30 minute fix that doesn't need budget approval

#035

Read Time: 3 minutes

56.3% of Salesforce admins just named technical debt their #1 challenge.

I believe them. Here's my proof.

There's a ticket in our system right now. Created last August. Still open today.

It doesn't fix anything. It just asks one question: which objects are still running on old page layouts instead of Dynamic Forms?

That's it. A list. A report. Nobody has to touch a field.

12 months.

Not because it's hard. Because every single week, something with a deadline beat it.

That's the tax. Nobody budgets for it. And nobody stops paying it either...

Technical debt never sends you an invoice

Every new request has a requester. A name, a date, someone who follows up in Slack on Thursday.

Debt has none of that.

Nobody emails you asking when the page layouts get modernized.

Nobody escalates it.

Nobody notices it in a QBR.

So it loses every prioritization fight. Not most of them. All of them.

It just charges you interest instead… very quietly.

What the interest actually looks like

Here's the live example, straight out of our org this week.

Enable Dynamic Forms on a record page, and the old page layout stops driving the fields on that page.

But the layout is still there. Still assigned. Still looking exactly as real as it did before.

So now you have 2 sources of truth and 1 of them is lying to you.

Your admin edits the layout. Nothing changes on screen. They spend 40 minutes proving they're not crazy.

Now multiply that by every record type, every profile, every object somebody configured in 2019 and never revisited.

The bill never arrives as an outage. It arrives as this:

Every change takes 3x longer than it should, and nobody can explain why.

The 30 minute version you can do today

You don't pay down debt by rebuilding. You pay it down by pricing it.

Open a spreadsheet. 3 columns.

1. What's legacy. One line each. "Account page layouts, 4 record types."
2. What it costs per month. In hours. Estimate it. Honest beats precise.
3. What it blocks. The thing on your roadmap that's slower because of this.

Column 3 is the formula.

Columns 1 and 2 are an admin complaining about plumbing. Leadership has heard that before and they tuned it out.

Column 3 is a business case. "That reporting request everyone wants? It's 3 weeks instead of 1 week because of row 4."

Debt stops being invisible the second it has a hostage.

Then set 1 rule: every sprint, 1 item off the list. Just 1.

Not a cleanup quarter. Not a big migration project. You'll never get approval for those, and you know it.

1 item, every sprint, forever. That's how the interest stops compounding.

The uncomfortable part

I'm not writing this from above the problem. I'm writing it from inside it.

Our ticket sat for 12 months. Ours. The one that just asks for a list.

The difference is that this week it has a name on it, a date, and a person who follows up on Thursday.

That's the only thing that ever changes the outcome.

Your debt isn't going to prioritize itself. It has no requester.

So be the requester.

Talk to you next Friday.

- Jordan