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How Can Agentforce Help Manage a Salesforce Backlog?
About this Episode
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Neil Foglio, Solution Architect at Arkus. Join us as we chat about how to use a backlog to prioritize requests in your Salesforce org, and how Agentforce can help improve transparency and trust.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Neil Foglio.
Why Salesforce Admins need a backlog
We talk a lot about forward-looking statements on this podcast, but what about that thing trailing along behind you? That's right, it's your technical debt. If you're facing a mountain of requests, this episode is for you. That's why I sat down with Neil Foglio. He explains how your backlog can be a tool to streamline your Salesforce org and help it evolve with your business.
"It's not a to-do list and it's not a task list," Neil says, "it's a commitment that something will be prioritized amongst everything else that you have on your plate." It's a central place to capture all requests, improvements, and ideas, and then evaluate them so you can figure out what to work on and when.
Writing better backlog items
For Neil, the key to making a backlog that works for you is to write better action items. Make sure that every item starts with an action verb. Instead of "create a new fundraising homepage," be more specific: "design a new Lightning page so gift officers can see donation history."
The other key step is to evaluate and prioritize your action items. There are several different systems you can use, but you're generally looking at value, effort, and risk. How much impact will making this change have? What resources will you need to get it done? And finally, what data do you have to support what you believe?
For many organizations, there will also be custom dimensions that have their own score. For example, an educational institution may evaluate everything in terms of how it improves student learning. What's important is to establish a clear process and get buy-in from leadership over how things are prioritized.
How Agentforce can help with backlogs
Managing your Salesforce backlog is even easier with Agentforce. As Neil explains, getting a clear and specific user story is crucial to creating useful action items. You can set up an agent to take requests, and go through the granular details with the user of every action they're taking in a business process so you can get to the why behind their request.
Agentforce can also help you improve transparency by explaining the why behind your prioritization decisions. You can have a helper explain what you're working on and when you expect to deliver it.
Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from Neil and hear his upright bass playing. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.
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Full show transcript
Mike:
Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast. And hey, you know what? That intro music you hear today, that's actually our guest, Neil Foglio, playing the upright bass. Neil is a solution architect at Arkus. And in this episode, we're talking about something every admin eventually runs into the backlog.
Neil shares how thinking about your Salesforce org, more like a product than a project, can change how you manage requests, prioritize improvements, and make sure the right work gets done at the right time. We also dig into practical ways admins can evaluate ideas using simple frameworks like RICE so decisions feel fair and transparent. If you've ever wondered how to handle the constant flow of, "Hey, could we add this request?" This conversation's going to help. So with that, let's get Neil on the podcast.
So Neil, welcome to the podcast.
Neil Foglio:
Hey, Mike, thanks for having me.
Mike:
I'm excited to talk about this because a lot of things on the podcast we always talk about are future-facing. And I feel like this topic is kind of future-facing, but it's also managing, well, I don't know how best to put it, the burden of debt that we somehow get ourselves into. And in that, it's backlogs, which doesn't sound interesting, but I promise you, you're going to be excited by the end of this podcast. So Neil, let's start off with introducing you to the world and kind of let people know what you do and how you got into the Salesforce ecosystem.
Neil Foglio:
Yeah, of course. Hello, everyone listening. My name is Neil and I'm a solution architect at Arcus, Inc, where I work with both nonprofits and enterprises implementing Salesforce. Most of my work lately has been helping organizations treat their CRM more like a product than a project, and to rethink how they steer their Salesforce org with their evolving businesses, where governance kind of comes into the picture, and that's where this topic of the backlog fits in.
Mike:
Yeah. Wow. That's interesting because I'm looking at the core responsibilities we have for admins, and project and product management are both core responsibilities.
Neil Foglio:
Yeah. I feel like a lot of admins now are really acting more like product managers, steering their Salesforce org, figuring out what elements have the most value and where you can produce the most ROI. And this is where you want to have systems that prioritize those things, and that's exactly what the backlog is.
Mike:
Okay. So I will confess this, that when I started as an admin a long time ago before the iPhone, we'll just say that as a date, I had no concept of some of the technical things that my developer friends knew. I didn't know about change management. I didn't know about backlogs or managing technical debt. For newer admins that are just getting started in the ecosystem and at their organizations, how do you define what a backlog is and how do you define what gets on a backlog?
Neil Foglio:
Yeah, absolutely. And I was in that same boat. So I started my tech career coming from healthcare. And so the first time I heard the word backlog, I thought it was a terrible thing, that something wasn't happening, work wasn't getting done, patients weren't being cared for. But when we think back to starting in a Salesforce org, you might have been in a position where you inherit an org or your company gets some new leadership that wants to make a bunch of improvements to the org and you find yourself questioning, "Well, where do I start and how do I prioritize all of these questions and features coming at me?" Without a system to rate them all, the things that typically will get done are those asked by the person with the most seniority in the room or the person that's emailing you three times a week.
Mike:
Right. Sometimes it's the same person.
Neil Foglio:
Could be. And sometimes it is especially when there is new leadership or a disruptive factor happens in the business that we need to respond to. And what the backlog is it's a tool that creates a level playing field for all of these ideas and their stakeholders. So it's a central place to do two things. Number one, to capture all of these requests and improvements and ideas, and number two, to rate them against each other using the same evaluative criteria so you can figure out which ones have the most value at this moment when you have capacity to build something new.
Mike:
That makes sense. I mean, to be fair, when I first started, the requests would... I would manage them basically in the order that they were received. And I very quickly had to learn, "Oh wait, creating a list view is way less effort than creating a contract management application," for example. And just because the list view is the third one down doesn't mean I can't just bump it up and knock out a whole bunch of half hour jobs as opposed to, "Well, it's going to have to wait until I get this monster of a contract application created."
Neil Foglio:
I mean, those little things tend to add up too, right? So if you're spending a lot of your time in a reactive mode and you're doing these requests as they're coming in, you might not really have a lot to show for it at the end of the day.
Mike:
You can. Yeah, absolutely. I had to learn how to manage my backlog. And I will say this, your backlog isn't your email inbox, right?
Neil Foglio:
No. It's not a to do list and it's not a task list. It's more of a commitment that something will be prioritized amongst everything else that you have on your plate.
Mike:
Sure. How do you suggest admins manage their backlog?
Neil Foglio:
Yeah. So if you were to Google this online, you'd see there are a bunch of different prioritization techniques. So before we get to prioritizing the items on the backlog, we should talk about what makes a good backlog item because those vague items like creating a new fundraising homepage are not something that can be easily estimated, right? So the idea here is that if you have enough detail in your backlog items, you can figure out how much time it will take, how many users it impacts, how much confidence you have that it's actually a problem that can be solved, and how much effort in terms of time, hours, or people will take to get it done.
So the first kind of step is making sure that all of your backlog items start with an action verb. So using that fundraising homepage as an example, we can reframe that to say something like, "Design a new lightning page so gift officers can see donation history." In that one sentence now, we have exactly what we want to make. Maybe there's some reporting or dashboards in there too, who it's for, and what the impact would be for the organization.
Mike:
I like that. I think writing titles out and using different words or verbs or tenses is so my jam because when I was in sales, I would always write all my to do lists in the third person. So it was like future Mike telling present Mike what to do. And I remember all of the salespeople would make fun of me. I was like, "Yeah, but when I go to pull up my to do list, it literally tells me what I need to do right now and I don't have to decode what I was writing my notes on." So I like that you start everything with a verb.
Neil Foglio:
Yeah. Bring it into that trusted system, right?
Mike:
I mean, the backlog's there, the second you get 10 requests and you fulfill six of them, well, now you have a backlog of four, and then tomorrow you get 10 more requests. How do you balance between the two in terms of managing new requests versus shoveling all of the new stuff into the backlog?
Neil Foglio:
This is where the prioritization comes through. And so if we were to Google backlog prioritization techniques, you'll see a whole bunch of different methods, but what they all kind of have in common is that they convert three things: value, effort, and risk into a numerical score. So teams can compare those ideas more objectively.
In doing that, you're not trying to get to an absolute value. Precision isn't really the goal, but again, we're comparing the relative priority. So what you'll see is a really common prioritization technique has the acronym RICE, where the R stands for reach. Think number of users. Let's say you have a defect and it affects a hundred users or a thousand external stakeholders who get a specific document generated. I is impact, which is usually a scale where higher numbers have more impact. The C is for confidence, which accounts for how well you have data to back up what you're saying. And this is typically given as a percentage. And E is the effort, and that is measured in time or resources.
But whatever the technique, the most important thing is that this process of entering things into the backlog and revisiting the backlog happens on a regular cadence. So maybe it's appropriate if you have a pretty heavy backlog that it happens twice a month or once a month if there's not too much on it. But this consistent way to evaluate requests lets the prioritization process feel fair and transparent. And you can't put a price on that kind of trust, right?
Mike:
Yeah. No, that's good. So from a technology standpoint, how have you managed your backlog? Do you use cases in service or built a custom object or managed it outside of Salesforce?
Neil Foglio:
Well, I think I have to say that everything should be in Salesforce, right?
Mike:
Yes.
Neil Foglio:
Even if it wasn't on your podcast [inaudible 00:11:45].
Mike:
If it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't count.
Neil Foglio:
Right. Exactly. But if you're a new admin that's starting out trying to figure out what needs to happen in your Salesforce org, you can design a custom object that has some picklist values, new in progress. You can create the custom dimensions you want to rate your backlog items on.
So by custom dimensions, we just talked about reach, impact, confidence, and effort, but some sectors will have more tailored solutions. So for example, healthcare usually has a score that has something to do with patients, like risk of patient harm or impact to care coordination. Finance orgs are probably interested in reducing the likelihood of fraud or improving regulatory compliance.
And I'm working with an educational institution right now, you'll think you'll find this interesting, that's evaluating every Salesforce idea on how well that idea improves student learning.
Mike:
Ooh.
Neil Foglio:
And we think about putting that all in a Salesforce object, you can have all those ratings right there as your picklist values so you can easily calculate a formula to say, "Here is the score of this backlog item, and here's how that compares to everything else that's currently in flux."
Mike:
Wow, that's really cool. I like that. How much... We've kind of skipped over just the request part of building a backlog. But when I was an admin, I think I always struggled with the ticketing system that I created, not in managing it, but in how many questions and how many fields do I have users fill out for a certain request? Because there's always that like, "I need a lot."
And I remember a long time ago, Gary Palmatier told me, "Always ask people to tell it to you in plain English, not in Salesforce speak." Right?
Neil Foglio:
Right.
Mike:
And by that he meant, "I need to manage my incoming leads so that I ensure everybody gets called back 24 hours after a trade show and I send them a brochure." Not, "I need to manage new lead records and have your users describe what's going on in Salesforce."
Where do you find there's kind of a sweet spot in terms of getting that information from users or managing that so that you can adequately decide, "Here's how much effort this one's going to take versus this one, which I'm going to put in the backlog"?
Neil Foglio:
That level of detail is really important because that allows you to estimate the effort. We wouldn't ask our users to tell us how long it would take us to implement a feature. And I think you're absolutely right that giving it in plain English lets you figure out what that user story is, and then maybe also lets you connect with people who can give you more guidance as to what it would take to bring that element to fruition, right?
So I think getting that user story and that journey down from the person that's submitting the backlog request is probably what's most important because you'd want to know how do you replicate this? If it's a defect, what do I have to do to find this defect and resolve it? If it's a journey, if it's creating a document or sending out tax letters for donors, you want to know what those steps are so you can properly estimate it. And sometimes that comes just from doing and having your users tell you exactly what it is they are doing and what they'd want to do.
Mike:
Right. No, it's good. So Agentforce.
Neil Foglio:
Agentforce.
Mike:
Agentforce can help us do a lot of things. What do you see as use cases? Because this is also a great area for admins to build agents to help them manage their implementation. What do you see as use cases for admins to build agents to help with a backlog or with feature requests?
Neil Foglio:
Maybe the first question is, is building the agent on your backlog?
Mike:
Ooh, look at you going Meta. So is it people? There's the question for you.
Neil Foglio:
So is it? Well, I think when we think about what the agent's capabilities are, if you're already managing your backlog in Salesforce and not an external ticketing system or an Excel sheet, you can have your agent answer questions as to what similar backlog items have happened in the past because that's probably a really good use case because what happens over time with these backlogs is that they become this form of organizational memory. When you complete a backlog, you're not going to delete it from your backlog, it would be archived and completed. And that's when you start to see patterns in the requests that people make. And that's where AI is really useful in telling us what those patterns are.
Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. And I was also thinking too, boy, you could... There's a lot of... I don't know. Sometimes I have too many ideas and my mouth is going like, "What if it asks you had a question agent before they put in their request like, 'I'd really like to do this blah, blah, blah report'." And instead of just submitting the ticket, the agent's like, "Oh, well, that report already exists." And then it shows you the report and then it's like, "Yay, this agent saved me 18 tickets this week or something."
Neil Foglio:
Yeah. Or, "We're already working on this report for you and we expect to have it delivered in this quarter."
Mike:
Yeah. I mean, the agent could immediately look at the backlog and say, "Well, actually a similar ticket has been submitted and its status is X. So do you want to submit another one?" I think that was always something that I ran into, was one person have a good idea and then somebody in another department would have the same idea, but they think they're both the first person to have that idea. And so then you'd end up getting two or three tickets that it's like, "Well, these are all the same ticket," you know?
Neil Foglio:
That's where the backlog also is this collaborative tool, which if done really well, fosters this incredible sense of trust across the organization because you want to share those things with people who are interested in them.
Mike:
Yep. So let's talk about sharing. I created a dashboard that everybody in my org had access to. So they could see the number of tickets, they could see the status of tickets. And I felt like for me, the transparency kept everything honest. Somebody never said, "Well, it's just submitting it to a black hole." It's like, "No. When you submit it, look, the dashboard changed. Here's your ticket." What level of transparency do you suggest for admins in terms of sharing their backlog with their users? Because I think it can be tough sometimes when you have to make that decision of, "I need to pause on this because I can create these four list views and knock four tickets off my backlog as opposed to spending the next four and a half hours and creating this app or something because it can feel sometimes like favoritism."
Neil Foglio:
Oh, absolutely. And I think that's where backlog management isn't really a single person's job. I think the most effective teams usually have a committee, like a steering committee, that will review the backlog on a regular cadence together, which pulls in the executive sponsors of certain departments to make sure that the prioritization is happening in a fair and transparent way. And that level of commitment from leadership is pretty important for an initiative like this in large and small organizations because the backlog is your holding place, but it's also your prioritization space. And so a lot of people tend to get involved. Everyone wants to push their items up on the backlog --
Mike:
Oh, yeah.
Neil Foglio:
... unless their stuff done.
Mike:
Everybody wants to be platinum status.
Neil Foglio:
Right. Right. And that's where when you have this objective tool, you can explain why things are not happening in the order that maybe somebody wants them to. And then having that backup from your leadership or from your manager to agree with you is just as equally powerful.
Mike:
Yeah. That's always one important part that admins play is the governance of everything, making sure that all the departments and all the stakeholders really have visibility into things because it's always surprising how organizations think they talk a lot, but in realistic terms, they change processes within their own department and then sometimes they forget the downstream or upstream effects of those process changes.
Neil Foglio:
Right. Or other departments are missing out on the efficiencies they just created because they don't know.
Mike:
Oh, absolutely. All the time.
Neil Foglio:
Right.
Mike:
All the time. Neil, one of the things that's kind of fun about working in tech is I think people have interesting hobbies. I know I spoke to product managers that were into puzzles and games. I had a product manager on once that was into smelting pewter and little pewter figurines.
Neil Foglio:
Oh, wow.
Mike:
I was like, that's commitment, because those furnaces get up to like 2,200 degrees. You're not going to burn your house down. There's going to be nothing left.
Neil Foglio:
I wouldn't do that in my house.
Mike:
He did it in his garage, but still. Maybe I've watched too many YouTube videos of frying turkeys on Thanksgiving and I just envision that would be the same thing. But I'm curious, what do you do outside of managing backlogs and building agents to manage backlogs and thinking about building agents to do other things?
Neil Foglio:
Yeah. So I'm a practitioner of Engrosser's Script, which is a style of American calligraphy developed in the late 19th century. And I'm also a upright bass player, little bit of jazz, but mostly classical.
Mike:
Okay. So this is the one part where I wish we had video. Tell me more about the calligraphy stuff because that... I mean, I got to tell you, beautiful handwriting, that's a lost art.
Neil Foglio:
It's always been important to me. I think this started for me in seventh grade when I started getting interested in calligraphy. And more recently, I find it more meditative because when you're creating a letter form, you're really doing several strokes. It's not all one consistent stroke. You're picking up the pen several times. So sometimes to create one word, you're spending 15 minutes.
Mike:
Wow.
Neil Foglio:
And you can only be in that zone doing that process.
Mike:
Wow. I mean, with everything technology, that lost art of handwriting and beautiful handwriting is... I always look back at... It's not the same, but I have a whole box of my grandma's recipe cards. And she just had very beautiful cursive and they just took time. And that calligraphy is just... That's something I think now maybe with how fast you can change fonts on a screen you forget about.
Neil Foglio:
Yeah. They even make robots who will do the calligraphy for you using real ink and paper.
Mike:
Oh.
Neil Foglio:
Isn't that sad?
Mike:
I don't know. That's kind of cool though, because man. Oh, okay. And then you mentioned upright bass player. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you to play something because you would be the first musician on the podcast. So can I talk you into playing something cool?
Neil Foglio:
Oh, absolutely. I may have learned a little jingle specific for your podcast, Mike.
Mike:
Sweet.
Neil Foglio:
I think that's your podcast jingle. Yeah.
Mike:
Yeah. That's pretty much it right there. Wow. That's awesome. That is really cool.
Neil Foglio:
Thank you.
Mike:
Well, Neil, thanks so much for coming on and riffing with us. I think... Did you ever watch Ted Lasso?
Neil Foglio:
No, I haven't.
Mike:
Okay. I think there's an upright bass player on Ted Lasso too. So it's worth a watch, worth a watch for sure. But that was cool. Thanks for playing that little riff and sharing with us about backlogs. And I think you've ideated more than a few people to create some agents to manage backlogs.
Neil Foglio:
Yeah, I hope so. Thanks so much for having me.
Mike:
Huge thanks to Neil for joining me on the podcast and sharing how admins can turn their backlog into a real decision-making tool. From writing clearer backlog items to comparing ideas using impact, effort, and reach, Neil offered some practical approaches any admin can start using right away. And of course, a big thanks for playing the upright bass intro music. I don't know that I get live podcast themes with every guest, so that was an extra fun treat.
If you found this episode helpful, share it with a fellow Salesforce admin or someone on your team who can help you prioritize Salesforce work. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.
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