Jack sits down with Paul Calf (Salesforce Release Manager at Standard Life, and Gearset DevOps Leader for 2026) to talk through a decade-long Salesforce journey that took him from accidental admin to release manager. Paul gets candid about the failed audit that forced his team to get serious about governance, what it looked like to build a compliant release process from scratch, and why cherry-picking components in VS Code nearly broke him (and the team).
The conversation goes beyond tooling. Paul opens up about the culture-first approach his team takes to collaboration, from daily standups to blameless post-mortems, and what happens when someone accidentally data loads the wrong file into prod. He also shares his take on evaluating DevOps tools, approval bottlenecks, and how his financial services org is treading carefully, but deliberately, into AI territory.
About DevOps Diaries:
Salesforce DevOps Advocate Jack McCurdy chats to members of the Salesforce community about their experience in the Salesforce ecosystem. Expect to hear and learn from inspirational stories of personal growth and business success, whilst discovering all the trials, tribulations, and joy that comes with delivering Salesforce for companies of all shapes and sizes. New episodes bi-weekly on YouTube as well as on your preferred podcast platform.
Podcast produced and sponsored by Gearset. Learn more about Gearset: https://grst.co/4iCnas2
About Gearset:
Gearset is the leading Salesforce DevOps platform, with powerful solutions for metadata and CPQ deployments, CI/CD, automated testing, sandbox seeding and backups. It helps Salesforce teams apply DevOps best practices to their development and release process, so they can rapidly and securely deliver higher-quality projects. Get full access to all of Gearset's features for free with a 30-day trial: https://grst.co/4iKysKW
Chapters:
00:00 – Intro & Meet Paul Calf
02:00 – The Accidental Admin Origin Story
03:44 – The Audit That Changed Everything
05:28 – Building a Release Process from Scratch
08:00 – From Change Sets to Gearset
09:34 – Tackling Approval Bottlenecks
12:43 – Breaking Down Silos & Building a Collaborative Culture
15:42 – Blameless Culture & Owning Your Mistakes
18:55 – Lessons from Building a DevOps Pipeline
22:29 – Cherry Picking: A Horror Story
25:40 – How to Evaluate DevOps Tooling
28:11 – Continuous Improvement as a Mindset
30:15 – Approaching AI in a Regulated Industry
33:46 – Final Advice for Salesforce & DevOps Teams
37:20 – Wrapping Up
