The Value of Community
Meet Thomas Theunen, Head of Commerce at Forward and the first Belgian Golden Hoodie winner.
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(upbeat music)
- Welcome to Inside the Ohana.
I'm Dan Darcy, Chief Customer Officer at Qualified.
And today I'm joined by Thomas Tunein.
Thomas, how are you?
- I'm doing great.
It's hot weather, but we finally got some rain.
So it's good for the plants, not so much fun for the kids,
but it's, I'm doing great.
- Like I said, I'm excited about today
because you are our first international guest.
So Inside the Ohana is going international.
Where are you joining us from?
- I'm joining you from Belgium,
a small dot on the world map,
but dreaming big, dreaming big.
- That's awesome.
- So I wanna dive right into our first segment,
Ohana Origins.
So Thomas, how did you discover Salesforce
and start your journey?
- Yeah, so my journey started like in 2017.
We were starting to look at demand wear at the time,
just when Salesforce decided to do the acquisition.
So my discovery of Salesforce was quite abruptly,
like we were looking at demand wear for BDC commerce.
And then so the, yep, we're a part of Salesforce.
- So give me a little bit more details.
Let's take a step back to understand like,
what's your job, what's your title, where do you work?
I'd love to learn a little bit more about that.
- Yeah, so currently I am the head of commerce at Forward.
I'm in charge of about 60 people together
with my colleague, Head of Commerce, Yum.
And we have about 60 people just focusing on BDC commerce cloud.
So demand wear is still back from the day.
And besides that, we also have a dedicated marketing cloud
team and a CRM for sales cloud, service cloud,
all other, yeah, the force.com based products.
And yeah, with that, we mainly focus on connecting those products.
So if you're looking at marketing cloud, commerce cloud, CRM,
to acquired products who are not built on
on the force.com platform, who still need to connect somehow
and talk nice to each other.
And we chose to make that our main focus and help
get that 360 view of the customer, basically.
- So you definitely were on the forefront
of putting together the different platforms.
But beyond that, what was your initial impression
of like sales force as a core?
- Yeah, so the initial impression was,
oh, wow, this is big.
There's a lot going on.
So many different products.
And yeah, especially like three years ago,
there was a gigantic boom in amount of products.
Like order management came out, loyalty cloud,
vaccination cloud, of course, and things like that.
Just more and more different products started popping up,
some rebranding happening across the way as well.
And also in commerce cloud, there were acquisitions
happening for Headless.
So there was so much information just coming at us.
It was a lot to take in and a lot to look into.
And that's when I really had to deep dive into salesforce,
like, okay, what's possible, what's not possible?
I started to look at certifications, get myself educated
on trailheads, see what's going on,
doing some super badges, getting stuck,
asking people for help.
And that's when I really started to discover
what was going on.
Now we had our community in commerce cloud,
but I discovered a whole bunch of people
on that other side of the acquisition.
- So you just dove right into trailhead,
started getting your hands dirty,
starting doing all the hands-on projects
with the super badge.
That sounds awesome.
And then that's when you just,
it opened your mind up to all of these other things.
How about the trailhead community and the trailblazers?
Like tell me a little bit more about your experience there.
- Yeah, so first I was just asking questions.
I had a lot to learn.
I never seen the core platform before,
and we were starting to do our first project
in service cloud.
So I had to figure things out.
And there were a lot of helpful people.
Like any question I asked,
I had like three people within half an hour,
I was like, okay, that's quick.
I was expecting an answer in like two, three days,
like with other platforms where you ask a question,
hopefully within a week or by the deadline,
you got an answer.
And no matter the day or time,
you got someone helping you out, which was awesome.
Once I felt comfortable, I said,
well, I learned a lot over the past years
and I see people repeating the same questions,
but not always getting answers.
Maybe I should get that trailblazing,
Ohana feeling also within Commerce Cloud
because it was not known.
Like if you talk about trailhead or trailblazing,
in the general sense, not a lot of people were interested
in that if you look at the community in BDC Commerce Cloud.
So I'm hoping that, well, in the last year,
some of that has changed to get more people involved.
So I'm saying, hey, let's go to Dreamforce.
Let's go to an event.
Let's talk a bit more.
We got our first coffee chat like last month.
So hopefully we can get that feeling
of trailblazing, Ohana feeling in there as well.
- Yeah, so you're trailblazing in the BDC Commerce space.
So that sounds great and you're trying to create that community.
So Thomas, I want you to brag a little
'cause it sounds like you've had such incredible success
with Salesforce, you know,
but what's one of the biggest successes
that you're most proud of thus far?
- Yeah. So I talked about the company a little bit
and what we focused on.
And I think one of the biggest successes
is actually connecting all of those products together.
If you look at our projects, we have quite a few
where we do the 360 customer view.
And yeah, it's been working out great.
I mean, we've been able to connect all the dots together
and build our own connections.
So there were some products available by Salesforce,
but we decided to go our own way
because there were some problems unfortunately.
And we figured out our own route.
And so far it's been working out perfectly.
- On the opposite side of the spectrum,
what would you say is your biggest lesson learned?
- The same thing.
It's been a real challenge.
Now, when working with customer data
and getting a 360 view, especially with GDPR,
et cetera, and all of those different rules,
there's a lot to keep in mind.
And we missed a few things.
I mean, the first iteration,
we didn't catch all of the different scenarios
that you could think of.
And we hit the wall a few times,
but we overcame those consequences
and we found solutions.
And you can only learn things when you're in trouble.
Like when you need to learn new things
that you've never done before.
And not everything will work out perfectly.
And that's what happened,
but you need to just step up and take on those challenges
and just climb over those walls.
- If you could go back and talk to Thomas,
just starting out with Salesforce,
what advice would you give yourself?
- Do networking.
Get to know people.
Don't try to fix everything on your own.
You can't do everything, you can't know everything.
You need to rely on the knowledge of other people
and not just within your own company,
but also outside.
There's a lot going on.
I've said this multiple times to people.
Like you live in a shell within your company,
you have your projects, you have your way of doing,
but there's a lot of people out there
working with Salesforce, working with multiple products,
doing it their way.
And maybe we can learn from each other.
And I should have done that earlier.
Get to know people outside of Forward.
Just don't ask your colleagues sitting next to you.
Ask maybe, like we've been in the community,
like we're trying to do this
and we're trying to do it this way.
Is this the correct way?
Just asking that open.
And if nobody answers, that's of course,
if there's privileged information there, that's okay.
But if someone says, well, we did it this way
and that actually worked better, you learn something new.
You learn a new way of doing things.
And you can only do that by being open, connecting with people.
And just, yeah, having fun, just not just talking about work,
getting to know people actually personally as well.
And hopefully after two, three years of COVID,
I can finally meet a lot of these people.
I met a few already on connections this year,
but hopefully now with Dreamforce,
there's a bigger gathering coming over there.
I can meet a lot more people that I've been chatting with,
video conferencing with in the flesh for the first time.
- So I wanna ask you because about the meaning of Ohana,
because I asked this of all my guests
and people describe it a little bit differently here and there.
But what does Ohana mean to you?
- Well, for me, it's, well, the family outside of your regularly,
the bigger picture, the community that you build around you,
that's the Ohana for me.
The people you get to know either in a professional
or a semi-professional way on Twitter, on Trailhead,
and just, yeah, keeping a connection,
not just one touch point, but a lasting connection,
just the same people popping up every time
on your Twitter feed or in the questions or in your email.
Like, that's for me, The Ohana,
it's like a group of people that you actually know,
but yeah, it's hard to describe.
- I mean, but let's talk about like those connections
that you made, you have global connections.
Where would you say some of your trailblazing friends are
in the world?
- Well, I met a lot of people working in Commerce Club,
both within Salesforce and outside of Salesforce,
some people even moving to the mothership,
and also met amazing people at conferences.
And also, yeah, I became part of the shirt force.
- Tell us more about that.
- Yeah, tell us more about that.
- Yeah, so I knew that existed like I ordered
a shirt like in, I think, 2020,
like the one I'm wearing right now,
I thought like this is great.
And it's supporting it.
So it's shirts and every shirt you buy,
all of the profits go to a nonprofit
that changes every four months,
that's selected on a Twitter poll.
And once the war in Ukraine broke out,
I was like, okay, I wanna do something,
but why reinvent wheel if there's already stuff going on?
And I thought, okay, maybe one of the ways
to integrate Commerce more into the Salesforce,
or HANA is maybe we should actually do
a Commerce flavor T-shirts as well for shirt force,
because there were none.
You had data drive,
you had for metadata,
the core platforms shirts for that,
but nothing actually related to B2C or B2B Commerce Cloud,
or anything related to Commerce in general,
I said, well, let's submit some designs
and try to get some vibe going to support a good cause,
to help people escaping the war,
or to help them find safe passage to other countries.
And that's why I just contacted Todd and said,
well, I couldn't contact America,
I contacted shirt force and said,
I have this idea, I want to submit some designs,
and can we get the profits going to something
to support Ukraine?
And then in the next vote,
I pushed everyone, hey, votes for something
to support for this cause, and we won.
And I submitted those Commerce designs.
I think I have two on my name now,
one Whirlal one, Salesforce, O'Hanna Rocks,
and actually make sense.
We did quite our best to make sure
that it was according to the rules of Whirlal
and one for Headless.
And yeah, and hoping to continue doing that.
- Yeah, Thomas, I mean, you are honestly one of the,
you know, basic, you are one of the people
representing what I'll call the trailblazing community,
and this is just another testament
to the value of the community doing good out there.
So before we get into our next segment,
you kind of touched upon this with your trip
to connections that you didn't even know
why you were being flown out to Chicago.
But are there any special O'Hanna moments
that are a little behind the scenes that you wanna share?
Maybe your hoodie story?
- Yeah, so the Salesforce MVP program
is where the community can actually submit people
who contribute to the community and help others
and have the trailblazing and the O'Hanna feeling.
And our multipliers, as they call it,
like they share their knowledge
and they help people with their careers
or their personal lives.
And people can vote to get people selected
into the program.
And then Salesforce filters out
because they get so many submissions.
There's still a council, I think, somewhere behind the scenes
that picks out people either for re-election
because you need to be re-elected every year, I think,
or new people to the MVP program.
And suddenly I get a message saying,
"Well, are you going to connections?"
Well, no, I chose Dreamforce.
Like I went to connections in 2019.
I wanna give other people the chance to,
because for us, Belgium to the US to go to this,
it's not a cheap undertaking.
It's not, if we have one in Brussels,
it compared to one in Chicago.
Well, it's a lot of difference in time and costs.
So I said, "No, no, I'm gonna let someone else go."
And then a week later, I got a message,
"Yeah, I need a meeting."
And I go to the meeting with expecting maybe a question
to submit some sort of talk and still going to say,
"You need to come."
I can't tell you why, but you need to come over.
A compelling offer was made.
I couldn't say no anymore, and I went.
Not still not knowing.
They said, "We're gonna have you put on the keynote.
You're gonna have a four minute interview
about your trailblazing, telling your story,
try to put five years into four minutes."
It's not an easy task.
But I said, "Okay, I'll be on the keynote.
I can't say no to that."
But I got some meetings beforehand
and I should have put the dots together, but I still didn't.
I had a one hour and a half prep for four minutes.
Went to connections and just sitting there,
waiting for my four minutes, which became three minutes
or was five minutes and became four minutes,
just like a half hour before I started.
And just telling my story.
And then suddenly after I was done,
it's like, what fits with a t-shirt
because I was advertising shirt for us as usual.
I said, "What goes with your t-shirts?
Like a hoodie?"
And then suddenly just coming up with a hoodie is like,
"Okay, technically I already knew a minute beforehand
because they put it on the slides.
Like you can see the slides when you're sitting there
for the next and they actually put
good golden hoodie recipient Thomas before.
I actually went over as a sitting there.
And in front of me, usually they put some golden hoodies there
and it's like, we thumbs up, it's like,
yeah, it's like, okay, surprise, surprise, surprise,
surprise.
(laughs)
This is happening.
- I love it, that's incredible.
And how did you feel after you got it?
- Amazing, I never got so much attention in my life.
(laughs)
And a lot of people touching the golden hoodie
while walking in by.
So it was quite a special occasion.
Like I've never expected that to happen.
It's a nice recognition for the amount of work,
for time, spending in helping people.
It's not my goal, it was never the goal
to get this golden hoodie,
but it's an amazing experience just being on stage alone
and then getting that golden hoodie.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
- Well, huge congratulations on getting the golden hoodie.
It's definitely quite an honor.
Let's get into our next segment, "What's Cooking?"
Thomas, you are now the head of commerce at Ford.
Talk about how you got to where you are now
and what your journey has been like in your current role.
- Yeah, so like I said, journey started.
Well, beforehand, let me go back 11 years
while I was still a Java developer for InterShop,
a different e-commerce platform.
I did that for six, seven years
and then made a switch to the demand wear
because I was looking for something new.
After six, seven years of doing the same development,
I thought, I wanna try a different e-commerce platform,
see what's up there.
And ended up with demand wear,
then becoming Salesforce BTC Commerce Cloud.
So we went in five years from five people to 100 about,
going to 120 soon.
So we grew quite rapidly,
which meant that some people needed to take
a lot of people under their guard.
And I was already using my time
that I was not working on tickets to share knowledge
within the company.
I was already helping other people.
I was making sure everyone had all of the tools.
They needed to answer questions from customers, et cetera,
with the remote work.
And then I basically went from looking after a team
of five people and they asked,
well, would you look after everyone in the Commerce Cloud,
which is now even after I took on the role last year,
which when it was still 20 people,
I now have 60 people to watch out for.
So that's becoming a lot.
Luckily, I have help from my colleague,
but still two people to watch 60 people
is still quite the task.
So yeah, so that's why I started the blog.
I started answering people's questions.
I saw that as a way to keep myself involved.
I started teaching for Salesforce as well,
for the Architect course for BTC Commerce Cloud,
which will force me to keep up to date
with what's going on.
So from a technology perspective,
what challenges are you seeing now at Forward
and how are you applying what you've learned
from Salesforce to those challenges?
- From a Commerce perspective is the move to Headless.
So we are now splitting up going
from a monolithic architecture,
going a bit technical here,
but going from basically everything in one platform,
which is Salesforce,
to a more composable architecture,
which means combining multiple products from Salesforce
and also products outside of Salesforce in a correct way,
which is the more products there are,
the more challenging they become.
- So what is next for you and how are you shaping the future?
- Yeah, so we are looking at different products
within Forward, but I am really diving deep
into the Headless, the PWA Kit or the Composable Storefront
that it's been rebranded to this or last week,
was last, no, last week was rebounded.
And that's my main focus for now,
because it offers a lot of technical challenges for me,
and I do love a challenge.
And heading into that composable way of working
is something new for, well, not new.
I've been doing it a little bit for the past 10 years,
but digging into that more deep diving
is what I'm gonna be doing.
And helping people along the way,
I'm writing blogs specifically for this topic,
because it's a challenge for a lot of people
to head into that composable PWA Kit/ Composable Storefront
area, and I'm sharing my learnings within Forward and outside.
- I mean, it's great to hear that you're obviously
contributing back to the community
that you obviously learned quite a bit from.
So I love hearing that.
Let's get into our final segment, The Future Forecast.
What do you envision as the future
of the Salesforce ecosystem?
- Oh, it is gonna grow in the future.
If you're still looking at the amount of different products
that have been added to the ecosystem,
it's giving a lot of people more options
to join the Salesforce ecosystem in different segments,
not just what the products were five years ago,
which means that it will attract more people
and a lot more questions, because like I said,
the ecosystem is becoming more and more complicated,
a lot more products added,
and a lot of requests are to combine all of these products
together, which comes with complexity,
which will require a lot of experienced people
or people willing to take on those challenges head on.
But there's still going to be a growth.
- Yeah, what advice do you have for those aspiring individuals
that wanna join the community?
- Yeah, I said this earlier, get connected.
Don't stay in your bubble.
Put yourself out here.
Ask questions, join a community, ask a question.
There's physical meetings happening again.
So all of those trailblazer communities
on physical locations are happening again or remotely.
There's coffee chats that you can join
where you can ask questions.
There's Salesforce organized coffee chats
or webinars where you can ask questions.
Those are the places to be.
Don't stay within your bubble.
Don't be afraid.
Ask a dumb question.
There are no dumb questions.
So put yourself out there.
And if you don't get an answer, okay,
then nobody knew the answer, so you're not alone.
But looking at the amount of people helping each other,
you should get your answers pretty quickly
or be pointed in the right direction.
So put yourself out there.
There's a lot of different channels to choose from.
You have Discord, you have Slack channels,
you have Chatter groups.
- How many Slack channels are you a part of?
I'm curious.
Do you mean in one organization or the amount of orgs
that I'm part of?
- Not a org that you're a part of, yeah.
- About 12 and probably around 60 or 70 channels
that I'm monitoring for interesting stuff
to happen or probably even more.
And that's just the Slack channels.
- I mean, that is definitely the power of the community.
Before letting you go, let's have fun
with a little quick lightning round.
Ready?
- All right.
- Your favorite Salesforce product.
- PTC Commerce Cloud.
(laughing)
Favorite Salesforce character.
- Ruf.
- And why?
- Well, she's one of the latest additions
about the architect, which is what I profile myself most with.
So once she came out, I was like,
yeah, that's the character that I'm gonna add.
- You can see her right behind me right there.
- Yeah, I know, I couldn't order in Europe.
It's not available.
I'm not sure if it's not available.
All of the roof memorabilia/swag
is not available unfortunately in Europe.
- Well, you should bring another suitcase
with you to Dreamforce, just an empty one.
'Cause I'm sure you're gonna get a lot of swag.
That's a pro tip right there, okay?
- Yeah, I've heard that, especially because last time
there was like the big, picoty, I think.
- Yeah, people had to take home.
- You could see the big, you know,
Astro behind me in the big sassy.
Favorite brand of anything besides Salesforce?
- Favorite brand, hmm, that's a good one.
Actually, probably, ooh, that's actually a good one.
Right now, Apple.
But I switch my favorite brand like coffee brands as well.
So I usually go all in with a specific brand.
Like I make a pic like this is the best for me right now
and then just go all in.
(laughs)
- Secret skill that is not on the resume.
- I can actually cook desserts quite well.
I have taken evening classes for a chocolate,
baking cookies, cakes, et cetera.
So I can create quite a lot of desserts.
- Well, maybe that's two case, you're bringing a dream for us.
You should bring a lot of goods
and bring it to your friends, you know?
That's good. - Yeah.
- Belgian chocolate is always a winner.
- Oh.
- 1,000%.
You just won front row seat tickets to your dream event.
What is it?
- Actually, I am not so much for an event-goer,
but if I got tickets to go to Japan or anything in Japan,
I would go immediately.
I'm not a concert-going person or an event-going kind of,
well, except for the last year,
but if I could go to anything in Japan
to give me an excuse of going there,
I would just sign up immediately.
- Maybe, you know, the trailhead classes you're teaching
needs to be taught to the community in Japan.
- I already gave some hints.
Like when are the physical teaching moments
going to be reinstated, but they didn't bite for now.
We'll see what happens.
Australia maybe. - Oh, it's already closer.
- Yeah, yeah.
Well, Thomas, this has been so much fun,
but before I let you go,
let the listeners know where they can find you,
and is there anything else you'd like to share
or anything to plug?
- Yeah, so you can find me on multiple locations
on the trailhead community.
You can look up my profile,
which contains links to my blog, my LinkedIn, my Twitter.
So you can find me mostly active on Twitter, LinkedIn,
if you're looking at social media.
And yeah, the regular trailhead channels.
And also on the unofficial Slack.
So there's a, like I said before,
there's an unofficial commerce cloud Slack available
where you can just apply for,
where there's a lot of people helping answer questions
and sharing knowledge.
There's people from Salesforce,
people from other companies, customers, partners, et cetera,
which I would really,
if you're in the BDC commerce space,
I would suggest you join.
And of course, shirt force.
So if you want to help a good cause,
please visit shirt force,
buy a commerce related or any other T-shirt
to your liking to wear a dream force.
Now's your chance.
Hopefully if this comes out before dream force.
And to wear to the other conventions.
So to share it, to get a funny shirt
related to Salesforce, to support a good cause.
Thomas, well, thank you so much.
And I'll see you at dream force.
Yeah, see you at dream force.
Thank you.
It was a pleasure.
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