Salesforce Career Converstions #9: Andrew Hart
Episode 9: Andrew Hart talks to Lee about his 2.5 year journey from zero Salesforce certs to #202 CTA of around 302 (last time he checked).
[This interview with Andrew Hart has been transcribed for your benefit. Please ignore any rogue typos. Thank You.]
Lee: So, Andrew Hart, hello. Thank you for taking the time to speak to us. How are things going?
Andrew Hart: Yeah, thanks, Lee. Things are going well, thank you. Busy as ever with work and family and everything else that we have in our lives, but well, healthy.
Lee: Good. That's good in this current time. So I am... Ordinarily, I would go on about giving an intro for you, but why don't you do it yourself? Tell everybody mainly I suppose what you're doing now, and then we can rewind time and go back to the beginning. Okay?
Andrew Hart: Yeah. Of course. So I am Andrew Hart. I'm a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect. I'm the lead Technical Architect for the Accenture Salesforce group in the UK. I always describe my role as having three pillars. A bit of pre-sales, so using the CTA cert to get in front of customers quite often, helping shape and sell projects.
Andrew Hart: Delivery, so helping to deliver the projects, and in my case, that's usually around delivery assurance or high-level support or engagement at the sort of technical executive level. The final bit is team development, so looking after those who I consider in my care, and that's the technical team for the most part—so looking out from hiring, upward to training and enablement support when they're on projects and just general set of ears and a brain if they need it and feel that my brain can help them on their projects.
Lee: There's a lot to what you're doing obviously. It's been a wild ride I think, correct me if I'm wrong, going back to the beginning. When I say the beginning, I kind of mean slightly before Salesforce. Again, please tell me if I'm mistaken here, but is it fair to say that your background didn't necessarily lend to being what people would associate with a CTA, sort of a Technical Architect? Am I right with that?
Andrew Hart: Well, I mean, I've been a consultant my whole... More or less my entire working life, and I think as a consultant, you play several different roles, project to project, customer to customer.
Andrew Hart: I've never been... You know, I'm not a classic TA path if you think computer science degree, software engineering, product development type background, but I've always been technically leaning. But I very much feel that technology is an enabler for solving problems, or it should be business-led, and that starts with conversations.
Andrew Hart: I've always approached my role in that way. I encourage TAs that I work with to work in that way as well. We are never... In the consultancy space anyway, we're never just building an academic, technical solution. It's always solving business problems, and it can't be lead by technology.
Andrew Hart: In Salesforce, you see this in their go-to-market as well. It's all about business benefits, and it's KPIs in either service or sales or whatever other clouds they're pitching. It's never just about “look at this cool tech”. It's always about looking at the problems it can solve, and I've approached my career that way.
Andrew Hart: I acted on some advice I was given maybe 15 years ago from a manager I had at the time within Oracle, which was, you know, we can offshore development, we can offshore testing, we can offshore a lot of things. We'll never offshore someone looking in the customer's eyes and asking what their problems are. There always needs to be someone to have those conversations.
Andrew Hart: I wouldn't say that radically changed how I approached my job, but it's always been in the back of my mind, that a lot of skills can be outsourced or sent elsewhere, but somebody in the room to understand a customer is always going to be needed.
Lee: That leads me actually to what I was going to say, because your pathway to Salesforce, for this podcast anyway, this phase of this podcast, is a little different in what I think, because you were at Oracle for quite a long time, maybe ten years, weren't you?
Andrew Hart: Yeah. And actually, I was a Siebel guy for a few years before that as well. Yeah, when you asked me about this I did say to you well I haven't been working with Salesforce 10 years yet, but-
Lee: Well, we'll let you off on that one because your rise to where you've got to is fascinating. So yeah, sort of 10 years... Nearly ten years at Oracle.
Andrew Hart: Yeah.
Lee: So-
Andrew Hart: So I-
Lee: Go on.
Andrew Hart: Well, no, I mean, I went to Siebel as it was. I was Siebel trained, and I had been working for small consultancies, and I went to Siebel, which was the CRN mothership programme at the time. Shortly before, about a year earlier, Siebel got acquired Oracle, which, to be honest, was a relatively smooth transition for us at Siebel. I think it was more difficult for the Oracle CRN people when Siebel arrived.
Andrew Hart: That was where I cut my teeth in terms of working for a big consultancy, with their big projects, for technology as well to a certain extent. But it was undoubtedly where I, in those nine years, building on maybe the few years I had had before working with Siebel, that I moved up levels, and by the time I left there I was at the advisory architect level. Oracle had quite a similar model to what Salesforce has in that while they do some project themselves, they are more comfortable putting architects into critical customers.
Andrew Hart: Then, I made a move to Salesforce. To be honest, I probably stayed at Oracle a little bit too long for my career, but I was enjoying the work, and if I'm frank with myself I was very comfortable there in every regard. I thought about leaving a few times and never entirely, quite pulled the trigger.
Andrew Hart: By the time I did, I got into Salesforce, as I say, nearly seven years ago, so not early. I mean you've had people on this series who have been around in the Salesforce space for much longer than I have, but I feel that I got in at a good time. I got to go straight to Salesforce, so I got to learn the product very closely with the best at that time.
Lee: And obviously... Just to go back a little bit, after... You mentioned being very comfortable and thinking about leaving but never quite making the leap. What was it then that... What happened? Were you headhunted? Because there's a connection between Oracle and Salesforce if I'm not mistaken?
Andrew Hart: Yeah.
Lee: So was that an obvious move to make? What made you then to go switching, considering all of your career had been on that other... You know, Siebel and Oracle. It was a big decision to make, isn't it, I guess?
Andrew Hart: It was. But Salesforce was... As you say, I had grown out of Siebel in some ways, and there was a lot of similarities in terms of how the Salesforce clouds were structured and how the Siebel products were being made. Siebel had never really made a move to the cloud. It had been an ambition for a while, and Salesforce was there already. I think even seven years ago it was still very much an evolving product and certainly nowhere compared to where it is today, but it was nevertheless this cloud-based, zero-footprint product.
Andrew Hart: That was going to be the next phase, and I think we all recognised that Siebel was on the downslope, and there were quite a few people who made a move from working with Siebel to working with Salesforce.
Andrew Hart: For me, it was the right time for several factors. The projects I was getting, the interest that I had in the platform at that point, I felt I probably hit a bit of a career dead end, where I didn't see the right prospects at Oracle, and that's not an indictment of Oracle. That's more an indictment of myself. But, yeah, several things just came together, and I was headhunted directly from Salesforce. We have in-house recruiters.
Lee: Very flattering, I imagine? Just brilliant.
Andrew Hart: Oh, everyone loves being headhunted. It is flattering. We try and make out it's an inconvenience, and sometimes it can be, but it's incredibly flattering to be approached for any roles.
Lee: Yeah. Of course. I imagine you get a lot now as well, but that's a conversation for in a minute. So Salesforce... In a relatively short period of time then at Salesforce, because you're only there three and a half years, what was the first project you did, or what was the first bit of work you did then on Salesforce?
Andrew Hart: My first project was a service cloud implementation at a global pharmaceutical company, actually one I had worked at before in the Siebel years and one that I've worked at since in the Salesforce years. They're a big customer, lots of Salesforce instances, lots of projects going on.
Andrew Hart: I joined a team that was mostly in flight. It was coming towards the end if I'm honest, but I got to get hands-on with some Visualforce, and there was still a lot of clicking as well, and ultimately helped the project through the test phase and get it live.
Andrew Hart: Yeah, it was good, and it was at that point... I had done a lot of transition from Siebel to Salesforce, so learning the terminology differences, learning how Salesforce did things that I might have recognised from doing the Siebel platform.
Andrew Hart: But then I started finding the new things. I remember once, it was quite early on, I was just trying to think there must be a way that I can limit some behaviour in Visualforce based on the user that's being on the page, and it just led me down a documentation wormhole. But I discovered there were... This had been thought about before me by the Salesforce engineers. This had been built in,
