should, the way it manifests itself in Salesforce. And the way it’s been positioned is it’s a sharing family.

Don Robins:
It’s a support and sharing, we’re all in the same family. And you sort of have a responsibility to help the betterment of your community. And I just love it. It’s such a wonderful concept. And it’s so germane to technology because technology, you have to learn from people in the technology. So it’s just a glove fit. And what Salesforce has done to cultivate a knowledge sharing community. And the technology that they have built to support it. In the earlier days in community forums and groups, you still find Stack Exchange, obviously for hardcore development. But the evolution of the forums, the evolution of even to this day, the most recent changes in the user experience on the developer portals and the forum portals and the trailblazer communities.

Don Robins:
Hundreds of thousands of people are out there, all anxious for conversation. And waiting for people to answer their questions or being there to answer other people’s questions. And it’s a magical thing. And they’ve done this incredible job and one of the reasons why I haven’t produced a play by play for two years and one of the… COVID was absolutely a big reason for that. But the other reason for this is there’s been a proliferation of content, proliferation of other forums out there, other podcasts and other webinars and Salesforce Trailhead live and Salesforce plus. And it’s just been the incredible growth. So it’s not really needed in that sense. And I’m sort of relieved because it was a lot of work. But the idea has really taken off, just really taken off. And I love it.

Josh Birk:
Well speaking community, and speaking COVID in the before times, if we can call it that you spoke at PuntaDreamin. As a fellow public speaker, I think it’s interesting the idea of speaking to an audience who’s if not mostly, somewhat… They’re fluent in a different language, what was it like speaking in Uruguay.

Don Robins:
Oh, that’s an interesting question. Well, many of them, from… I query them. I actually did two presentations at Punta. Aldo Fernandez, invited me down to do a… And I did a microservices presentation. And before my session, I asked, everybody here understand what I’m speaking, I’ll speak slowly, but I don’t speak Spanish. So I would try to make sure that I wasn’t speaking too fast and I would try to elucidate my pronunciation to make sure I was understood. I think I was understood, sort of hard to know if people don’t tell you, I don’t understand, what are you going to do?

Don Robins:
But I spoke in English and I just tried to make my point with visuals or make my point with examples. I mean, I love the concept of spreading knowledge globally with localizations. I love the localization concepts of Salesforce. It’s not talked about enough in my perspective. I had made sure to include it in my most recent course. My wife’s Japanese, she is a translator and a localizer and did software localization. So I’m sensitive to the concept. It’s not just translation. It’s localization. You have to connect. But I loved that trip. I ate too much meat.

Josh Birk:
Of course.

Don Robins:
Clogged my arteries, but I had a ball.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Nice. Well, first of all, I want to give you points for mindfulness because I have been accused not generally on stage, because I have actually only spoken to English speaking people. But some of my guests and when I am traveling to like world tours and things like that, that I can be a fast speaker. It’s one of the things I try to be cognizant of when I am on stage, because I get into that like really like nervous energy and I’m having a lot of fun that it makes me talk a little bit faster, kind of thing. So points for mindfulness there. I do want to talk about the closing presentation that you did. You were trying to literally come up with a formula for success. What made you want to put that together?

Don Robins:
That’s a great question. Just a little bit about the history of that. So Aldo had invited me down to Punta, and I was going to do the microservices presentation. And he said, by the way, he says, “I don’t have anyone to do the closing keynote.” And I said, “Well I’m working on this sort of…” I’ve been sort of working on this, not a presentation, but I ruminate on things. And one of the things I was ruminating on was really about knowledge acquisition, which I focus on. And what is it that helps people learn to the point where they can be effective in a timely manner and be successful. And that just sort of led to, well what does it mean to be successful? And what it came down to was, I don’t know, maybe we got something here. Certainly, we’re going to talk about knowledge acquisition. And that’s a huge part of it, but that’s not the only part.

Don Robins:
It’s not just about learning. I mean, knowledge is something you can go out and these days… I remember when I had to learn dBase. There was one book on dBase II and it was really expensive. And I didn’t have much money in those days. And I ended up getting a copy handed to me from a colleague. But today there’s just so much so easy to quote, unquote, get knowledge. Find information about the thing that you’re looking for. But knowledge isn’t enough. It’s more than that. So there was that whole dimension. And it means more than that. I mean, what are you going to apply it to? Well, you’re going to apply it to opportunities. You have to have opportunities… Salesforce has a ton of opportunities.

Don Robins:
And of course that fit into the whole concept of a keynote. So we were going to talk about opportunities. And I said, well, what are the other elements of somebody to… I got an opportunity over here on the left and I know I have to go gain a bunch of knowledge over there, but there’s more than that. I mean, there’s other characteristics. And that brought in the concept of, I think the other one was passion and what is passion? Because if you talk to a lot of people about Salesforce, there’s a lot of passion out there about Salesforce. People love Salesforce. Well, what is that about? Well, a lot about is it helps people be successful. So passion is definitely an element that leads to success. But sometimes it’s hard, so you need determination.

Don Robins:
I mean, it’s hard to learn what you need and it’s hard to maybe play a role that somebody else doesn’t think you belong in. And I’ve had lots of conversations about that, particularly with women. Women architects. And if you persevere, you stand up for what you can do, that’s a big element of success as opposed to giving up.

Don Robins:
So sort of these attributes. And I said, “Okay, well, how can I put this into a presentation where I can sort of keep an audience engaged?” And when I did this formula thing and people can go watch it on YouTube. I said, “Okay, here’s the formula for success?” And it was really simple. S equals success equals… What was it? O to the power of Y, I think it was. And it’s like, that’s the formula for success. Simple. It’s like, okay, we’re done. Now let’s break it down. Because it’s always about breaking down into the pieces. Yeah. So I walked through it. That’s where that came from. If that makes any sense, it was fun to put together.

Josh Birk:
No, it’s really neat. I highly recommend people check it out on YouTube. And I love that when you were breaking down various forms of education and various types of media like Trailhead and webinars and personal instructors and things like that. And I don’t know if this, I feel like it probably was, but I’m not sure this was the full intent. But it was like the message I kind of got from it was like, the more you go down the spectrum, one of the key factors it is how much are you actually engaging in the community? Are you engaging in one instructor? Are you going to a developer group? Are you going to a conference? And it’s like, the more you’re engaging, the more likely you are to learn.

Don Robins:
That’s correct. There are so many dimensions and particularly, and not only the dimensions of where you’re engaging, but the nature of the engagement. It’s sort of is parallel to the concept of learning modalities. People learn differently. But even for people learning differently with the modalities that some people gravitate to one versus another, some people like to read, some people like to listen. Some people like to watch. Whatever it is they all have a different effect. And it’s the most powerful when you combine them.

Don Robins:
And of course the most important is doing, and Salesforce is all about doing. Once upon a time certification, in the Salesforce world, we didn’t do certification prep. There was no cert prep. The certification exams assumed that you already worked with the product in the real world. And the purpose of certification in those days has evolved, was prove it.

Josh Birk:
Exactly.

Don Robins:
If you actually do this and the certification division inside Trailhead academy, they’re brilliant. I mean, these people are scientists and they understand the nuance of actually being able to evaluate somebody’s knowledge state. But in those days it was designed specifically, if you’ve done this you know the answer to this question because you’ve been there. That’s what certification, really… That’s how it was designed. And I believe it still is.

Don Robins:
And it’s because when you do something on a regular basis, day to day, it becomes organic. It becomes intrinsic to you. And you just know what’s wrong and you know what’s right. And there might be something on the cusp, you can’t quite remember something. But for the most part, the majority is it’s in you and that’s because you do it. And that’s how people best learn by actually engaging. It’s where you make mistakes. You learn from the mistake. You never do it again. So that doing aspect is really important. Not just reading about it, not just answering a test about it. That’s why Trailhead can be so effective because it actually, the hands on challenges. You’re doing it. You’re actually learning. It’s brilliant. It’s absolutely brilliant.

Josh Birk:
And that’s our show. Now I would highly recommend watching that presentation. We’ll have it lean in our show notes, along with links to several of Don’s other works as well. Now, before we go, we did ask after Don’s favorite non-technical hobby. I’ll be honest, I allowed a range because I really like a lot of his hobbies.

Don Robins:
My favorite non-technical hobby. I’ve had many hobbies over my life. I’m a jazz collector, but that’s sort of dormant. I have a wall of 78 RPM jazz record sitting over there that I have to go through and find a home for. I’m a scotch drinker. I love single malt scotch and traveled to the island of Islay and done distillery tours. And I have a bit of a coin collector. And I have a dog. That’s my third Husky. This one’s a Husky mix.

Josh Birk:
Oh, I adore Huskies.

Don Robins:
I love Huskies. And one day I figured maybe I’d have a Husky farm where all the unloved Huskies in the world could come and live, but that’s just a fantasy.

Josh Birk:
Well maybe once you have finally retired from the wonderful world of technological enablement.

Don Robins:
I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.

Josh Birk:
I want to thank Don for the great conversation and information as always. I want to thank you for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about this show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast, where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes and have links to your favorite podcast service. Now it’s the new year. We’re trying a few new things. This is our first ever two parter. We might experiment a little bit more in the future. I’m always open to your feedback. Easiest way is just to reach out to me on Twitter, Josh Birk, that’s B-I-R-K. Thanks everybody. I’ll talk to you next week.

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