1. About the Salesforce Strategy Designer Certification Exam
The Salesforce Strategy Designer certification is intended for individuals with expertise using design methods to create compelling experience strategies that drive business outcomes using the Salesforce Platform. Candidates’ skills span business, innovation, design & delivery.
- Content: 60 multiple-choice/single-select questions (You have to choose one correct options from three options provided)
- Time allotted to complete the exam: 105 minutes
- Passing Score: 70% (42 Questions out of 60)
- Registration fee: USD 200 plus applicable taxes as required per local law
- Retake fee: USD 100 plus applicable taxes as required per local law
- Prerequisites: none
2. Salesforce Strategy Designer Certification Exam Guide
3. Salesforce Certified Strategy Designer Exam Outline
3.1. Value Design: 32%
- Given a customer scenario, create an effective challenge statement that pairs a business objective with a user problem, to frame the altitude and scope of a design project.
- Based on the challenge statement created, identify the metrics and signals that will define success.
- Given a customer scenario, evaluate how the internal dynamics of the organization might impact your recommendation on the right approach to solving the challenge statement.
- Given a scenario, explain how key external context for innovation might influence or impact the organization’s strategy.
- Defend the rationale for strategic directions, including how they satisfy business and user needs, and future implications.
- Given a customer scenario, advocate for ethics and values on behalf of both users and the organization.
3.2. Artifacts: 23%
- Given a business need, connect user needs to high-level Salesforce capabilities.
- Given a customer scenario, determine the criteria for feasibility, desirability, and viability within a user experience.
- Given a customer scenario, identify the best methods of co-creation to employ with customers and stakeholders.
3.3. Intangible Deliverables: 26%
- Given a scenario, craft a strategy to create alignment.
- Given evolving internal dynamics, identify the key relationships needed to solve the challenge statement.
- Given an audience description, identify the best presentation techniques for communicating a vision.
- Given a scenario, utilize the tools for productive cross-discipline collaboration.
3.4. Leveraging Adjacent Roles/Skills: 19%
- Given an aligned vision, create a roadmap for implementation that is feasible and holds true to the vision in every iteration.
- Given a scenario, determine the technical and business capabilities that underpin delivery of vision to solution.
- Given a scenario of disparate business and technical deliverables within a design/build team, facilitate productive collaboration.
- Given a scenario, determine the knowledge and skill infusions needed in the creation of a vision.
4. Salesforce Strategy Designer Certification Exam Trailmix
5. Important Topics for Salesforce Strategy Designer Certification Exam
One important point to note about Salesforce Strategy Designer exam is that usually Salesforce Certifications have questions where you have to select:
- One correct answer from four options
- Two correct answers from four options
- Three correct answers from five options
In Salesforce Designer Certification exam you have to select one correct answer from three options.
5.1. Value Design: 32% (19 Questions)
- Challenge Framing and Scoping
- Five key elements to scope the process:
- Understand the need
- Articulate the opportunity for design
- Establish the problem-solving approach
- Create a project plan
- Identify measures of success and potential risks
- A How Might We (HMW) statement turns your challenge framing into a question that can be solved.
- Key Moments When Teams Need Most Support
- Kickoff
- Research moments
- Synthesis moments
- Review moments
- Common Methods for Evaluating Success
- Business Success
- Growth targets
- Expansion targets
- Efficiency targets
- Customer satisfaction targets
- Customer Success
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Retention Rate
- Lifetime Value
- Business Success
- Best Practices for Goal Setting – SMARTE framework
- SMARTE stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound, and Ethical
- Research for Strategy Design
- Product Lifecycle
Product Lifecycle
- Main Types of Research for Strategy Design
- Research for Discovery/Understanding
- Research for Inspiration/Idea Generation
- Research for Exploration/Refining an Idea
- Research for Validating Assumptions, Decisions, and Designs
- Ongoing Assessment and Customer Listening
- Choose quantitative methods for questions that sound like, “How many…?”, “How much…?”, “What do most people…?”, or “What is the success rate of…?”
- Choose qualitative methods for questions like, “Why…?”, “What would be ideal…?”, “How does it feel to…?”, or “What’s wrong with….?”
- Seven methods for external primary research
- Interviews
- Observations or shadowing
- Group conversations with stimulus
- Diary/journal studies
- Codesign/participatory design sessions
- Surveys
- Analogous research
- Research goals and research methodologies
| For Discovery/Understanding | For Inspiration/Idea Generation | For Exploration/Refining an Idea |
| – Interviews– Observations or shadowing– Diary/journal studiesSurveys | – Group conversations with stimulus– Diary/journal studies– Codesign/participatory design sessions– Analogous research | – Group conversations with stimulus– Codesign/participatory design sessions |
Research goals and research methodologies
- Best practices for design research ethics
- Be Honest
- Ask Permission to Record
- Stay Lean
- Limit Access to Identifiable Data
- Observe Regulations
- Respect Participants’ Expertise
- Pay Participants Fairly
- Listen Without Leading or Advising
- Take Only What You Need
- Ensure Representation
- Seek Support If You Have Ethical Questions
- Insights form the basis for strategy design unlocking opportunities for innovation and leading to ideas that are meaningful to people, creating real value
- Best practices for planning an insights workshop
- Create an agenda that leaves plenty of room for discussion
- Bring the research insights to life
- Create a set of boards for shared viewing
- Set a time and place
- Best practices for facilitating an insights workshop
- Remember to pause
- Ask open-ended questions
- Listen to your stakeholders
- Allow participants to challenge and build on the ideas you’re presenting
- Know what’s next
- Idea Generation
- Who to Invite to a Brainstorm (3-10 participants )
- People who know your users
- People who are generative
- A mix of optimists and realists
- How Might We or HMW statement is an effective tool for framing challenges that design teams use it at the level of framing the project challenge
- Brainstorming rules
- Encourage Wild Ideas
- Go for Quantity
- Be Visual
- Build on the Ideas of Others
- Stay Focused on the Topic
- One Conversation at a Time
- Dot Voting: A simple Decision-Making and Prioritizing Technique
- Journey Map: design teams also use journey maps to describe a future state experience
- Asynchronous Ideation: Use digital collaboration tools such as Slack, Figjam or Google Slides if meeting in real-time in not possible
- Co-creation – design or product team invites people outside the core team into the ideation process
- Common Mistakes in Group Ideation
- Deferrals to Leadership
- Grouping by Perspective
- GroupThink
- Dominant Personality Bias
- Distractions
- Strategic Vision Creation
- Analyze each solution concept based on:
- Desirability: Think of this as what’s valuable to the user
- Viability: Think of this as what’s valuable to the business
- Feasibility: This of this as what’s technically possible
- Consequence Scanning: A process teams use to interrogate solution concepts to consider their potential effects by asking three key questions
- What are the intended and unintended consequences of this product or service feature?
- Within these intended and unintended consequences, which are positive?
- Within these intended and unintended consequences, which are negative?
- Strategic Vision: An aspirational view of a future state and a point of view on what teams should build to solve the project’s design challenge
- Design Strategy Prototyping
- Examples of low-fidelity prototype formats
- Sketches
- Paper interfaces
- Building block prototypes
- Borrowing and recombining
- Live action + Survey
- Role-playing
- Examples of low-fidelity prototype formats
- Wireframes
- Mockups
- Splash pages
- Foam or 3D-printed models
- Interactive prototypes
- Best practices for packaging prototype findings
- Create a one-page executive summary
- Give analytical and emotional highlights
- Make the document tell the story
- Keep it lean
- Go-to-Market Planning
- Four common types of product roadmaps
- Portfolio roadmap: Shows the planned releases of multiple products in a single view
- Strategy roadmap: Displays the team initiatives needed to achieve the product goals
- Releases roadmap: Shows the activities (what needs to be done, when, and who is responsible) that must happen before you can bring the release to market
- Features roadmap: Shows the timeline for delivering new features
- Best Practices for Creating Alignment with Key Stakeholders
- Know your audience
- Start early
- Orient around outcomes
- Get them involved
- Create clarity
- Anticipate objections
- Common trade-off decisions during the deployment phase
- Effort vs. value
- Time vs. cost
- Compromise vs. sacrifice
- Clarity vs. consistency
- Aesthetics vs. usability
- Alignment as a Strategic Craft
- Benefits of Alignment
- Focus the project team’s efforts on what matters most.
- Drive outcomes more directly.
- Improve communication and teamwork.
- Improve efficiency, since people can act more independently in service of the common goals.
- Reduce the possibility of friction and stray from intent, especially at handoffs.
- Enable everyone to contribute their expertise in a way that supports the vision.
- Increase team satisfaction because members believe in what they’re doing and can see that others value it.
- Increase accountability, because when everyone shares goals, we can hold each other accountable.
- What’s at Risk Without Alignment
- Wasting time and energy on the wrong ideas and tasks.
- Inconclusive outcomes because success isn’t well defined, you can never achieve clear success.
- Discord between stakeholders, which sometimes becomes discord between teams.
- The need to do re-work, including the need for additional investments in time and resources at a minimum.
- Resistance and lack of trust in the project team and in design overall.
- A lack of understanding of the importance and value of the work and the solution vision.
- Project failure or premature ending due to a lack of support or resources.
- Low morale among employees who can’t point to successful contributions to the organization or feel misaligned with company values.
- Decision Making and Prioritization Methods
- Dot Voting
- Decision Checklist
- Criteria Scorecard
- Prioritization Matrices
- Trade-Off Scales
- Conflict Resolution Methods
- Get Curious
- Get to the Heart of the Objection
- Go Back to the Last Aligned Moment
- Name the Challenges
- Acknowledge the Value of Perspectives
- Explore Solutions Genuinely
- Invite Collaborative Problem-Solving
- Bring in Fresh Inspiration
- Pause, Then Revisit
- Digital Transformation
- Organizational Alignment (V2MOM)
- The Four Industrial Revolutions
- Jobs to Be Done Framework for Designers
- The Jobs to Be Done framework says that people buy or hire products and services to get a specific job done. Seeing users through this lens provides a framework for discovering and defining jobs and needs, and it ties those jobs and needs to measurable outcomes defined in terms of success for the user.
- Jobs to Be Done Principles
- Customer-centric
- Solution Agnostic
- Stable Over Time
- Measurable Outcomes
- Journey Mapping
- Journey maps are documents that visually illustrate the experiences customers have with a business or an organization.
- Benefits of Journey Mapping
- Better team alignment
- Strategic thinking
- Deeper understanding of customer pain points
- Increased empathy
- A strong case for innovation
- A guide to measuring impact
- Sustainable Design
- Best Practices for Sustainable Design
- Behavior Change Design to Address Climate Change
- Relationship Design for UX Strategy
- Ethics by Design
- Consequence Scanning is a framework that purposefully inserts friction into the product development process, with the goal of mitigating negative or unintended consequences and identifying opportunities for impact. It offers a framework to think through a product’s positive impact, and any negative impacts that might be prevented.
- Consequence Scanning helps mitigate
- Imbalance in the Benefits of Technology
- Unforeseen Issues
- Erosion of Trust
- Impact on the Environment
- Changes in Norms and Behaviors
- Displacement and Societal Shifts
- Inclusive Design
- Values-Driven Design
- Design as a Social Practice
- Accountability in Design
- Relationship Design at Scale
5.2. Artifacts: 23% (14 Questions)
- Lightning Experience Performance Optimization
- Flow Basics
- Path & Workspaces
- A path gives reps a visual representation of the stages required for working through a sales process. The paths you create for your sales teams can include:Key fields that reps complete before moving to the next stage in the sales process
- Best practices
- Words of encouragement to keep your reps pumped
- Links to relevant Chatter posts
- Policy reminders
- Even potential gotchas
- The workspaces help reps get super efficient when they qualify leads and work on opportunities.
- Channel Management and Partner Portal Strategy
- In-App Guidance in Lightning Experience
- Customer Engagement Solutions for Salesforce B2C Commerce
- Cross-Cloud Customer Identity and Data Management for Salesforce B2C Commerce
- Omni-Channel Routing and Digital Engagement
- Application Integration Patterns for Salesforce Lightning Platform
- Democratized Innovation through Citizen Integration
- Connectors for Data Integration
- API-Led Integration for Business Reinvention
- Five Key Attributes of API-Led Connectivity
- Connectivity-in-context
- Repeatable
- Purpose-built
- Scalable
- Reciprocal
- Field Service Basics
- Field Service is used for Coordinating field operations—including scheduling service appointments, dispatching mobile workers and equipment, and tracking vehicle locations, product stock, and appointment status
- Field Service Users
| Role | Description |
| Administrator | Sets up field service features according to their unique business needs. Set up includes installing the Field Service managed package and Field Service mobile app. |
| Agent | Takes customer service calls and requests field service appointments via work orders, which list the skills and parts that are needed. |
| Dispatcher | Assigns and manages the service appointments. The dispatcher console included in the managed package helps dispatchers schedule, optimize, and dispatch service appointments from one screen. |
| Mobile Worker or Technician | Manages their service appointments. Their tasks include closing work orders, tracking the parts they used, and providing service reports. |
Field Service Users
- Experience Cloud Basics
- Experience Cloud can be used to
- Create multiple experiences for specific needs.
- Extend business processes to partners and customers.
- Integrate data (such as orders or financial information) from third-party providers.
- Use themes and templates to create beautiful branded experiences.
- Use Salesforce CMS to create content and deliver to any channel.
- Experience Cloud common use cases:
- Customer Service and Account Portals
- Partner Relationship Management and Channel Sales
- How to Design a Collaborative Experience
- UX Mapping Methods Compared: A Cheat Sheet
- Four Types of UX Mapping Methods:
- Empathy mapping: Empathy maps help team members understand the user’s mindset.
- Customer journey mapping: Customer journey maps focus on a specific customer’s interaction with a product or service
- Experience mapping: Experience maps generalize the concept of customer-journey maps across user types and products.
- Service blueprinting: Service blueprints are counterparts to customer journey maps, focused on the employees.
- Three-Step Decision Framework: Before beginning any mapping effort 3 decisions must be made:
- Current (as-is) vs. future (to-be)
- Current mappings are based on an actual “today” state of what you are mapping.
- Future mappings are based on an “ideal” state for a user type, experience, or a to-be service structure.
- Hypothesis vs. research
- Hypothesis mappings are based on an accumulation of existing understanding within a team or organization.
- Research mapping is based on data gathered specifically for building the map.
- Low-fidelity vs. high-fidelity
- Low-fidelity maps are unpolished and often created with sticky notes in a flexible, unrefined manner.
- High-fidelity maps are polished, created digitally, and look final.
- Current (as-is) vs. future (to-be)
5.3. Intangible Deliverables: 26% (15 Questions)
- Relationship Building
- Sympathy. A sympathetic response can include emotion, but it’s focused on keeping distance, makes a judgement about the person or how they should react, and doesn’t take the other person’s perspective into account.
- Empathy. An empathetic response recognizes the other person’s perspective and emotions, communicates these back to them, and withholds judgement.
- Guidelines for developing positive, healthy relationships at work:
- Accept and celebrate a diverse workplace.
- Develop active listening skills.
- Expand other communication skills.
- Take time to support those you lead.
- Manage technology and anticipate its impact.
- Share your wisdom and invite the wisdom of others.
- Develop honesty and trust.
- Virtual Presentations
- Strategies for Presenting to Executive Audiences
- An executive summary is a brief summary of your project plan. It includes the most important and relevant details of your project plan.
- General Considerations When Creating Your Presentation:
- Focus on the Flow
- Have a Single End Goal
- Include Relevant Statistics
- Present Data So It Gets Attention
- Focus on Slide Design
- General Considerations When Presenting to Executives
- Practice, Practice, Practice
- Get Your Timing Right
- Project Confidence
- Expect the Unexpected
- The Ladder Canvas has three sections:
- Face the ladder
- Assess each level
- Repair the steps
- Create Strategic Company Alignment With a V2MOM
- V2MOM: The V2MOM has been used to guide every decision at Salesforce
- Vision — what do you want to achieve?
- Values — what’s important to you?
- Methods — how do you get it?
- Obstacles — what is preventing you from being successful?
- Measures — how do you know you have it?
5.4. Leveraging Adjacent Roles/Skills: 19% (12 Questions)
- How to Build a Roadmap
- Types Of Roadmaps
- Product Roadmap:
- An internal product roadmap communicates the effort and activities required to get your product ready for the market. This internal artifact is especially useful to coordinate across your engineering, marketing, sales, and support teams.
- A public product roadmap communicates the timeline when you will deliver the features to your customers. Architects and other stakeholders will use this information to plan their implementations and buying decisions.
- Program Roadmap: A program roadmap communicates the planned releases for all the products in the program. A program roadmap is a high level, strategic artifact to communicate where investments are being made and how you are directing your team’s efforts to achieve a goal that is aligned to the overall corporate objectives.
- Product Roadmap:
- Align on Your Impact Goals
- Accessibility Basics
- AI Ethics Maturity Model
- User Training and Enablement
- Responsible Creation of Artificial Intelligence
- Business Process Mapping
- Business process mapping creates visual representations of business processes. A business process map includes the steps in the process, who does what, additional context, and how success is measured.
- Process Mapping for Business Analysts
- Behavioral Economics
- Behavioral economics is a discipline examining how emotional, social and other factors affect human decision-making, which is not always rational. As users do not always have stable preferences or act in their best interests, designers can guide their decisions via strategic choice architecture.
