Starting My First Salesforce Project: What Is Salesforce?

#salesforce #beginners #crm #career

When I started my job as a Salesforce Developer, my Amma asked:

“So Salesforce is the technology you're working on… is it a sales job? Do you need to sell?😅”

I paused. Then I laughed.

I told her:

“No Amma 😭 It’s not about selling products. It’s about building systems.”

Let me explain the same in a simple way.

Imagine a big theatre with multiple customers, employees, movies, and tickets — all managed using Excel sheets and emails.

In today’s fast-paced world?

Chaos. Absolute chaos.

That’s where 👉 Salesforce comes in.

Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform that helps companies:

📦 Store and manage data - Customers, Movies, Bookings, Payments — everything in one structured system.
⚙️ Automate business processes - Automatically allocate movies to Mini or Maxi theatre.
🔐 Control user access - Theatre Manager and Employee should not see the same data.
🏗️ Build custom applications - Entire Movie Ticket Management App — from booking to feedback.

So no… it’s not a sales job.

It’s about designing and developing structured, scalable business systems, automating business logic and solving real-world operational problems.

It’s system architecture + development + business understanding combined.

But my Amma's reaction - Oh, then you help them to increase their sales... Fine.

Even though I was unable to explain her fully, she got the basics right 😊

Because at the end of the day, well-built systems do help businesses grow.

Why I Decided to Build Something Real

Once I truly understood what Salesforce enables, I didn’t want to just learn it from documentation or Trailhead (Official learning documentation of Salesforce).

I wanted to build a real system from scratch.

That’s how Skill Align was born.

What Is Skill Align? 💡

In many organizations, employee allocation to projects often depends on:

Availability
Manager assumptions
Informal discussions
Quick decisions

But not always on structured skill evaluation.

This affects almost every employee - without structured skill tracking, talent is often underutilized or misaligned.

Skill Align is my attempt to design a system where:

Employees have clearly defined skill records
Projects specify required skills and expected proficiency levels
Allocation decisions are based on data, not perception
Skill gaps can be identified before assigning someone

Instead of asking,

“Who seems suitable?”

The system should answer,

“Who is the best match based on skills and requirements?”

That’s the vision.

What this Series Is About 🚀

Instead of building this silently, I’ve decided to document the journey.

Starting now, I will be sharing:

What I build each day
Why I design it that way
Architecture decisions
Data modeling logic
Challenges and learnings
Improvements and redesigns

This is not a step-by-step tutorial.

This is my real-time journey of building a Salesforce application from scratch.

If you’re learning Salesforce, transitioning into development, or curious about how real systems are structured — this series might give you practical insight beyond theory.

Would love to hear your parents’ views about your job too 😄