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 ...
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