Episode 3: Mitesh Mistry Salesforce Career Conversation with ROD. One of only 300 Salesforce Certified Technical Architects on the planet discusses his career and how he got there.
[Below is a transcript for your benefit. Please excuse any typos.]
Lee: Hi there guys.Welcome to RODcast. In today's episode I'm chatting with a Mitesh Mistry. Mitesh currently one of only a few hundred certified technical architects in the world and he's going to discuss with us in this episode his journey to becoming a CTA. His favourite project to date in Salesforce and what it's like to also work at the mothership of Salesforce and, and what he's excited about for the future. So hope you enjoy.
Hello, it's Lee Durrant here. Welcome to RODcast, the podcast where we get to meet and chat with some truly fantastic people from within the Salesforce ecosystem. My goal for this podcast is to help and inform people who either already perhaps work in the Salesforce ecosystem or maybe you're thinking of breaking into it to understand what's good about it, what could be better, and where there are opportunities. And what some of the most amazing people in this space, how they got into it and where their career took them and what their plans are for the future. Hope you enjoy it. And please help me to reach as many people as possible within Salesforce by leaving some comments and sharing, all feedback welcome. So yeah, hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2: So hello Mitesh. And welcome to our podcast, which we're calling RODcast. Thanks for doing this, mate. How are you?
Mitesh: I am good, thank you. How are you doing Lee?
Lee: Yeah, yeah, getting there. Getting there, mate. Wish the weather was better but, not bad at all. But again, really appreciate you doing this. Quite exciting for everybody listening, because correct me if I'm wrong, you are a certified technical architect now aren't you?
Mitesh: Yes, that's correct. So I'm a Salesforce CTA as of May, 2018.
Lee: Last year. So that's fantastic. Obviously as you know, as I explained to people listening before that that this podcast is all about the journey of Salesforce experts. You know from different sides of what you guys do. But someone like yourself, it'd be quite interesting for people to hear about how your journey began if you like with Salesforce and all of that. And then what led you to where you are today? Cause I'd be quite interested to find out if this was all planned at the beginning or whether it's just happened organically as you've gone on.
Really. So if that's all right, I'll fire away with a couple of questions to get started. And then the obvious first thing to ask you is actually in the lead up to getting into Salesforce what, what were you doing? You were at university before.
Mitesh: Okay. So I mean, let me run through my background. So I studied software engineering at the university of Edinburgh. And as part of my experience there, I got a chance to spend a year overseas. So I worked for a company called Sun Microsystems who are now taken over by Oracle and I was looking after the global labs team there. So had a really good experience for one year out in the US that was my first technology role, looking into IT. Sort of hardware networking systems and understanding how they work.
And I also do a small role with the Royal Bank of Scotland where I was building some internal applications for them. As part of my work experience as well. So I had a bit of experience before graduating. And when I graduated I got a role working for Deloittes in their graduate consulting programme.
And my very first project was more doing Java development, a bit of Selenium testing as well. And we're building a digital rights management solution for a really large media company in London. And after doing that build for three months, they wanted to use the salesforce.com platform to be able to capture different members, different musicians, and be able to correctly attribute money to them based on who is actually playing that particular media and the recordings.
So that was my very presentation introduction to Salesforce. I started working very heavy on Apex and Visualforce to really get into the nitty gritty of the Salesforce platform, understanding exactly kind of how the code based aspects of that work. And moving on from there as my career progressed, I started becoming more of a sort of solution consultant and growing more as the time progressed into a programme architect, and then as an enterprise architect after that.
So it's kind of grown from being more of a developer to sort of all round consultant and then leading to become an enterprise architect, which I really believe is like the jack of all trades. We have to do bits of everything. So that's kinda how I feel about myself.
Lee: So it's fair to say, cause it was like 10 years ago that you got into Salesforce when you were at-
Mitesh: Yes.
Lee: So it was essentially by accident at the time, cause had you heard of Salesforce in terms of the opportunities-
Mitesh: No, not at all. So I was introduced to it three months in, there was a project kicking off as part of the work we're doing on this client. And that was really my first introduction to Salesforce. I didn't know how scalable the platform, how flexible it is that I'll actually be doing that for the last 11 years.
But I think very quickly understood that you can deliver solutions really, really quickly on the Salesforce stack. Projects which would typically be like 9, 10 months in Java or other platforms. You can wrap them up in two, three months in Salesforce and deliver a really robust solution for the customer.
So I think I'm the kind of person that I like to see gains and rewards and solutions really quickly. So when I saw Salesforce and just saw how capable it was, I thought, you know what, this is the exactly the stack I want to be aligned to. So that's what I've been doing for the last 10, 11 years since then.
Lee: That's answering my next question, which was at what point in those 10 years did you know that you wanted that to be your career, that one technology?
Mitesh: Yeah, so I think once I started working for another cloud consulting provider called Acumen Solutions from there on in, it's pretty much been out and out Salesforce. So I got to understand not just the coding elements, but the all round platform, what is able to do the main features that are there and just how quickly and easily you can take a company's entire like IT systems and infrastructure and have that fully hosted in the cloud in Salesforce. And literally manage the company's entire business on the Salesforce stack. So the more I started to see that, I think it was like a natural alignment for me to kind of grow in Salesforce as the platform grows as well.
Lee: And obviously your early days with Salesforce, and I'm sort of thumbing through quite a lot of your background. Strange question, but have you ever worked directly for a what we would consider to be an end user?
Mitesh: No, not really. So it's interesting you mentioned this. So whenever I've done projects, I've always done long term ones where I've been on the client site for over a year. And to be honest when you're at a customer site for more than six months, you kind of feel like you're at one with the customer. You're kind of part of their team in essence. So although I haven't done an end user role per se, I still have felt that when I'm on a customer side, I kind of feel part of the team that's there in terms of length of the projects I've done whilst I've been there.
Lee: I guess that would only help if you're working at a big consultancy that have big customers. Otherwise as you referred to earlier, you're going to be bouncing in and out of projects quite quickly if it's [crosstalk 00:07:26]. Okay. And is that good advice do you think to someone that perhaps is thinking of that journey, similar journey to yourself? It's better to be with a partner so that you get the opportunity to learn loads of different things. Or is there-
Mitesh: I think as a junior, what I say is if you're new to the Salesforce ecosystem, you want to make a break into the Salesforce space. And I think starting off at a partner is probably the best way to begin because you get a chance to experience different industries, different customers, and they all have different challenges and problems that they're trying to address. And you get to learn different aspects of the Salesforce platform as you do different projects. And I think that grows your overall platform experience but also grows your overall customer experience as well at the same time. So I think my recommendation for anyone starting up a BS, start with the partner and then pick an industry that you'd like or pick an aspect of the Salesforce stack that you really like and then try and align yourselves with that.
Lee: which I suppose if you go back 10 years, whilst there was still vast opportunities at Salesforce, the way, it's just gone from where it was 10 years ago to where it is now. The opportunities are just vast aren't they? So I guess is it fair to say that you picked your moves just because of the opportunities that were in front of you at the time or was it all quite strategic to get to where you are now?
Mitesh: I think it's based on opportunities that present themselves at the time. And you know, have different consultancies that focus on different clients as well. Like one of the previous consultancies I worked for, they were focused very heavily on financial services. They were doing a large implementation for the Financial Conduct Authority. Probably one of the largest Salesforce enterprise implementations we have in the UK.
So that gave me a really different flavour of Salesforce as well. So I've kind of chosen my moves, not just based on personal growth,
