12+ Salesforce Product Insights from True to the Core ‘24

True to the Core sessions are highly anticipated and consistently popular. These sessions could be described as an “ask me anything” to Salesforce executives and product managers, where the audience can ask even the thorniest questions and get a transparent response. True to the Core is designed to connect Trailblazers with the product teams, making decisions about the direction a product is going.

The Dreamforce ‘24 edition of True to the Core did not disappoint. The session featured concerns around Flow test coverage and gating, questions about where night mode will appear as an option, why page layouts are linked to user profiles, and a whole lot more…

True to the Core Dreamforce ‘24 Participants

The panel was composed of leaders who are responsible for different aspects of Salesforce’s technology and commercial direction. There were also many product managers in the audience ready to step in to talk about their specific remit.

• Parker Harris (Salesforce Co-Founder and CTO, Slack)
• David Schmaier (President and Chief Product Officer, Salesforce) 
• Ryan Aytay (President and CEO, Tableau, Salesforce)
• Kat Holmes (EVP and Chief Design Officer, Salesforce)
• Param Kahlon (EVP and GM, Automation and Integration, Salesforce)
• Clara Shih (CEO of Salesforce AI, Salesforce)
• Khushwant Singh (SVP of Product Management, Platform, Salesforce)
• Alice Steinglass (EVP and GM, Platform, Salesforce)
• Srini Tallapragada (President and Chief Engineering Officer, Salesforce)

Highlights: What’s Been Delivered?

Since the previous Dreamforce True to the Core session, Salesforce reported back with the following statistics as a way of demonstrating that they do want to listen to the community’s feedback:

• Points Delivered: 1 million – up 40% year over year
• Ideas Delivered: 367 – up 30% year over year
• Ideas Updated by Product Managers: 1,188 – up 35% year over year

What’s New? Providing Visibility Into Roadmaps

• RoadmapExchange: With a view that looks over the next three releases, this initiative will include the community in the roadmap. Objectives are to gather feedback, share potential use cases on how future features would be used in your organization, and join pilots and design previews.
• Roadmap Previews: Webinars that walk through upcoming releases and answer questions interactively. So far, this initiative has launched for Sales, Service, Analytics, and Revenue Clouds.

1. Flow Test Coverage and Gating

Salesforce Flow has exploded over the past few years, with Salesforce reporting that 83.2B Flows are run every week. One goal of Flow was to give non-coders similar powers to what can be done with Apex (coding).

This question is an interesting one. Consider Salesforce’s messaging around Agentforce leveraging the ‘trusted’ Flows already in your org as the automation that agents will tap into, then the question Matt Piper (Software Engineer and Salesforce professional with 15 years of experience) posed is one that’s becoming more urgent. Frustrated by a lack of awareness around engineering rigor, Matt calls for more education for those who are now equipped with the power of Flow – as they say, with more power comes responsibility (more than they may realize).

Question:

“We’ve had the engineering rigor and test-driven development for Apex since day one. It’s a requirement that you could not build code in production and that your code had to meet at least 75% coverage by unit testing.

Today, we cannot build automated testing for Flow. As Flow continues to get more parity with Apex, we have to resort to building Apex to test our Flows, which defeats the purpose of this declarative development environment – or, the alternative is to purchase third-party tools to run these at an additional cost.

We’ve asked multiple times why we don’t have any testing on Flows. Test coverage has been a core component of all pro-code tools since day one. As a result, a plethora of regressions is being introduced into orgs.

Now, with Agentforce, thousands of Flows will be introduced (because each agent can require a Flow), meaning that we now will have potential regressions with an LLM model that we can’t test.

Flow is code, regardless of what happens, because you’re still applying decision elements in loops, maps, and sets. We need more education on the development rigor on what Flow actually does behind the scenes.”

– Matt Piper, Director of Engineering at LeafLink

Answer:

“Test automation for Flow has seen a lag – we’re going to work on it. One of the biggest disappointments for the Flow team was that they built Flow tests, but they were not API accessible (so you can’t automate those tests). You can’t put them into your CI/CD systems.

We redirected the focus when the prioritization feedback came in. We’re looking at test automation for next year, at creating permission that would allow you to mandate the tests (at the org level) for every time a Flow went to production, confirming that it has been tested.

We’re also making an investment in debug and error management. We want to know what will make Flow enterprise-ready and robust, and ensure it is something IT departments will like, making their jobs easier.

Governance is also important. Seeing more usage of Flow to drive mission-critical processes, Flow will move from exclusively ‘Salesforce Setup’ into more of a tool for business analysts to work with before a Flow is rolled into production.”

2. Selective Data Copy for Partial Copy Sandboxes

A Salesforce Sandbox environment enables you to test new configuration, code, and automation outside of your production (live) instance. There are different types of sandboxes, and you will have access to these types/frequencies to refresh them, according to your Salesforce edition. 

This question relates to Partial Copy Sandboxes, which allow you to copy not only metadata but also a portion of your data. As the name suggests, you can select a sample set of data using a sandbox template.

Question:

“I work with an enterprise edition account that has less than 5 GB of storage. When I refresh my sandbox, it doesn’t copy all the data – it selectively copies*. However, I have to spend time figuring out what didn’t copy and then get that data into the sandbox.

It would be nice to not have selective copy on partial sandboxes, but to instead, do a determination of when I make a template, use that template and copy everything that can be copied.”

*As is expected behavior

Answer:

“I understand that in a Partial Copy Sandbox, it can be challenging to determine what’s getting copied. So, let’s talk – I can share more about what we’re doing in the roadmap.”

– Alice Steinglass, EVP and GM, Platform at Salesforce

3. Night Mode

Night mode (aka dark mode) – available on devices such as OSX, iOS, and Android – has become extremely popular in recent years. The benefits of using dark mode on any device are the reduced exposure to blue light (which stimulates the body’s production of serotonin and dopamine) and, as a result, tricks our brain into thinking it is daytime.

Featured on the “An early peek with what’s possible with SLDS 2” slide, we saw a version in dark mode – which likely spurred more questions, like this one…

Question:

“I’m glad to see that night mode is on the roadmap – it’s great for accessibility. I want to clarify that it’s going to be applied to all the different types of UI interfaces, not just for end users in Salesforce, but also for the Flow Builder canvas, Prompt Builder, Model Builder (etc.), the mobile app, and Trailhead.”

Answer: 

“We are focusing first on what’s going to reach our end users. But we are thinking together about builders. We know that that’s where a lot of time is spent and where a lot of eyeballs are drained. We want to focus on that as we start to figure out what the next stage of this roadmap is.”

– Kat Holmes, Chief Design Officer and EVP at Salesforce

4. Layouts Tied to Profiles

After Salesforce announced the eventual retirement of permissions on profiles, admins and architects are starting the process of migrating to permission-set-driven models of user management. There’s a lot in favor of the shift; however, some settings can become ‘gotchas’. This question aims to untangle why page layouts are still related to profiles. 

Question:

“We want to move our users to permission sets and permission set groups, but layouts are still tied to profiles. So, I don’t know how we’re going to move those users. Plus, we don’t have a conditional way to give certain layouts to people who are on specific permissions set/s.”

Answer:

Avoiding the Proliferation of Profiles/Permission Set Priority

“When we think about profiles, we think of them as one-to-one between a user and a setting; permission sets and permission set groups handle the many-to-many.

We’ve always envisioned that page layouts would stay on profiles. However, what we’ve been hearing lately is that it’s been causing a proliferation of profiles. We may need to think about this more. But then I think if we did put them in permission sets and permission set groups, which one – if you have many – would we show you?”

– Cheryl Feldman, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce

Generative Canvas for Lightning

“A sneak peek – Salesforce is working on Generative Canvas for Lightning, using generative AI to dynamically generate page layouts for specific users based on their role, their profile, and what they’re working on at that present moment. 

Generative Canvas for Lightning has just been released in pilot on the AppExchange, and anyone can participate in the pilot, with the aim of bringing it into production next year.”

– Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI at Salesforce

5. Efficiency of Salesforce’s Support

Salesforce offers different support packages. A while back, they streamlined the support case submission process in order to gather the correct information right away and understand an appropriate time to follow up on the case (according to the time zone you submit). 

Many of us would have felt like we’ve been going in circles with the support teams – in my experience, this has improved, but as we’ll hear from this person, there is still plenty of room for improvement for Salesforce to follow their ‘meet the customer on their preferred channel’ message. 

Question: 

“Customer support is a problem. The support package choices now are Signature, Premier, or Basic. The problem with basic support is that it takes days. With a nonprofit usually running so slim, they need something right now. Even if you pay for premier support, the first response is, ‘Let us know a time that we can get on the phone or on a Zoom call’. If they had just read what was written on the ticket, then perhaps a phone call wouldn’t be necessary. 

Some people want the answer in writing so that we know that they are understanding us, and we are understanding them.” 

Answer: 

“We agree that basic standard support is too slow. We’re currently working to turn on chat, so that’ll get you sub-one-minute response times.

We’re launching Agentforce for the Help portal on October 11th. We really want to move from what we’ve traditionally had with asynchronous responses (the back and forth) to synchronous responses using chat and Agentforce.”

– Jim Roth, President, Customer Success at Salesforce

6. Integration User

Salesforce introduced Integration user licenses, which are specifically designed for system-to-system integrations (as they only provide the user with API access). This question relates specifically to Industries Cloud orgs, around how these users and permission set licenses (PSLs) work together. 

Question: 

“An Industry Cloud org includes a license and a PSL that go together. If there are nine human users, and then one integration user is set up (therefore, re-allocating the PSL so it can see the industries objects), the tenth human user does not have a PSL available*. If one needs to be purchased, the integration user is no longer free as a result.”

*Based on assumption

Answer: 

“We’ve switched over to using permission sets for integration users for security reasons. It’s a modern way of doing it. We’ve run into some challenges because permission sets have a secure by default setting, i.e. you don’t have permission to anything. However, with the admin user, everything was on by default, and now it’s all off. We can work through this. 

There have also been issues where PSLs didn’t contain all of the right capabilities – if you see any of those, let us know by submitting a case (bug).

With the specific PSL issue raised, we should be able to fix it and not count against the licensing for the integration users.”

– Alice Steinglass, EVP and GM, Platform at Salesforce

7. Consolidation of Feature Development

Andrew Russo approached the microphone with a statement t-shirt that listed out all the different setups (backends) that admins, developers (etc.) use, with most using them every day.

“I figured we needed to show all the setups, but there’s actually more that aren’t listed.”

– Andrew Russo, Salesforce Architect at BACA Systems

This hails back to his question from last year’s True to the Core session: “The UI (Setup) feels like it was built by 25 different teams who don’t communicate. What we need is an official, unified style guide for Setup and backend APIs that all product teams will be required to follow for all new innovations.” 

The question that Andrew posed this year follows along the same vein – why is there (potentially) duplicative product development work going on across the platform? Just like the ‘multiple cooks’ working with Setup, his concern is that this spreads to end-user features, too. 

Question: 

“There’s been a focus on unifying data. However, Salesforce has a lot of products, and the products are somewhat built in silos. There’s the Customer 360 apps team (e.g. Sales Cloud, Service Cloud), the industries clouds, then there’s the platform. 

Funding seems like it’s gone into which clouds bring in the most revenue. Platform doesn’t bring in direct revenue but supports all of these. What happens when app teams get funding, they build new functionality, which is locked in their silo (e.g. Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, etc.)

For example, Service Cloud has document generation to support Field Service (FSL). Sales Cloud may want to leverage it; however, Service Cloud may not have the incentive to make it available to them. 

Can we look at shifting funding from building functionality in silos and, instead, build for the platform, so that all the teams can utilize it? Look at how this approach will maximize shareholder value and reduce duplicate work (why would two teams build the same functionality?).”

– Andrew Russo, Salesforce Architect at BACA Systems

Answer: 

Merging Teams and Charters

“Welcome to my world – this is what I look at every day. I’ll give you some evidence of this. First of all, we want to root out duplicative work. We used to have two revenue clouds, now we have one. We used to have three payment teams, now we have one. We’d love to get a list of all the duplicative aspects that you see because I’m constantly merging teams and charters so that we don’t have that.”

– David Schmaier, President and Chief Product Officer at Salesforce

Unifying the Product Suite

“There’s work going on to unify the suite. One of our biggest investments besides the AI focus with Agentforce is ‘more core’ – Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud on the platform. That enabled Salesforce Foundations. The idea is to move from individual clouds to more people going for the suite. In three years, I believe that every customer will move to the multi-cloud suite. We want to make it as easy as possible to do.”

– David Schmaier, President and Chief Product Officer at Salesforce

Unifying the Analytics Suite

“Instead of having four or five different stacks, there will be one unified analytic solution named Tableau Einstein, built on the Salesforce core platform.”

– Ryan Aytay, President and CEO, Tableau, Salesforce 

More Core and Agentforce

“More core and Agentforce are major platform investments that benefit every cloud. We’ve taken a platform approach to Agentforce, which is powerful because agents can play multiple roles and can seamlessly hand-off with each other or to team members in different clouds.” 

– Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI at Salesforce

8. DevOps Center Enhancements

DevOps Center is the place to manage releases and to give low-code and pro-code development team members a single set of configurations and code to work with, bringing closer collaboration. DevOps Center for Data Cloud will be generally available in November 2024. But what else is new with DevOps Center, or has it been neglected? 

Question: 

“In the one year I’ve used DevOps Center, I haven’t seen a single new feature. There are such obvious things that should be added. Are we going to give more effort or more resources or see changes to DevOps Center soon?”

Answer:

“We are investing in a DevOps Center. We have a team working on it. This year, it went slower than we expected and wanted. We were fixing some issues that we were hearing from you.”

– Alice Steinglass, EVP and GM, Platform at Salesforce

“Launched for DevOps Center recently: 

• Bitbucket Support (Beta): We have been hearing that this is one of the key blockers. People make an investment in a source code control provider, and they want to make sure it’s supported. 
• DevOps Center Testing (Pilot): First-class support for testing, with four partnerships involved. Now, we have quality gates – anytime you’re moving into production, you get to set the bar, i.e. you must meet this bar for this application. That can be in the form of a unit test or other coded UI tests. 
• Code Analysis Tools: More investment in this tooling. 
• BCS Integration: We’ve been using GitHub events, which frankly, were flaky. DevOps Center allows for auto sync and for you to sync.”

– Dan Fernandez, Vice President of Product for Developer Services at Salesforce

9. Multi-Select Picklists

Everyone loves to talk about multi-select picklists. I say that tongue-and-cheek because multi-select picklists are great for users working at the record level, but a headache for admins and developers to work with.

Limitations include report groupings (only field values that are exactly the same are grouped together), Field History Tracking (the Old Value and New Value fields are blank), Data Imports (when adding values to existing records) – plus ‘gotchas’ with formulas, validations, and automations.

Question: 

“When will multi-select picklists be fixed?”

Answer:

Salesforce acknowledges the multiple issues and admits that what’s been done recently is not the best fix on the list. When creating a multi-select picklist, a pop-up warns the person of the challenges and attempts to redirect them to other features that will work better.

10. Scratch Orgs (Unlocked Packages)

A Salesforce scratch org is a temporary Salesforce instance, typically used for a specific development. As part of the Salesforce DX collection of tools, these are aimed towards developers or architects with experience in Salesforce CLI and Visual Studio Code. As the name suggests, scratch orgs are empty by default, allowing you to ‘start from scratch’.

As a long-time developer, this questioner was excited when scratch orgs and accompanying functionality were introduced because “the whole team was following the managed package approach, and Salesforce was working on 2GP and unlock packages”. 

Question:

“What is happening to make it easier for enterprises to enter into the unlock package? I inherited a six-year-old org that has the tech debt of 14 years. Getting to a modernized development process has proven to be difficult. For instance, I can’t even create a scratch org right now from our codebase because the limits on what I can push with SFDX currently seem small. 

I know that there are third-party tools, like HappySoup, to help with identifying dependencies. However, anytime I reach out to someone with this challenge, the answer is along the lines of, “Yeah, that’s hard”. I know it is, which is why I’m wondering if there is any additional work going on to get us to the point where we can do the ‘modern stuff’? I’m still heavily reliant on sandbox development, which gets hard when you have 17 teams.”

Answer: 

“This is an active area of investment for Salesforce. Just launched this summer, Scratch Org Snapshot has been reported as 12x faster, and in some cases 24x faster. 

We’re working with some of our key customers and partners right now to look at the scale limits and how packages can be broken down into sizes that work to get below the limits. 

We also are piloting a 2GP migration tool to help companies upgrade from 1GP packaging to 2GP packaging. 

And one additional plug – some of this will be easier if you migrate to Hyperforce.”

– Alice Steinglass, EVP and GM, Platform at Salesforce

11. Releases: Staggered Feature Releases

We’re all familiar with Salesforce’s three-per-year release cycle. Within each release, there are three release windows (see the Winter ‘25 release as an example).

This question started boldly, with a broad (but relevant) query posed directly. The first response was, “That’s a nice softball question”.  

Question: 

“I wanted to ask if you’re satisfied with Salesforce’s use of AI on its public-facing digital property. 

In 2024, I feel it’s ridiculous to post 500 pages of release notes when it’s referring to technology that summarizes and gives us personalization. 

We can’t get code examples of how to use those new features that are personalized for my developers. 

In the latest release, the amount of staggered features, I feel, is greater than ever. Do Salesforce expect us to be checking to see when features become available? Why don’t I have a bot that tells me when these things are available? I just feel like some of the AI side of things is focused so much on the customers, but we’re not able to get our hands on this technology with our interaction.”

– Chris Pearson, Salesforce Engineering Director at Jostens

Answer: 

The response was prefaced with how Salesforce is embracing ‘Salesforce on Salesforce’ or ‘customer zero’ (i.e. Salesforce using their own products).

“We’re told that we’re going to see a dramatic change in the Salesforce Help portal that now hosts the release documentation. We’re told that we will see some difference in 3-4 months and a big difference in a year from now.”

– David Schmaier, President and Chief Product Officer at Salesforce

12. Accessibility: UI Regression Testing and Bugs

Question: 

“As I told you last year, Salesforce is the most digitally accessible business enterprise application on the planet, bar none, so well done. 

However, I’m sure it’s clear that there are still many issues that are hitting the releases. So many issues won’t hit production if your accessibility practices at the design level are solid. Then on the regression testing, we’re finding the bugs before your team is.

The European Act of 2025 is about to go to the Department of Justice, which reinforces the Americans with Accessibilities Act. This means that accessibility is not a nice-to-have – it is a have-to-have.”

– Mike Hess, Founder and Executive Director at The Blind Institute of Technology 

Answer: 

“One of the things I’m excited about in our design system update is being able to drive – especially as WCAG compliance criteria are constantly changing and 2.2 is right around the corner – is making sure we can update centrally through our design system. 

There are things that we can bake into our tooling and testing before it goes out the door. We’re making a huge investment both in what we do in Figma up front (making sure that everything is in the design stage forward takes reflow, resizing (not just the color contrast) into account, but also to order the pieces that are really critical. Then, also automated tooling that will do more testing and catching of those bugs alongside what our teams are being trained up to do.

There’s no finish line to accessibility, just like with quality and trust overall, and we’ll keep investing.”

– Kat Holmes, Chief Design Officer and EVP at Salesforce

13. Hyperforce Migration and Platform Events

Hyperforce represents Salesforce’s unified cloud infrastructure, focusing on reliability and availability. By moving away from private data centers into a partnership with public cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Salesforce can ensure full compliance. They can also focus on meeting local regulations for data storage and security, while continuously investing in further enhancing the Customer 360 products and functionalities.

But, have all migrations been smooth sailing? 

Question: 

“We are seeing multiple performance degrades recently, which we didn’t see before moving to Hyperforce. 

We are also seeing issues related to platform events and Hyperforce. On the older architecture upon which we developed platform events integrations, they were working fine – in Hyperforce if there is a huge surge in the volume.”

Answer: 

The Scale Center was the first suggestion, to which the enquirer mentioned he didn’t think that the Scale Center is capturing platform events. The Scale Center was designed for investigation – there are a lot of pilots coming soon.

“Immediately after migration, we had an issue with platform events and the way we were syncing with AWS and all. But that, I think, is resolved.

There was one transient issue with file force, where we were still accessing because of the time it takes to sync up the old files we had, which we knew. We worked with some of our underlying partners and network partners to increase the bandwidth. My understanding is these two issues got resolved.”

– Srini Tallapragada, President and Chief Engineering Officer at Salesforce

Other True to the Core Topics Discussed

There were between 15-20 topics covered during the session. So far, we’ve covered the ones that are the most broadly applicable to Salesforce customers. Here’s a run-down of the other topics mentioned, which you can hear about in the session recording (using the time stamps we’ve included): 

• Agentforce and OmniStudio (at 20:00): For those organizations investing in OmniStudio and using data integration procedures to bring in data, how can the gap be filled between OmniStudio and Flow so that these organizations can use Agentforce without having to rewrite everything? Salesforce released 100+ industry-specific agent actions. Now, these have Flow, MuleSoft APIs, and APEX code. Salesforce is open to partnering with customers on use cases beyond what the connectors can solve. 
• Support for Multi-Orgs (User Changes) (at 52:15): If a user moves between Salesforce orgs owned by the same company, why can’t we ‘follow the user’ and not have to purchase duplicative licenses?
  • May not be intuitively obvious that Data Cloud can be used to connect different Salesforce orgs. Also, there have been a number of tweaks in Salesforce’s pricing models – a universal license mentality and also moving to consumption-based pricing (i.e. dormant users won’t consume, so you won’t be charged). Salesforce agrees that customers shouldn’t have to pay twice for a user.
• Analytics Styling (A ‘No-Brainer?’) (at 33:45): Why are there restrictions on styling for analytics dashboards that don’t reflect the customer organization’s branding?
  • Salesforce is unifying all the analytics stacks with Tableau Einstein, built on the Salesforce core platform. In the analytics keynote, they showed the new UI, plus the option to have custom color schemes, rounded corners, and other styling options that haven’t been possible in Tableau and other analytics products that Salesforce offer until now.
• Data Category Filters for Knowledge Search (at 54:10): Data categories are assigned to knowledge articles to make them more searchable (i.e. the relevant ones only appear in the search results). However, in Experience Cloud, searches can’t be based on data categories. For example, the customer searches for “error” and multiple knowledge articles appear that aren’t related to the specific context in which they’re searching for a resolution to that error.
  • Salesforce acknowledged that they need to solve this. Within Data Cloud, the Vector Database can be applied to search, allowing for unstructured data, like knowledge articles, to be searched. There’s also a shout-out due for the partnership between the Service Cloud and Platform teams, for their journey towards Unified Knowledge which was delivered a few months ago having been in the works for two years. We don’t just have knowledge in Salesforce, but also many knowledge repositories. 

Bonus: A Redundant Checkbox in Setup? 

A ‘cheeky’ bonus got some banter flowing (at 15:10). The question was: “When you create an object, all the way down at the end of the page, there are a couple of checkboxes. One of them is to make notes and attachments available. We’re not using notes and attachments in Lightning (that was a Classic feature) – we have a separate Notes and Files related list. So, why do we still have that checkbox?” 

Summary

True to the Core at Dreamforce ‘24 offered a transparent, open conversation between Salesforce executives and the Trailblazer community. From Flow test coverage and gating to the much-anticipated night mode, it was clear that Salesforce is listening closely to its users and working to make real improvements. 

Once again, this session gave attendees a unique chance to connect with people shaping the tools they rely on every day.