The App Competition Begins! | Legends of Low Code Season 1 Ep. 1 | Watch for FREE on Salesforce+

Fate, Fortune, Glory. What do these words bring to mind? Business Apps I'm Ryan Felton and I'll be your host as nine trailblazers answer the call to compete in a first of its kind challenge. They've used Salesforce to innovate at their companies. Now they'll form teams and race to build the best app for a non profit in only two days. This is Legends of Low Code. The weather in San Francisco is ominous, but inside it's nothing but good vibes. Everyone's ready to start building an intake app for nonprofit Pacific Clinics. Pacific Clinics was named Uplift Family Services when we filmed this challenge. They may have a new name but retain the same critical getting families access to the help they need.

My name is Eleanor Castillasumi. I'm the Vice President of Research and Program Development at Uplift Family Services. Uplift is a mental health behavioral health organization that serves all ages. Our services range from addiction prevention to your intensive wraparound services.

In just 48 hours, these brave teams will build and present an app to take Pacific Clinic's intake process from a list of tasks to a smooth automated process.

We need to develop an app to make services much more easily accessible for individuals as well as an app for our clinicians to minimize the time to organize information and spend more time providing services.

Let's meet our teams. Each team has one admin, one architect and one developer. Meet Team Quest Janet, Zach and Pooja.

My name is Janet Elliott and I'm from Sacramento, California. I wanted to audition for this show because I wanted to get together with other trailblazers. I'm a solution architect at kicks off my favorite activity, brainstorming and I have a reputation for being awesome on a whiteboard in my free time. I'm a big movie buff and I also like to go camping and go on road trip trips with my family.

My name is Zachary Banks and I'm from Austin, Texas. I currently am a product manager at PayPal and I am a nine time certified Salesforce Architect and I'm a recent Golden Hoodie winner. It's important for me to be helping a non profit because I've been volunteering my whole life and I really want to help them further their mission.

My name is Pooja Pand, I'm from Jersey City, New Jersey. I became a trailblazer while I was working as a business analyst. I think I bring to the table problem solving skills. If I win today, I will call my mom first on the list. She's very looking forward to this.

Introducing Team Odyssey Nana Chris And Lisa.

My name is Nana Gregg and I'm from Dallas, Texas. I am a solution architect and in charge of learning and development for a consulting team. I've been to Every Dreamforce since 2012. I'm an MVP hall of Famer and a singer for Apex in the Limits, a Salesforce parody band. All the Trailblazers. I know y' all are gunning for me. Let's do this.

I'm Chris Stegall from Los Angeles, California. I'm a marketing director and a Salesforce consultant focused on marketing. My favorite part of being a trailblazer is all of the amazing people that you meet.

My name is Lisa Melminger. I'm from Austin, Texas. I am part of a consulting company.

Why should they pick us?

Teenage me go so lame. Shouldn't have started with you. I am most excited about building an app for a wonderful charity and beating the other two teams.

And make way for Team Adventure. Ciso, Susan and Rick My name is Ciso Natuli and I'm from Atlanta, Georgia. The skills I bring to the table are leadership, energy and creativity. I'm currently a principal solutions engineer as well as a proud member of Salesforce's military at home cheering me on. I have my beautiful wife and my three lovely daughters. My name is Rick and I'm from St. Louis, Missouri. I've been working with Salesforce for about six years as an admin and a developer. I'll tell you, I have to be a little bit nervous about the tight time frame we have for this competition.

I am Susan Thayer and I'm from Lincoln, Nebraska. I'm a Salesforce solution architect. During the day I'm just a mild mannered Salesforce consultant, but on the weekends I am armed for the mud and ops horse races. I've come home with several gold medals but what I really want is a gold medal from Salesforce. I am very excited that we're working with a non profit and able to solve some real world problems while having little fun competition at the same time.

This might be low code, but the stakes are high. The team with the overall best app will take home $10,000 to donate to any nonprofit they choose. So it gives me great pleasure to say trailblazers ready, set.

We had a really great conversation with Eleanor about some of the problems and the challenges that they're facing. The people that they're serving don't always have access to computers. Sometimes all they have is a phone, sometimes they don't even have that access.

Clicia and I are working on the data model high Level, understanding the Persona and the object and how it's going to sort of flow through that.

So they're mapping out the process. I'm getting the technology ready, and then once they have that, I'm just going to drag and drop it.

And then from Uplift staff, they need to be able, if they receive a call to create a referral for that. We're going to have a screen flow. These are the questions to ask in order for you to submit a referral. That makes sense. All right, so I'm going to write that down.

Okay.

I want to use a whiteboard, but I don't want to write anything that other teams will see.

You just write really small. Usually history decides who's a legend. Since we only get two days, we brought in judges. We're here to get up to speed on judging criteria. Eleanor, what problems are you hoping to see solved by this app?

We need a way to easily manage the referrals that we receive, conduct intakes efficiently, and then match our consumers with the most appropriate program.

And what are you using to do that now?

We use Excel spreadsheets to manage all of that. You know, all of those things are barriers to accessing services.

You want to make life easy on your teams and your families.

Yes, exactly.

Teams will be judged on innovation, presentation, and finally, results, how well they address Pacific Clinics challenges. Dan, you're here to evaluate the innovation of these apps.

I'm Daniel Peter. I'm the Salesforce practice lead at Robots and Pencils, and I'm local here to the Bay Area. I've done some hackathons before, some nonprofit hackathons. It has been decades of experience that have brought me to this point. The problems I'm hoping to see solved in this competition are creating a great user experience. It's about making a system that people love to use.

Jess, what are you looking for in a great pitch?

Simplicity. I want to make sure that whatever story that they're trying to convey, it's simple enough for a six year old to understand. I am Jessica Chan Kobaras, and I'm a VP of marketing here at Salesforce. I've been at Salesforce for 16 years, and today I lead a team that's responsible for our content, our events, our trailblazers, really our experiences team. I've been in many situations similar to these trailblazers. Right. This is a time pressure situation. And there are also often times that, you know, I have to come together with folks that I may not have worked with before. We're really excited to see the App and the solution. But we also want to see some of the how behind it. So what are the things and components that the Trailblazers are actually using to bring the application to life?

Trailblazers. You know, Slack, you love Slack. It's how you bring the right people into your project at the right time. And the right time is now. You're going to have set times to huddle, screen share and consult with Salesforce product experts. The Slack station is open. Hey, Deb, how are you?

Great. Do you have any place that you just feel like you don't have a handle on?

We're about 20 minutes into it, so.

Everything they serve underserved communities and folks that might not have access to all of the tech that we do. Uplift will send somebody to their home to fill an application. What tools in NPSP can we use to make sure that that person has insight into their application stage, but they're not authenticated themselves. Right. It's the rep filling it out on their behalf.

They're never going to be looking at.

This in any digital format. The person you're serving.

Right. The client who actually needs to have digital access to that application.

So at the end, they want to gather. Satisfaction of the engagement. How would you use a survey in nonprofit cloud? Would you just use the survey functionality or would you use something external?

You would need to create lookups for surveys.

Okay.

We also wanted to know about digital signatures. Is something like that included in the nonprofit package?

It is not.

Does it have to be an actual signature?

Once they've gathered the information from the parent, they need the parent to sign off and say, yes, this is correct. Agree to this set of services.

Have you guys taken a look? Maybe an experience talk?

Maybe that would be a good place to start.

What was the best question one of the other teams asked?

There were a lot of good questions.

Good luck, team. Awesome.

Thank you. Thanks so much.

I think the Slack station helped us understand a pivotal piece of our plan and also to validate some of the build items that we were creating.

I think initially after the FLAG meeting, we felt a little defeated going in. We just weren't sure what questions we needed to ask.

Oh, I wish we had more time to prepare before we met with them.

We just didn't necessarily know exactly what to ask, but I think we do.

Have a really good sense of where we're going now. We only got the 10 minutes. With uplift, it becomes really important to ask yourselves those questions of like, what is the expected user experience? What is the value? We're Providing if you're not careful in not asking those questions regularly, you could wander pretty far off the trail.

Remember when she was talking about the people that they service and I think she said like 60% of them don't have English as their main language. So I definitely feel we should use the translation workbench. That way we can put in languages, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, whatever it might be. Maybe you can even assign it to the case manager that specializes in that language.

I like that.

Add some auto assignment rules.

Yes, absolutely.

Are you feeling pretty confident about the amount of time that you have left on the clock?

Definitely would love more time, if that's what you're offering.

And how have you established the roles on the team?

I think it's been pretty organic so far, honestly.

Pooja and I have been working together, sort of brainstorming, trying to understand the data model. It's been nice to be able to work with each other and come to an understanding that way.

I'm curious about user experience. So getting those referrals submitted without people giving up during the process, we want.

To automate most of the process, but we also want to make sure that there is a human connection between the case manager and possible client.

I see some great low code tools up there that you're using. Is there one that kind of stood out?

There's one, but we're going to save it for the presentation.

Okay.

From a low code perspective, Lightning is the perfect decision. You can show and hide components to make that experience for our case managers exactly what they need to give them the information they need at the right point in time of the intake. And so of course, Lightning is the perfect decision.

It's not every day you build a fully functional app within two days. It's not too often you build a fully functional app and a reality TV show at the same time. That's true. With just minutes left of day one, the judges share their observations.

I'm pretty impressed with what I saw and heard out there. I mean, should we start with Team Adventure? It was a little bit vague for me compared to the other teams. They didn't really show us much.

The team definitely seemed confident, but are they overconfident? That's what I'm wondering. They claim to have some innovation, but they wouldn't tell us what it was.

So, you know, something that really resonated with me was when TeamQuest was talking about the human side of this and thinking about the actual individuals and people and families on the other side of this app.

Customer empathy, end user empathy, human centered design. That stuff is really important. I'm glad to hear them mentioning it so early in the process.

I will say with TeamQuest, they spent a lot of time at the slack station and they talked a lot about the data model and they were even talking about duplicate data, which is not something I heard the other teams talk about. So I think that is going to be something extra that will be helpful and really important for your business. So I'm excited to see what they come up with there with Team Odyssey. The one thing that kind of stood out to me today, they actually admitted that they weren't prepared for their time with the experts. But what I will say with Odyssey is their team dynamic seemed like they were really vibing.

All right, everybody, day one is almost over. How are we feeling?

I'm super impressed with what the teams have been able to accomplish so far.

They've all got something to bring to the table. Very proud to see them rise to the occasion.

It's just amazing to see all nine of them really trying to solve our problem. As a non profit, you can't even fathom that kind of resource.

We're at crunch time, right? We're halfway through the competition, so it's just a matter of being able to execute.

Day one comes to an end. And with it, we're that much closer to the makings of a legendary app. Next time on Legends of Low code. Trailblazers. Just 10 minutes left in the competition.

Trying to bring a project across the finish line is really tough.

Three, two.

Come on, work.

Faster, faster, faster, faster.