Whiplash: my perspective on Salesforce's Rapid Evolution of Tableau

0:00After a really long sort of period of time, I'm talking six or seven months, reflecting on this new vision from Salesforce that we've been presented, and then having finished

0:13the ten minute summary that I did um earlier in the week.

0:16I think I've arrived at a point of reflection where I think I have a perspective to share.

0:21And the the the title of this video is not clickbait.

0:23I genuinely think whiplash is a good metaphor to use to explain not just I think

0:29my processing of this new vision.

0:32But I think generally actually the circumstances I think we find the community in in response to this feature based on the comments that I've seen.

0:41Okay, so this is a bit of a complex video.

0:43No tableau in this video, no screen shares, just me talking and no edits.

0:47We're just gonna go right into it.

0:48Now I want to start by responding to one thing, which is someone made a comment that

0:53they appreciated that I was still trying to be positive and optimistic about the new features and that, you know, as a content creator, that I must be, you know, just trying to keep brave face to some of these changes, even though

1:05Truthfully, I think people think that you know these changes might not be ideal for their ecosystem or their own context.

1:12I can't really speak uh on behalf of those people.

1:14But I think I wanted to touch on this point about you know why I make content

1:18It's not I'm not I don't make content to I don't know do Salesforce uh like a a service um

1:27I make content because I'm part of what I think is a feedback loop that keeps the community going.

1:33Just to explain this.

1:35When I learned Tableau, I consumed content from respectable members of the community.

1:41Many of them are Hall of Fame visionaries, but there were also many people who were just

1:45good at the product.

1:46They weren't ambassadors, they weren't visionaries.

1:48To to this day I still hold many of those people really high regards.

1:52They taught me everything I know about um the products and analytics in general.

1:56And

1:57Part of sort of the reason I run this channel is to continue that loop.

2:01I hope there are people who watch this channel, get into the product, and then go on to do good things with Tableau or

2:09um realize it's not for them and move on but I help them get there faster or discover someone else who makes content as a result of starting off by watching videos on this channel.

2:18Well w whatever way you sort of go on into the community, this channel is here to support that.

2:24So when I make a video about Salesforce stuff, I'm actually always playing a neutral role

2:29And the neutral role is this.

2:30I'm here to show you what's new, how it works, but I'm not here to tell you what to think about it because as a

2:38As someone who makes this content, I respect your ability to make your own judgments.

2:42I'm not gonna tell you what to think.

2:44Yeah, like when I make a video about Salesforce or Tableau, whatever it is, I make them because I think they're important touch points.

2:51Back to the

2:52Purpose of this video, whiplash.

2:55I think this is a useful metaphor for understanding a feeling that I've really struggled to

3:02Put across in various discussions with Salesforce in various discussions in videos and various discussions with community members

3:10We all have this feeling that something has changed.

3:14Something is changing.

3:15And it's the obvious thing, you know, Salesforce acquired Tableau.

3:19But the really tough thing is to really place that feeling.

3:22just you know be able to point at it and say this is what it is and I think whiplash describes it really well and the way I'm gonna do this I'm gonna show you I'm gonna I'm gonna talk about two examples specific to Salesforce

3:35In order to highlight this, okay.

3:37The first one is around the way products are presented.

3:41Okay.

3:42I would say there's five states to, let's say, showcasing a product

3:48The first one probably you never see or you never know you're seeing it because it's not intended for you to really experience as an end user

3:58What I would call this is a a mock or prototype showcase.

4:01So basically what you do is you build a prototype that looks like the real thing, but then you give it the interaction elements that allow it to behave like the real thing

4:09This is what tools like Figma are really good at.

4:12In the past I know Tableau used to use a tool called Invision.

4:15Invision, I think, shut down and then moved everything over to Figma.

4:19So the way this would work is that if you wanted to sort of prototype a feature, what you'd actually do

4:23You'd build a mock version in Figma and that's what you would pitch to sort of get the feature built.

4:30And then that would allow you to say, look, put that in front of you know 10 people and say, hey, if you could do this, click on that, what do you think?

4:37What that allows you to do is before you even build anything, you can get sentiment, you can get ideas.

4:42And then those ideas inform

4:45what I would call like an MVP.

4:46So that's sort of your first level of a showcase.

4:48Showing a potential customer, a potential idea, but in a completely conceptual stage.

4:53Okay

4:53The next one is we've actually got some developers, they've built what is the MVP and now you're actually using it, you're trying it, you you're literally using the software.

5:02But this again is not typically public thing.

5:04This is typically the internal team that are doing this.

5:06They're literally working on a prototype.

5:08It's buggy as hell, it crashes.

5:10It's nowhere near sort of customer ready, but it's on your laptop and you can start to sort of figure out how the interaction works.

5:16What other things have you not thought of?

5:18Where are the bugs?

5:19What's causing all these challenges?

5:20That starts to come out.

5:21That's sort of stage two

5:22Stage three is what I would call, okay, you've got that prototype into a place where you're happy to let someone else drive it.

5:29So you put it in front of someone else, but you're supervising that person.

5:32Okay, so you're either looking over their shoulder or you're on a web share or something like that, and then they're trying it.

5:38Stage four is about clearing out those quirks, clearing out as those challenges, those bugs.

5:43that meant you had to look over their shoulder.

5:45And it's actually what I would typically call a beta.

5:48And people are very familiar with this.

5:50Beters are designed for lots of people, maybe a thousand people, to try something out

5:54you start to get generalized feedback.

5:56By this point you should be already comfortable letting the feature out, what you're looking for, things you haven't thought of, and quirks around performance, presentation, UI, UX, all of that kind of final polish that you'd put to stuff

6:07that happens after this step.

6:08Then the final stage is okay this feature is ready.

6:11Let's go to production.

6:13Since Salesforce acquired Tableau, I've noticed that

6:18The stage at which we see things has fundamentally changed.

6:22We see them at what I would call two very distant stages.

6:26I feel like we see a lot of things that have the polish of a finished product, but they're in fact this prototype, this mock.

6:35Okay

6:36And then at the same time, we see them almost too early, which is which sounds like a really crazy thing to say, but because we see them too early

6:48But they're presented as final visions.

6:50What you miss out on is this sort of opportunity to really sort of influence that vision, influence that journey, influence sort of the outcome

6:58What I struggle to sometimes place is who is showing the features.

7:03So when you see the showcases, the best way to think of this is primarily led by product marketing.

7:09Showcases are designed to invoke a certain feeling, a certain idea, and if your sales force, obviously interest in the product, and you know, bottom line

7:17You know, no, self was a business.

7:18Then they want some money.

7:20The showcase is supposed to instigate discussions from customers to say, yes, I would like to move in that direction with you.

7:27I think that's going to be great for my company.

7:29But and here's the big but Tableau used to do this very differently.

7:34And I say Tableau because at the time it was a separate company, Tableau the company.

7:38Tableau did something this completely differently.

7:42When Tableau did these demos, and this is just from recollection, I might be wrong, so hit me in the comments if if if you need if you've experienced this.

7:51I felt like we saw beaters at the same phase that we are seeing marks from Salesforce.

7:59So what do I mean by this?

8:01What I mean by this is that we would see an actual working beta, an internal beta, a working beta of the product in front of us

8:14as the sort of first tranche demo.

8:17And the reason I know this is because there used to be this capability called a feature flag.

8:20And the feature flag essentially probably is still there.

8:23It's a way in Tableau of

8:24enabling certain features because what actually happens is the the the code that you're pushed actually contains future capability in it because it's hard to take out the code

8:33that you're developing for the future from the current build, you're constantly building on the code base.

8:38So it actually makes sense that there are parts of the software that aren't switched on until everything is in place.

8:43So

8:44There used to be a mechanism called feature flags where you could just switch on certain parts of the feature capability.

8:48And so you'd actually be given instructions on how to do this and you would be able to enable specific feature flags.

8:55If you use Tableau Server, the way you could see these feature flags, you go into Tableau Server, there's a YAML file in there, and the YAML file just has a list of flags.

9:03Those flags are features.

9:05So you could take those flags, go back to Tableau Desktop, and then enable the same feature in desktop because of course some of the features had to be present in both platforms.

9:13So that's a bit of inside baseball as to sort of how that used to work.

9:17What I'm saying here is though that back in the Tableau day, we saw a ton more of this kind of stuff.

9:22And it also meant that unfortunately you'd see stuff in the product that never got shipped.

9:27And that absolutely happened.

9:28I've seen that with uh dashboard grids.

9:30This was demoed once.

9:32We've never seen it and to this day, you know, the grid alignment, the automatic snapping, that's the specific thing that never got shipped, but uh, you know, was available in the product through a flag.

9:41That just got removed and it's disappeared and it's never gonna be there.

9:44But it was built, it was in the product and it worked as far as I was aware, never had a bug, just did not get shipped.

9:50You know, going back to Tableau back in the day we saw a lot more demos at this, I think, more it was further ahead.

10:02But it was a reality.

10:03It's really the genuine thing.

10:06Okay.

10:06With Salesforce, I feel like we see way too many decks and way too many.

10:14mocks and I know they're mocks because they come many months many months before the actual beat arrives

10:25And then the things they're showcasing aren't even available in the in the in i i in what we see as the beta.

10:34So you'll see a mark

10:36You'll see a presentation from a keynote.

10:38You'll have seen the keynote seven months ago.

10:40We're now coming to the next keynote.

10:43And the tough thing about this is that

10:46The beta will show features further back than the mock that we saw, if that makes sense.

10:51It's a little bit, it's just really hard to place, a really hard to describe, but

10:57This sort of sudden change leaves this feeling, this whiplash feeling that I think

11:05Again, is really hard to place, but I genuinely think like it leaves something if you're really dialed into the product or you're dialed into seeing things at conference.

11:13Actually, to be honest with you, conference was a big audience.

11:16Back in the day, 10,000, 15,000 people went to conference.

11:18I know conferences are small in a post-COVID world anyway, globally around the world.

11:22It's not just the Salesforce or Tableau.

11:24But, you know, it was actually quite meaningful to s to have people see these features working in the product, but that's what was being showcased, actual working code in the product, rather than uh mocks and PowerPoints showing you like what could be possible.

11:39And then the smaller side to that is that it actually leads into my next point, which is um let's say the presentation approach, like who's talking about the product?

11:50I said before it was led by product marketing.

11:52Throughout the whole entire process, I feel like we see a lot less product managers as well.

11:57We see a lot more product marketing professionals.

12:00But product marketing is not the same as product management.

12:03And I feel like Tableau had a heritage in having product managers showcase the product, not product marketing.

12:11And you might ask, how are they different?

12:13It's really hard to explain.

12:15But again, this is a good example of webplash because I feel the difference.

12:19I just can't I can't tell you what it is.

12:21But the product manager

12:23in my gut I felt I think had a better sense bet better intuition for what was really gonna hit home about the future.

12:32But with product marketing, you get the thing that execs wanna hear, which sucks a lot of the time.

12:38And I know it's weird because the execs pay the bills, but

12:41It creates this huge disconnect in the product.

12:44I I call it sort of the intuition gap, right?

12:46And so it's actually like a a cycle.

12:47It's a very vicious cycle.

12:49because you hear a feature and then you hear someone from product marketing talk about it, they talk about it, and then as they're talking about it, you start to ask yourself

12:58Does doesn't this person is this person a real day traveler?

13:02Because they're not talking about this feature in the same way I was thinking about.

13:07I was thinking about it in this context here at work, but

13:10They're talking about it in this very sort of generic sense.

13:12So you start to question like, hmm, do they do they understand me?

13:16Do they get where I'm coming from with this feature?

13:18So you ask a question, you go in.

13:20And then sometimes a products and marketing team then go into this sort of mode where they're trying to understand the voice of a customer.

13:26The voice of a customer's actual phrase it's used inside of Salesforce that speaks to how they collect information about customers

13:33and the features they want.

13:34So they get into this sort of mode where they go into the voice of the customer and they go into sort of a listening mode.

13:40The problem with that though is that

13:42uh in this listing mode you're not actually answering the question but the analyst is trying to answer because you the the the marketeer is trying to gain insight that they

13:53don't feel they have or they need to have or they understand already but want to hear it in the voice of the customer.

13:59But you as the analyst just want to know the answer.

14:01You just want to get a little bit of

14:03faith and trust and know that okay this person that's telling me about this thing genuinely knows my pains and feelings and you don't get that you don't get that from the marketing I certainly don't get it from the product marketing on the Salesforce website or for Tableau anything

14:16I feel like a whole bunch of personality just been completely lost in that whole approach.

14:21So that's an opinion, by the way.

14:23It's not necessarily like a a fact.

14:25Many people will have different opinions.

14:26If you go back to

14:28If you go back to the Tableau days, I I just genuinely feel that, you know, when a feature slapped it really slapped because they knew exactly what was gonna slap about it.

14:39I don't think we have that same intuition in Salesforce at the moment at all.

14:43It's a little bit disconnected.

14:44Now this could be for a bunch of diff I don't think it's it's a people thing.

14:47I think e everyone at Salesforce is really smart.

14:49It's just a little bit of a

14:51I think it's an it's a byproduct of Salesforce itself being such a large company, so many structures, and having very so many filters involved in the process that by the time something makes it all the way through, even though what you poured in was gold.

15:06Still comes out with this, you know, s somewhat off-gold kind of polish to it, if that makes sense.

15:11It's still great look, great polish.

15:14It's very refined, very precise wording, but it's just off gold a little bit, you know, whereas what you poured in was a little bit was a little bit richer, you know.

15:24So again, this sudden change, again, whiplash again, it's just this sort of it's a very stark difference.

15:32And so if I go to my notes here, what was I gonna say next?

15:36It actually brings me to this point around whiplash, this sort of the the thumbnail of this video.

15:41Like whiplash if you look up the definition of whiplash is not actually the action of changing quit things quickly

15:48Changing things quickly has got a different meaning.

15:50I don't know what that word is off the top of my head right now.

15:52But whiplash is specifically the injury that comes from a sudden change of direction, right?

15:59If if I sort of finish this video on this point

16:02Whiplash is where I think we are in general in response to some of the Salesforce um announcements.

16:09That doesn't mean any of them are bad.

16:11It doesn't mean any of them are wrong.

16:12Some of them could be great and in the future I might be sat here saying this is one of some of the best changes that that were ever made to the platform

16:19That still does not change the fact that there has been a lot of changes of direction.

16:25There has been a lot of renaming.

16:26There has been a lot of

16:27space and there has been a lot of lack of clarity on you know what is tableau core what is tableau next what's happening to cloud what's happening to prep you know all of these sudden things oh that metric's gone

16:38the tableau sort of narrative thing gone, even though that was only introduced two months ago.

16:42Metrics gone.

16:43Here's Tableau Pass, you know, all of these changes, like clockwork, boom, like a lot of things being trialed in real time almost on the product itself

16:51Meanwhile you're an analyst, your whole world, you know, isn't changing that fast at all.

16:56So to you, the relative perception

16:59is this sort of erratic back and forth that causes this whiplash that I think people are experiencing, but they can't place that feeling.

17:09And I genuinely think that's sort of what

17:12summarizes the comments.

17:13If I look at my comments, you do see people conflicted.

17:17Really positive about some of the directions, really nervous about what it means for them.

17:22You see a lot of the push for AI.

17:24Really positive about how it can change your workflow.

17:26Really concerned about what it's going to do to their careers.

17:30You see that again.

17:31Boom, bang, boom, bang.

17:32You see Salesforce's sort of change in terms of product mix, uh sudden change in licensing, sudden change in in pricing.

17:40These things all have to change, of course.

17:42Um the world doesn't stand still.

17:44But there's always an opposite and equal effect to the end user who is in a context that maybe is not changing so fast.

17:52And so to me, I think that's what's causing this effect.

17:55So yeah, I think that's it.

17:56We're really curious to know what you think.

17:58I think perspectives really matter in this discussion.

18:01And yeah, this is a different kind of video.

18:03No editing, just talking to the camera alone in my room.

18:06A bit sad really.

18:08But yeah.

18:09That's sometimes how content creation goes.

18:11Thanks for watching.

18:12I'll see you in the next one.