We chatted with our Senior Salesforce Developer, Sonam Dubey, to learn more about her day-to-day, what it’s like to lead a Salesforce pod, and her favorite parts about working at Beyond Finance.
How long have you been on the team and what do you do?
I’ve been working at Beyond for almost 14 months now. As a Senior Salesforce Developer, my role is to work on design, build code for our applications, and improve workflow automation on the Salesforce platform. Essentially I — along with the rest of our Salesforce engineering team — help the sales team to sell faster, the service team to serve our clients better, and all other teams to have a good pre-existing view of client data so that they can provide the best possible debt solutions during the process.
I’m also the pod leader for my team, so I’m responsible for knowing everything that’s happening from a technical perspective, keeping an eye on everyone’s work through code reviews, and supporting my teammates.
Could you explain what Salesforce is and what it’s used for?
So the uses for Salesforce can actually be very wide. Every company implements this customer relationship management (CRM) tool differently — it’s a cloud-based software, so it helps all kinds of companies in all kinds of industries support their specific business needs. That’s actually one thing I really like about Salesforce. The platform gives you a solid codebase and UI framework if you just want to use their out-of-the-box features, but also the freedom to easily customize the application based on how your business wants to see their interface or workflow.
Another important element of Salesforce here at Beyond is that it stores our data and gives us a 360° view of our client base. So when our agents are interacting with clients and need to access contact, bank account, and credit card debt information, it’s pulled from a table in Salesforce. Then, when the agent is walking a client through the process, they can present this data to the client in a digestible UI, also built through Salesforce.
Is there anything else Salesforce helps with when it comes to supporting clients?
We’ve built the sales, service, and debt solutions offer flow into our application. So for example, when a call comes in — or we call out to a prospective client – our sales agents need to ask specific questions and use input the client may have already given us. Everything is built into the interface through Salesforce so the agent doesn’t need to do extra mental work or math to get their job done — they can read, they can talk, they can click, and they can keep their focus on caring for and communicating well with the prospective client.
Is there a specific Salesforce coding language? And what other frameworks or languages do you use?
Yes, Salesforce uses an object-oriented language called Apex — it’s similar to Java. And then Salesforce’s old UI framework isn’t bad, but we have a preference for the Lightning Web Components (LWC) framework to build new UI applications. I also have built a basic admin-level understanding of other APIs — tools like AWS, Heroku, DocuSign, CTI — so that I can install, integrate, and use those third party packages in Salesforce.
What was your path to becoming a Salesforce developer in the first place?
I had done my Masters in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering in India and I’d actually never really thought about a role as a developer. My goal was originally to become a professor at an engineering college and participate in research and development. After moving to the United States, my plans changed. My brother is in IT as well, and because I loved problem-solving and learning new tech, he introduced me to Salesforce! When I started diving into this new framework, I fell in love with how broad it was — how much there was to learn, all the free resources and training material, the great tools, and all the many complexities. I got my certification in 2015, and the never-ending learning has kept me interested in Salesforce ever since. So, it turned out for the best and I really enjoy what I do.
Could you break down your day-today at Beyond — perhaps using today as an example?
9:00 a.m.
At this point in the morning it’s always pretty quiet, so this is valuable time to get more mentally demanding work done: coding, solving problems, and working on design documentations — things like that.
10:30 a.m.
This is when all the “activity” starts — something is broken in production or our product manager needs some answer for next week’s sprint planning or a meeting starts. As a senior developer, I tend to spend these next few hours supporting my fellow developers. They ping me on Slack, and I’m there to lend a hand or help answer questions.
We also have our daily stand-up at 10:30. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, stand-up takes the form of a brief video meeting, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays it’s just an asynchronous thread on Slack. During stand-up we’re basically establishing what everyone’s working on and making sure if someone has a blocker, they know where to get help.
11:00 a.m.
Today’s Friday, so we had our weekly “Retro” at this time. During Retro, we first take some time to shout out either a team or individual who did a really good job with something! Then everyone has the freedom to talk about what went well, what didn’t go well, and how we can do better next time.
Today we ended up looking back on the way one project was broken up for this past week’s sprint. The project was meant to address an issue our team wanted to resolve with the way our general sales script was presented to our agents. Our PM ended up writing multiple cards to fix the smaller pieces of the issue but that ended up being really difficult to track — which card was already released? Which feature? This card says this feature isn’t released, but then that developer says that it is released. So it caused some confusion. Having recognized that challenge, we’re now able to brainstorm on better ways to organize work in the future, perhaps joining smaller issues that belong to one specific context into a single card.
If this were a Thursday, we’d have our weekly planning meeting now. We work on a one-week sprint schedule, right? So every week around mid-sprint, we — our product, QA, and engineering teams — come together in one call and talk about what we want to achieve next week and if it’s realistic. We look at the cards on our Trello board (the product management tool we use), and make sure there’s enough information there for our developers and QA team to move forward.
12:00 p.m.
Today at this time we had a meeting to plan for the next sprint and to kick off a new project — we’re taking a new backend approach to “Enroller,” an existing app that supports the work our sales team does.
If this were a Tuesday, I’d be jumping into our weekly design meeting now. All the leads on the Salesforce team — the managers and VPs and senior developers — meet and we present possible solutions to a given challenge and then decide which approach is best based on the tools we have available to solve it.
12:30 p.m.
This is generally when I take 30 or 40 minutes to feed my kids and take lunch myself!
1:10 p.m.
Believe it or not, I had another meeting at this time today. I usually only have 2, maybe 3 daily meetings max (as a senior developer, you tend to have extra responsibility and therefore attend a few more meetings than other developers), but we just happen to have a lot of exciting projects going on!
I led this meeting to discuss the launch of that new “Enroller” project I mentioned. The app supports everything our sales team needs to do when helping new clients to enroll with Beyond Finance — display our general sales flow, send a DocuSign, share educational materials — things like this. While the application does currently work, it’s heavily integrated with our platform backend so we sometimes see performance issues. Our engineering leaders recently decided that we should redesign the entire application so that more of our simple logic is run through Salesforce for efficiency’s sake, even as our more complex computations continue to be handled on the platform side. Everything on the frontend will look exactly the same to the sales team, but it’ll make our whole application run faster and allow it to handle larger volumes of data.
2:00 p.m.
Every day around this time (as long as no production issues come up!), it becomes a lot quieter again so it’s time to go back into my “focused zone” and work on code, solutions, and design tasks for the rest of the day.
This afternoon I worked on a specific component of our sales interface which allows our agents to edit client info, gather client data, and collect their income information along with their expenses. This component saves the raw data, runs some logic, and returns a display so we can show them what their new monthly deposits and timeline will look like. I’m currently working on ensuring that if one of our agents is on a call with a new client and the client says, “Oh no — that’s not my social security number. It’s this …” then our agent can go in and update it through the UI, and it’ll get safely saved in the Salesforce database.
5:00 p.m.
I wrap up my day!
How has working remotely been for you? Had you ever done it before?
Well, at my previous company I worked on a hybrid schedule — 3 days at home, 2 days in-office. But because Beyond allows us the option to be solely remote, I was able to move to North Carolina to be near my family. On top of that, I have that chance to take a 40-minute break and eat lunch and spend time with my kids. I’m getting back that time I’d be rushing to work, then rushing back to pick them up from daycare on time. Instead of driving and getting stuck in traffic, I’m spending more time coding and thinking about code, and then when I’m done with work, I’m spending more time with my family.
When it comes to my day-to-day, it’s also been pretty great. As engineers, it’s really useful to be able to just work asynchronously through Slack and Trello and then just use meetings for when we’re stuck or for something like a team “Lunch and Learn.” This kind of structure where you can respond as you become available and only join meetings when they’re really necessary makes it easier to be productive.
You said you were in the Sales pod — what other Salesforce pods are there at Beyond? And do you usually stay in the same one?
There are three Salesforce pods — Sales, Service, and Debt Solutions. When I joined Beyond, I was leading the Service pod, supporting all the features for our Client Success Department. I was in that pod for over a year but because leadership wanted this new backend built for the Enroll app’s UI, I transitioned to the Sales pod to help with that. Our engineering leadership encourages changing pods because it’s good for growth and learning — it really helps to expand knowledge of the business.
What does it look like to be a senior developer and pod leader? Would you say you’ve taken on a mentorship role for your other teammates?
Well, I wouldn’t really call it a mentorship role as much as a support role. But actually, sometimes they’re supporting me! You know, sometimes I’m stuck on something and even though I’m the “pod leader” they end up being the ones to help me figure out my technical challenge. So the learning and support goes both ways. The culture here is really about being open — being open to discussions of different ways of doing things, open to considering new solutions, and open to learning. So I make sure I’m staying open just as much as the team I’m supporting.
What’s your absolute favorite part about working at Beyond?
There’s more than one! But well, one thing is how well-defined our team structure and sprint schedule is — I haven’t encountered that before. Our engineering leadership’s just done a really good job designing the weekly timeline and the whole process. Another thing is that just in the 14 months I’ve been here, the company has seen so much growth and it’s been pretty great to witness and be a part of.
And then probably the biggest thing is the amount of opportunities available. You know, when I joined the team as a “Senior Salesforce Developer” I had a certain idea of the kinds of things that would be asked of me — writing complex code, working on interesting projects — but I didn’t expect the level of ownership I’d have with writing high-level solutions, leading these pods — I wasn’t expecting it, but since it’s happened, I’ve been so excited and happy. I always get the opportunity to think about how we can solve these bigger problems — senior developers come up with three or four solutions and we go into design meetings and present them. This really helps all of us lead developers to become not just strong developers, but good designers — good architects. I didn’t get these types of opportunities at my previous roles. I’m grateful to be trusted with these challenges and it’s been amazing for both my career and personal growth.
Update: Since this interview was conducted, Sonam has been promoted to Lead Salesforce Developer.
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