I Used to Think the Goal Was to Be the Expert

I’ve been working in the Salesforce ecosystem for about 15 years now. That’s long enough that sometimes I find myself thinking about the different versions of me who have existed along the way.

The builder who wanted to learn everything. The person who eventually realized other people had started asking her the questions. The architect who had to learn that knowing how to build something wasn’t enough. And now, increasingly, the leader who is learning that sometimes the most important thing I can do is let someone else have the answer.

I don’t think I noticed these transitions while they were happening. Careers don’t usually work like that. Nobody sends you a notification that says, “Congratulations! You are now an expert.”

You just keep learning and building and solving problems until one day you look around and realize your role in the room has changed. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how mine has changed.

First, I Just Wanted to Build Things

I started my career like a lot of people in technology do. I wanted to figure out how things worked.

Someone needed something built, so I learned how to build it. Something broke, so I figured out why. Someone asked a question I didn’t know the answer to, so I went looking for it. Doing the work was the learning strategy.

And I loved it. There is something incredibly satisfying about starting with a problem and ending with a thing that works because you figured out how to make it work.

Over time, I found the parts of the platform that really clicked for me. Data was a big one.

I spent years working deeply in CRM Analytics. I built dashboards. I designed dataflows and recipes. I obsessed over visualizations. I learned the weird quirks and edge cases you only learn when you spend every day inside a product. Eventually, people started coming to me with questions.

Somewhere along the way, I had become the expert.

Then People Started Asking Me

I don’t remember the moment that happened. I don’t think there was one.

At some point, though, I went from being the person asking questions to being the person people brought into the room because they thought I might know the answer. They asked what I thought. They trusted my recommendations. They let me pilot new features. They gave me complicated problems and trusted me to figure them out.

Sometimes they treated me like an expert before I was entirely convinced I deserved the word.

And that mattered. Because expertise isn’t built entirely by learning more things. It’s also built through opportunity.

Someone has to give you the hard problem. Someone has to ask what you think. Someone has to put you in the meeting. Someone has to trust your answer. Someone has to give you enough room to occasionally be wrong, figure out why, and come back better the next time.

People did that for me. And slowly, I became the person they already seemed to believe I could be.

Of course, there is some comedy in looking back at this now. I spent years becoming really, really good at CRM Analytics. And then, after spending every day in CRM Analytics, there was definitely a point where I would have killed to work on literally anything besides CRM Analytics.

Please. Give me Service Cloud. Give me an integration. Give me some weird automation problem. I would like to see another part of Salesforce now.

Then I became a consultant.

And I got exactly what I asked for.

Then My World Got Bigger

I’ve been consulting for about four and a half years now, and one of the things I love most about it is how much bigger my world has become. I’ve gotten to work across products, industries, integrations, architectures, and business problems I might never have encountered if I’d stayed focused on one particular corner of the platform.

And now? I miss CRM Analytics.

Of course I do.

I’ve only gotten to work with it on a couple of client projects in the last five years, and every once in a while I find myself missing the dashboards. The recipes. The dataflows. The satisfaction of getting a visualization exactly right.

Apparently past me should have been more specific about what she wished for.

But there’s something else that comes with that distance. The technology moved while I was doing other things. It always does.

Releases keep coming. Interfaces change. Features get added. Products get renamed, reimagined, replaced, or folded into something new.

Expertise has a shelf life.

The knowledge doesn’t disappear. But the fluency can. Drop me back into CRM Analytics and I’m not starting from scratch. I still understand data modeling, transformations, visualization, and how to tell a story with information.

But there’s probably going to be a moment of, Wait. Where did they move that?

And I hate that moment. Because there’s still a part of me that immediately thinks, I should know this. I used to know this.

For someone who spent a lot of her career becoming the person who knew, not knowing can feel surprisingly uncomfortable.

Breadth Doesn’t Always Feel Like Expertise

The funny thing is that I’m not actually learning less. I’m learning differently.

As my career has grown, the boundaries of what I need to understand have gotten much bigger. Knowing Salesforce isn’t enough anymore.

I need to understand how Salesforce fits into the rest of an enterprise. How data moves between systems. How identity and security decisions affect the architecture. How governance changes what we should build. How AI is changing the questions we need to ask.

I don’t need to become the deepest expert in every one of those things. But I need to understand enough to see the connections. Enough to ask better questions. Enough to recognize the risks. Enough to know when the problem in front of me is bigger than Salesforce. And enough to know when I need another expert in the room.

That requires a different kind of learning.

I still read release notes. I still do Trailhead. I still earn certifications and play in sandboxes and follow the things that make me curious. But earlier in my career, I learned because the thing I was building required me to.

Now, sometimes I have to learn precisely because the thing I’m building doesn’t.

That’s a different kind of growth. And sometimes it’s harder to see.

The builder’s expertise is tangible: Look what I built.

The product expert’s expertise is immediate: Ask me. I know the answer.

The architect’s expertise can be almost invisible. Sometimes it’s asking the question nobody else thought to ask. Sometimes it’s realizing the Salesforce problem isn’t actually a Salesforce problem. Sometimes it’s seeing how one decision will ripple through five other systems. And sometimes it’s knowing enough to realize that you need another expert in the room.

Breadth doesn’t always feel like expertise.

I’m still learning to recognize that it is.

And Then There’s Leadership

This is where I’m still growing.

Because I still want to know. I want to understand how the thing works. I want to click the buttons. I want to see the configuration. I want to understand why we made the decision. There will probably always be some part of me that wants to be able to answer every technical question immediately.

But increasingly, I’m finding myself in rooms where someone else should answer.

Maybe they’ve spent the last six months living inside a product I haven’t touched in two years. They know the new features. They know the edge cases. They know the weird behavior the documentation doesn’t mention.

They know this better than I do.

Earlier in my career, I think I might have found that threatening.

Now I’m starting to see it as the goal.

Because someone once made room for me to be that person.

Someone Let Me Be the Expert

I’ve been thinking about those people a lot lately. The people who asked what I thought. The people who trusted my answer. The people who invited me into the meeting. The people who gave me something difficult before I was entirely sure I was ready for it. The people who said some version of, “Kristi knows this. Ask her.”

As I write this, I can picture the people who did those things for me. I know their names. I remember the opportunities they gave me. And I don’t think I fully understood at the time how much those moments would shape my career.

There’s confidence packed into a sentence like, “Ask her. She knows this.” Someone you respect is telling a room full of people that your knowledge matters.

And maybe, without realizing it at the time, those people were doing more than recognizing expertise. They were creating the conditions for it.

They gave me room to become the expert.

Now I’m starting to realize that I get to be one of those people.

I can be in a meeting where someone asks a question and, instead of feeling like the architect is supposed to have the answer, say, “I don’t know. Sarah knows this better than I do. Sarah, what do you think?”

That isn’t giving up my expertise. It’s using it differently.

I’m trusting Sarah. I’m trusting myself enough to admit someone else knows more about this than I do. And I’m telling everyone else in the room that Sarah is someone they should trust too.

That’s leadership in a way I don’t think I understood earlier in my career.

Not having every answer. Knowing whose answer we should be listening to.

Making Room

Maybe that’s the biggest change I’ve noticed looking back over the last 15 years.

At first, growth meant learning how to build. Then it meant becoming the person people trusted to know. Then it meant learning to see beyond the thing I was building and understand the larger architecture around it.

And now I’m learning that growth can mean making room.

Not because I’ve stopped being any of those other things, but because now I get to use them differently.

Let someone else answer the question. Ask what they think. Put them in the meeting. Give them the hard problem. Let them disagree with you. Give them something they’re almost ready for and support them while they figure it out. Say their name when someone asks who understands this part of the solution.

Tell the room, “She knows this better than I do.”

And mean it.

That’s not becoming less technical. It’s not caring less about expertise.

I’m still going to read release notes. I’m still going to chase certifications. I’m still going to disappear into a sandbox because something sounded interesting and I need to understand how it works.

And if somebody lets me build a CRM Analytics dashboard tomorrow, I will happily still be adjusting the data recipe three hours later.

I’m still a builder. I’m still an expert. I’m still an architect. And I’ve been a leader in different ways throughout all of it.

Those parts of me didn’t disappear when the next one showed up. They built on each other.

Maybe what I’m discovering now isn’t that I’m becoming a leader. It’s that my understanding of leadership is still growing too.

For a long time, so much of career growth felt like accumulation. Learn more. Build more. Know more. Take on more responsibility. Become the person people trust with the answer.

I’m still doing all of those things.

But I’m beginning to understand that leadership also means making room.

My career doesn’t have to be measured only by how much expertise I can accumulate for myself. It can also be measured by what I help other people discover in themselves.

I used to think the goal was to be the expert.

Now I think about all the people who made room for me to become one. The people who trusted what I knew. Who gave me room to figure out what I didn’t. Who put me in the meeting. Who asked what I thought. Who gave me the opportunity to grow into every version of myself that came next.

Fifteen years later, I think I understand something about leadership that I couldn’t have understood at the beginning.

I want to be one of those people for someone else.