What Are Roles, Duties And Responsibilities Of Release Manager / Code GateKeepers In Salesforce

Salesforce as a whole is a very diverse company and there are many job openings in market if you are working in any salesforce domain whether it is Salesforce CPQ, Salesforce SaaS Platform, Salesforce Force.com, Pardot, Analytics, Einstein the list goes on and on.. But, In this article, we are going to primarily focus on the roles and responsibilities of that salesforce release manager or code gatekeepers should possess to perform activities related to deployment in Salesforce.

 

A Good Release Manager Must And Should Be A Core Salesforce Developer, So that he can deploy quality code in production – Nitendra Shukla (SFDC247.COM)

I know most of you will not agree with the statement that I have made above but it is my thinking that a good salesforce developer understands what is quality code and he will ensure that we are not deploying bad code in Production. Anyways this is not our topic of discussion today and we need to focus on the roles and responsibilities of a release manager.

The Roles And Responsibilities Of Release Manager / Code GateKeepers In Salesforce.

If you are a project manager or a recruiter then you must choose an experienced candidate for the role of release manager in your project or company. But, how you will decide who is the best candidate for the job as a release manager. The answer to this question actually depends on the person to person. Although this article is not about the questions that we need to ask it is an important aspect of choosing the best candidate.

As per my past experience as a release manager for 3 projects, I can give you a few general questions that you can ask the candidate that you are interviewing. (This ideally will be a separate post/article). Some of the questions are mentioned below:

1. How to create a best practice release management process/model for our organization for salesforce?
2. How you can improve our current release management process within Salesforce?
3. Why it is important to have 75% code coverage while deploying your code in production, what if we don’t have 75% code coverage, how we can deploy our changes to Production?
4. What are deployment settings and limitations of change Sets?
5. What is a quick deploy feature in salesforce and why you want to be a salesforce release manager?

Once, the candidate is hired there are certain roles and responsibilities that he has to do for his/her project. I am going to highlight a few of the responsibilities which are general and again it will depend on the organization to the organization what they are looking for in the role within the project.

I am going to advertise my role in the below template:
To strengthen our Salesforce Team, we are looking for a name of job role, that will be responsible for delivering various projects on Salesforce Platform according to the agreed timelines and standards. Seize this unique opportunity and grow together with the rapidly developing organization.

Duties & Responsibilities of salesforce release manager:

• Collaboration And Coordination: Communicate with Project Teams, Service and Project Managers, and Functional Release Managers to understand the demand, prepare landscape and sandbox setup proposal. Providing leadership, control and take responsibility for the given area and manage and coordinate the deployment process.

• Supporting/Planning project cutovers and oversee deployments: Manage releases according to the organization standards and adhere to timelines.  Ensure appropriate resources are available and communicate deployment status as necessary.

• Subject Matter Expert for the release management tool: As a specialist of a tool you must act a leader to support, train other team members if they are facing any issues in the deployment of there releases/project streams.