Have you found the Salesforce Lightning Roadmap?

Did you know that Salesforce has published a roadmap for their new user interface, Lightning Experience?

Did you know it was publically available?

Do you use it to plan your Lightning Migration?

Well you absolutely should. The Salesforce Lightning Roadmap is a valuable tool for Admins who are planning, in the middle, or already transitioned to Lightning Experience.

Not Sure how to get started with Salesforce Lightning? Check out the Trailhead! https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/projects/migrate-a-classic-app-to-lightning-experience-with-declarative-tools

Most importantly, you can find the Salesforce Lightning Roadmap at this URL: https://www.salesforce.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/e-books/salesforce-lightning-roadmap.pdf

This will likely continually get updated. You can always find it by googling “Salesforce Lightning Roadmap.”

What does it look like?

Sample of Salesforce Lightning Roadmap

The report is broken down by category. Under each category is a list of features. To the right of the feature, you’ll see a column for the various releases including the ever ambiguous “Future.”

Salesforce Lightning Roadmap Legend

For each column, you’ll find a green circle with a checkbox, a blue circle, a red circle, or the ever dreaded gray circle. This let’s you see at a glance when the feature is planned for general release (green circle with checkbox), Pilot and Beta. It’ll also gives you a great visual cue for what features are not currently planned for development.

How you use the Salesforce Lightning Roadmap depends greatly upon where you are with your Lightning transition.

• I’m Planning to Transition to Salesforce Lightning

When you’re in the planning stage, it’s very important to be able to identify which features you’re currently using that may not be available in Lightning Experience.  Sometimes, the feature may be a critical for your business and will stop you from fully transitioning your users. Using the roadmap, you’ll be able to see which release the feature is scheduled to be available. This will help you plan your timeframe for when you can transition users based on the needed features. You should also use this to help communicate with management on what is holding people back and when they should be able to transition over

• I’m in the process of transitioning to Salesforce Lightning Experience

While you’re in the middle of transitioning your users, you may find groups of users that need certain features that aren’t available. Perhaps those features are not critical to the business and preventing them from going over. You’ll still want to identify when these features are planned. This will control when you’ll need to revisit training users for these features as they become available. It will also help dictate when you’ll be able to disable groups of users from being able to go back to Classic.

• I’m Already Using Salesforce Lightning Experience

What the big question is how often are your users switching back to Classic and why. When users are switching back to Classic because Lightning is missing a feature, then it’s very important to know when those features will be available. Eventually, you’ll want to prevent users from switching back to Classic, but you don’t want to prevent people from doing their job.

When users are switching back to classic because it’s “too difficult” or “takes too much time” or “I don’t have time to learn” how to do something in lightning, you have a different issue. These are situations where you may need to do some more training or make improvements with Actions, Lightning Components, or updating your Lightning Pages to provide a better experience.

Personally, I love that Salesforce has published a Lightning Roadmap. Normally, Salesforce Roadmaps are only exposed during Dreamforce or other event presentations. It’s rare to have something readily available for everyone to access whenever they want to.

Are you already using the Salesforce Lightning Roadmap? Did I miss a purpose or use case? Let me know in the comments!