It’s finally happened. After all the marketing talk for the past year, Lightning has finally arrived at your app’s doorstep. What are you going to do about it?

CEO Brian Walsh participated in a panel focused on this very topic during DF16, outlining the steps required to start over and reimagine your app with Lightning. The session offered well-rounded perspectives from:

Below are highlights summarized from that knowledge-packed session.

Lost in all the Lightning terminology? Here’s a Quick Guide to defining the differences in Lightning.

The Top 7 Things You Need to Know to Get Started

1. Change is coming fast so don’t get caught behind the curve. What does this mean? Customers are starting to demand Lightning. If you are already on the AppExchange, don’t let your competition get ahead of you, take the plunge now. If you are new, start with Lightning first. Two deadlines loom before you:

  • All existing apps should be Lightning Ready by February 2017.
  • Starting March 1, 2017, all new applications on AppExchange will required to be Lightning Ready.

2. The stages of Lightning. When we talk about Lightning, there are different stages as you get into the Lightning experience.

  • Lightning-Ready: your current app as it is today, works in Lightning. It may not look like Lightning, but it will be functional. Your customers can get their job done. Bottom-line, 100% of your end-user use cases must work as expected in Lightning Experience. Here is a link to Lightning Ready requirements.
  • Lightning-Ready Plus: you’ve done a little styling, new fonts, making it blend a little better with Lightning Design System but it’s still just using your current application.
  • Lightning Components: you go all in with components, realizing the components bring a new kind of experience for users, and offer you new ways to interact with them and help them get their job done.

3. Educate your team on Lightning. As you build your team that’s going to take on Lightning, check out these three Trailhead trails:

 

4. Where do you start? Start small with a initial goal of a POC that can be tested and refined.

  • Gather a small team to create bite-sized pieces of functionality and get your feet wet.
  • Paul Berry wrote a fantastic blog piece on How to Start a Fire on Purpose. His team had to break all the rules to try something brand new, so put in a team that was authorized and incentivized to go do that.
  • Pull together a cross-sectional team with a product manager, UX lead, a developer, even a key customer – someone that you can work closely with, to iterate quickly. At CodeScience, we achieve this through Design Sprints, via a process famously put into play by Google Ventures.

 

5. Study the Salesforce administrator. This is an often overlooked persona.

  • The Salesforce administrators are the ones that are going to install and build new applications. They’re the ones who are going to piece together all of your components together on the page.
  • If you really take care of that administrator, they’re going to want to install your app. If it’s 45 minutes to try to install it just to test it out, they’re probably going to try somebody else. But if they can do it in in two minutes and get to that first delight, that’s a game changer.

6. Identify the tasks your customers are accomplishing. Think about the workflow.

  • Start with the problem itself and think about the task that someone’s doing.
  • Rather than thinking about here’s everything that’s going on in your application, are there similar tasks that people are doing from a page that we’re on. Don’t worry about the technology side at this stage. It’s truly about the end user and the tasks they’re trying to accomplish.
  • Salesforce is moving away from a model of it’s just a data entry platform that people can report on, to a platform that enables front-line people to be extremely effective.

7. Lightning is still new tech. 

  • From Vincent Cabral of Nintex Drawloop, “We had developers that could do Visualforce pages, they could do Apex, and you still have those elements there. But you have this whole new JavaScript, all these components and it’s just a different way of designing so just be aware of that. Lightning is always evolving and getting better. This is going to take resources, it’s going to take time.”
  • Embrace that your existing team will need to expand their skill sets.

8. BONUS TIP. Need help? Call CodeScience – this is what we do. We don’t have to rewrite your whole app. We can get you started.

 

Accelerate your Lightning initiative

We’re here to help you succeed. At CodeScience we have deep expertise in building managed package solutions and Lightning components.  Whether it’s updating an existing product or starting from scratch, we can get you there in warp speed. Let’s talk!

 

About the Author: Stefanie Gesiorski
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