Salesforce DevOps at Toast

As with most things in Enterprise SaaS, success hinges on:

• Investing in the right people

• Adopting the correct processes

• Implementing the right technology

While DevOps is a subset of your overall Salesforce strategy, it’s mission critical as you scale.

And historically, this is a discipline that has been severely lacking in most Salesforce teams.

(For more insight on why that's the case, check out our interview with Max Rudman - Founder of SteelBrick and current CEO of Prodly.)

For Toast, the challenge is supporting a 20-person, global Salesforce Engineering team, including:

• Director, Salesforce Engineering

• Director, Salesforce Dev Ops & QA

• Business Systems Lead (India)

• 16 Salesforce Engineers

  • 👉 5 in India

  • 👉 10 in the U.S.

  • 👉 1 in Poland

• 5 Salesforce QA / Dev Ops

  • 👉 3 in U.S.

  • 👉 2 in India

At this scale, coordinating an efficient testing and release process is the difference between success and failure.

And when you consider that 70% (15 out of 21) of the Salesforce Engineers at Toast joined within the last year, that’s a lot of faces new to the org.

People

They undoubtedly have the right team in place when it comes to DevOps. This is a well-resourced, highly structured group.

At the top of the org chart sits:

• A Director Salesforce Engineering charged with overseeing all net new build across Salesforce, bridging the gap between strategy / design and execution.

• A Director of Salesforce Dev Ops & QA focused entirely on quality control, adoption of tools like Prodly, and oversight of manual & automated testing.

• An Offshore Business Systems Lead bridging communication between 10+ onshore Engineers and 8 offshore Engineers.‍

Process

When you’re talking about a Public company doing $1B+ in ARR, streamlined processes is the only thing that allow for maintaining speed and flexibility in releases, while also remaining SOX compliant and ensuring the quality of deployments.

It’s OK to start manually! Don’t over-optimize from the start and be sure to get the right process in place, then automate.

For example, Toast used a manual data loader for CPQ configuration data changes.

It was time consuming, required a lot of resources, and involved duplicating efforts across each environment in its release pipeline.

But it’s best to walk before you run. Then you can adopt tools to accelerate.

Technology

Now, Toast has the team in place and mature processes to accelerate. This allows for adoption of DevOps tools like Prodly. Instead of manually pushing changes, Developers complete their work and hand off to the release team, who automatically promote changes for testing before pushing into production using pre-built data set automations.

They can seed sandboxes to rely on standardized test data throughout development cycles to test changes across Salesforce.

You can’t throw bodies at these problems.

You can’t expect any platform to magically create efficiency. Bad Process + Good Technology = Bad Outcomes

Streamlining Dev Ops is an incremental process. It starts with the people, who optimize the process, and then adopt the technology.

And Toast is doing it just right.