Live Q&A with Product Leaders | True to the Core, Dreamforce 2026

Yeah, why don't you hit it? Well, first of all, I want to say thank you to Joy for being here with us again. Welcome Joy once again. Thank you. I had the iPad for a moment to answer the questions and I was told to dutifully hand it over. Yeah. I mean, I think what we love about True to the Core is the feedback. It turns into real programs. For example, like coming out of True to the Core, we rebuilt the well-architected program. We had an amazing admin keynote, architect keynote yesterday. We rebuilt the well-architected program. We did that in partnership with many of the architects here in the room that came directly from True to the Core. So, there's a lot of feedback that we get that we take, we bring it into programs. And twice a year, we're also doing a community sentiment survey. So, we get a lot of feedback here one-on-one. You all line up in the mics. We love that feedback, but we also have thousands of you that give us feedback twice a year and you've told us about pricing there. We'll probably hear more about that today. You told us about some of the frustrations with the product name changings and how fast everything is moving and we look through all of those comments. A lot of that is turning into programs that we're running. And I wanted to share one stat that came from our community sentiment survey that we did just recently in August. And it was around the skills and the skills that many of you said you needed in order to be successful in your career. And 60% of you said that the most important skill is around your AI skills. And so I wanted to share real quick before we get into the questions some of the programs that we've put into place. So a lot of you are on Trailhead. We've had over 151 million badges that have been completed on Trailhead, which is that's a lot of learning. So, congratulations to all of our learners in the room. You know, at this point, we have 1.5 million active certifications in the ecosystem. So, that is turning into real certifications and 270,000 Ranger statuses. So, an incredible amount of learning happening in this room and across the ecosystem. By the end of the year, we will have done 700,000 instructor-led learning. So, training that many of you are showing up, you're learning, you're getting hands-on, and it's always incredible to see what's happening across our online groups. So, we have 8,000 community groups where many of our community members are answering questions, helping you get up to speed on all of this incredible innovation and change that you're seeing. But I wanted to make sure that you were also aware that we have virtual workshops. By the end of the year, we'll have a hundred of those happening around twice a week. You can go, you can get hands-on and by the end of this year we will have trained up 1.3 million trailblazers. So if you don't know what I'm talking about you can go to developer.salesforce.com. You can find out about these virtual workshops. Hopefully you went over to the trailblazer forest this week. It was packed. The lines were long. So, there's just an incredible amount of opportunities for you to get hands-on with the technology. But a lot of that learning also happens in the community. And so, we have, you know, three and a half thousand community group meetings that are happening every year. And we're taking all of that enablement that we do virtually and we're giving it to our community group leaders so you can bring it to your user groups. So really excited to get that in the hands of all of you this year. 50 community conferences that are happening around 20 countries. We have Salesforce leaders that are showing up. We had over 120 that came this year, including my friend here, Jay Hurst, who joined us at Midwest Dreaming this year. So you can expect to see more of our product leaders and our executives showing up at this community. So, with that, I'll turn things over to Jay, I believe, to talk about the idea exchange.

Yeah, and thank you guys for joining us again. You know, this is always one of the most enjoyable parts of Dreamforce to really hear the unadulterated feedback from everybody. So, we continue to appreciate that. But we have been continuing to deliver what we can. Over 445 ideas were delivered in the last 18 months. Ideas that you guys have pushed us to and driven us to deliver for you. So, wonderful changes like launching the screen flows from related lists and list views. That was a huge one. I know a lot of you have been asking for that for a number of years. One that I'm really happy for, Daniel Ballinger working on the Apex heap limits, really increasing that, really easing some of that simple developer pain that you guys are seeing. So, and plus the over 1,000 ideas that our PMs have been commenting and engaging with you on to get workarounds, feedback, and continue to drive it. So, thank you for your support and your feedback.

And I believe I'm turning over. Yeah, you're turning over to me. I also want to remind everybody that you don't have to wait for just two times a year to give us your feedback. There are multiple ways to give us feedback throughout the year. You can visit idea exchange. You can attend the next True to the Core deep dive. We run webinars all year long and you can also participate in our Salesforce research program. The QR code is up now. We would definitely love for you to do that. The closer we can get to you throughout the year and get your feedback, the better. All right, with that. All right. So I was kind of expecting mics here, Emily, but I will do this. It's fine. Don't worry. I'm all good. I'm all good. I'll keep an eye on this one. And so, you know, they walk funny out of here. Don't worry about it. So, please line up. We would love some volunteers. Anyone want to volunteer? Ready, set, go. Ask a question. All right. So, if you get in line, we will do our best to get through as many of you as possible. And since this line organized earlier, you guys get to go first.

Yeah. My name is Siokumar. I am from PTC ServiceMax. I'm here to say a thanks and also ask a question. The thanks is a couple of years back in the same True to the Core I raised an issue about a platform event and I worked with the product team and then it got resolved but as an extension of it, as an extension of it there was a question about how the individual customers or the ISV can look at what's going on in the platform events rather than reaching out to Salesforce support team. So what happened was the scale center team we started working with the scale center team and in the last couple of years we there were lot of development that was made I want to say thanks to the team because they have developed the platform events related changes into scale center it's really amazing I don't need to go to the support team I don't need to ask about which particular event is creating a problem now I have the ability to look into the platform events and get the details so I wanted to say thanks to the entire skills product team. The ask is it's right now available only for the individual customers as an ISV. Can you extend that ability for the OEM ISV also?

First of all, thank you for the shout out. It means a lot to us and Chris is right here. So, it's a partnership between Scale Center and platform events team. If we can get more requirements from you because there is one thing about getting your package itself observability around that and then we've also heard you getting insights into your customers who've installed your package and observability around that. So which one out of the two would you say is top priority?

I would say the one about the managed package that would be the highest priority.

Okay, we can connect offline to define those requirements. Thank you. Great. Thank you for the question.

My name is Katie Vanoeva. I am a first-time caller, longtime listener, and my question is for Meredith. You had a slide with all these countries flags and then you just you know very much owned how awesome the trailblazers are around the world and how many certifications we hold. However, but I have it written on my hand because I'm a professional. The Trailhead localized titles Excel sheet, there's a badge for how to get Trailhead in your language. Of the 1,922 badges in English, only 583 of them, which equals about 30% are in at least Spanish. I didn't account for any of the other languages. I'm from the Latino community, so I want to represent. But how do we support the individuals that are carrying your product forward in other countries and helping them get all those certifications that you put on there? I did come from the Latino meetup earlier and there was a common thread and discussion that it is hard to learn Salesforce in native languages with technology going so fast. How is Trailhead planning to keep up with this? Yeah, if we are only at 30% right now.

Yeah. Well, I love that you did your homework. Thank you. I can go back to my team with that stat. So, I appreciate that. We did launch the MCP server for Trailhead. And so, we've been working really closely with our localization teams because we can do a lot with technology to localize the content, but we need to make it sure it really works for those local markets. So, I think we can certainly increase that coverage. And please come find me at TDX because I want that 30% to be a lot higher. I think you're right, we have the technology to do that and I think we can absolutely increase that number beyond 30. So, thank you for the feedback and thank you for the certifications in Spanish this year. Props to you. Thanks, Katie.

Hi, Michelle. Hi, Joy. Hi, gang. What you got? Oh, what do I got? Well, I got three things, but I'll be quick. Number one, I want to say thank you. You have expanded the community space at Dreamforce this year. It is clear that you are listening in some ways at least. And I realize there's other things that it's going to take longer to see the results from the request that we make. So, my request is actually doubling down on one I made here a year, year and a half ago. And I had asked to put on the V2MOM that every Salesforce employee needed to attend even virtually a community user group meeting or community conference. And this year, as Meredith mentioned, Jay, Meredith, several others actually attended Midwest Dreaming. And the feedback we got from that was huge. And the feedback we got from the PMs who attended was also huge that it was beneficial to them as well. So I am asking for your commitment to send more of your product teams to these community user groups to the community conferences and give us another opportunity to interact with you for those who cannot make it to these events.

Yes.

I think we do have an answer to that. I think we do something about it. Yes, we have some stuff aging, right? Anyone, is it 20 years that we have ideas out there? Anyone? Yes. Yes. 10 years. 20 years. 20 years. What's the number out there that you guys are all owning? Anyone? Long time, right? They're not willing to raise their hand and say their idea is 20 years old. I've been on the platform for 23 years. So there are ideas out there that are 20 years old. Yeah. And I definitely know that we have ones that are there for at least 10 years. Yeah. And we are going to do something about it. Why don't we take a look? Rebecca, I think we can do something about this. Let's have Claude help us. We're gonna have Claude close all of them right now. Come on. Let's look at all of the ones that are 10 years. All right, we have a couple here. Looks like we have delivered a lot, but it also looks like we have a lot that are still open. Open is winning. Yeah. And it looks like that a bunch that are 10 years plus have had 43% of you upvote them in the last year, which means you still want them. Okay, so let's take a look. Let's see if we can organize these. Yeah, organize them by PM. Love that. That one. Let's do this. All right. And now I think we can group them and send them off to the product teams. I think we can go through all of these. Okay. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to look at this backlog. We're going to go through the 10 plus year ones that we have and we're going to process all of them and we're going to either close them out and tell you exactly why we're closing them out or we're going to put them on the roadmap in the next year. That's bold. Come on. That was like an applause. Thank you. That's amazing. Oh jeez. And because you know we're going back in time, we're not going to stop there. We're going to keep going. And this will just be the beginning. We're going to burn them all down. But by TDX, we'll have the 10 plus year ones. Okay. Everyone hear that? TDX. Yep. Is that six? Is that six here at TDX or online at TDX? Yeah. All right. Thank you for the question, please.

Hi. So I'm Tom Basset, senior solutions architect from London, and I have a rhyme for you again. I've done a couple of these in the past, so let's see how this one goes. Dynamic forms, actions, related lists, one family, one plan. Experience Cloud slammed the door before the trio began. This should be on core. No upsell, no additional license required. But since 2024, the promise hasn't quite transpired. Road Map Exchange says a fix is coming for LWR only though, so if your site runs on Aura, tough luck. No show. Headless 360 swears the UI is here to stay, but half your Dynamics family is still stuck in delay. So my ask here is plain and true. Roll it out everywhere. It's long overdue.

So experience cloud. Kush? We've got some shy PMs today. Kush, you can't get away by not being up here. We see we can see you.

Can you hear me? Yeah, there you go. Thanks again for your feedback. Again, we hear you. We understand the importance of dynamic forms. It's fundamentally been a prioritization issue and we'll take this back again to the drawing board and get back to you.

Oh, dear again. Not going to put you in the hot seat today, Joy. I do want to second what I heard. I definitely think there's been a lot of great improvement and I recognize all the hard work Salesforce is doing with the community. So, thank you for that. My question quite simply boils down to it would be great if before Salesforce launches or changes an existing product if we can test it in a sandbox. I'll give a very short spiel, but we would have had an outage with Agentforce for five days in the migration from Agentforce employee license to the flex credit model just because sandboxes couldn't have the flex credit SKU and I learned way more than I care about with your deal team, your something tab team and a whole bunch of other teams at Salesforce pointing the finger at each other. So, if before y'all make a major change like that, which requires a signing event, if y'all could make sure we could actually test it, that would be awesome.

But I don't think it was about the pace of change. It was that we broke them for pricing but the general let's go fast and not break things.

Thank you for the question. Yeah, the security changes with MFA, PRMFA, step up auth, that was it's been a challenging year, I'll say, for us. There's a lot of threat actors in the world who are increasingly targeting our customers. So, we had to move very fast in order to force these changes in. And it wasn't smooth. I'll admit that. Going forward as we continue to get more of these security controls in place, we are looking at a couple of different ways that we can implement this for you. So, you'll start to see these changes pop up into the release notes. We're going to carve out a new section specifically for security control changes where you'll be able to opt in pre-release. You'll be able to identify exactly when the rollout will hit your instance which was another challenge I know that we had is the scattershot way we were rolling it out. So we are improving this. The first wave was really about getting it out as fast as possible, getting our customers as secure as possible, and now we can get into the repeatable pattern to roll them out to you. So, thank you all for your patience with this, your partnership and the feedback on the community. To myself, to James and the identity team, we appreciate it and we are going to do better on this for you guys.

Hey. Hi. My name's Alain. I've been here a few times. I want to start off with some kudos because it will take a turn after that and I know Andrew is coming up after me, too. I like that you are listening to us and like doing all those ideas you posted on the screen like a bunch of stuff that's been delivered. You're listening to us. You're like putting stuff in core and not only paying attention to AI all the time. So like I appreciate that, but I do take issue. I guess I'm going to tell a small story like not I'll avoid the story and just say like one of the things you put on the screen earlier very specifically affected my team. So, there's someone on my team, well, multiple stakeholders who just want to do something really simple. Just like have a chart and a dashboard that has the colors they want, like red, yellow, green. That sounds great. It also sounds relatively easy to put together. And right on the screen a few minutes ago, you said, someone asked for or people asked for more report and dashboard color customization and then it goes on with whatever and, you know, got cut off and you were like, we released all this awesome stuff, brand color palette and reporting. So, I want to ask the team genuinely, do you think that's a good solution to the problem you were trying to solve? Obviously, I think it's not at all useful and not at all what the people wanted, but you've marked it off as done now. And so, now I'm worried that you're never actually going to solve the problem that people wanted. And for the record, for the people listening, like all you can do is go into Salesforce settings and be like green, that's the color of my brand. And then Salesforce says, okay, you're going to have like five different greens and that's what your report can look like. But I just want to do something like red, yellow, green or make up my own colors or whatever. And the reason I bring this up is because it's so obviously what people want and the solution that you put in place that you advertise as having solved it is so obviously not what people wanted. So like how do you reconcile that and will you ever actually solve the problems you solve a lot of problems in the way people want. I don't want to take that away, but there are times when like you just do it wrong. And I want to know how like we deal with that and how you even put that together and said like that's a good solution.

Thanks for the feedback actually. So I just want to call out I'm the PM singer for the reports and dashboards and yes I definitely take your feedback but just the brand palettes which we have started that's the first phase of it and we are still working on getting to the exact problem you are looking at. So wait for some more time but we are definitely working on it.

Okay simple enough. Thank you.

Here. So, it's great that we have True to the Core and there's a lot of good questions that are asked, but there's also sometimes there's action taken on them. A lot of times there's commitments that are made and there's no follow-up or action taken on them. So, one the ask is that we can have some type of a blog post or some website, some place that Salesforce will one list out all the questions that were asked from each True to the Core and then the follow-up or action that came out of them to deliver them. So almost like an accountability ledger for True to the Core that would I think help a lot to help True to the Core. But we also have some issues that we need to go over specifically known issues. At the last True to the Core, there was a question that was asked about known issues. And if anyone remembers when the search was removed from the help site, that also broke the search from the known issues site because known issue search wasn't really needed. So it just broke and it only searched the title of the known issue, not the contents of it. That's kind of a problem. There also is a problem where currently of all of these known issues that are in solution in progress, solution scheduled or solution deploying, there are approximately 9,510. Thank you Claude for pulling that out because I had to scrape the website that have not been touched in 2026 but are currently getting the solution deployed or solution is deploying or solution is scheduled. I have a feeling that all solutions that are deploying will probably have happened within maybe six months of it and we're already in September. So there's like a thousand or 10,000 almost that are abandoned that are stale. It's a problem when builders are trying to figure out what's wrong and it's like well is it this bug? Do I need to talk to support? So it's quite a challenge and that's still open. I think MK maybe was on stage and agreed to look into it but we're still sitting at 10,000 currently. So just an example of one, but I think we need a ledger to really have accountability. Yeah. Well, I think on the ideas, I don't think we need new blogs and everything like most of these are ideas and so if the idea exists, we should have some way of tagging that it came up at the True to the Core and when so that you could see here's the ones that we've talked about. That would be my suggestion. We can do a blog as well, but I think if you have too many different places to look hard, I'm open to anywhere. The other one also, Trailhead phone support was offered at TDX. If you call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE, I think it was offered that you could get Trailhead phone support if you had help with badges or super badges. I believe it was one of the questions that was an answer is that you could get phone support and I don't know that that exists yet. So, just another thing that was mentioned. Yeah. And then on the known issues, does someone want to take that? Got a shy group today. This is really interesting. Right. Some people some caffeine here. No. Great. That would be great if you don't mind. Thank you.

So, for the known issues experience, we definitely hear you on the stale known issues. I will say the progress that we've made so far is that the sync functionality now does work moving forward. So we had in the past is product teams use a variety of coding systems when it comes to releases and if they're not on the core release schedule, they don't automatically sync. We have to do that manually and retroactively. The place where we're at now is that we have to go back in time and actually get the information from the individual engineering teams to know what to do with the status of that bulk of known issues he's talking about. So we need partnership. We lead the known issue side of the house, but from the engineering team, we have to know the source of truth before we can update them. So it's really the need of the engineer teams to go in and actually...

Oh, it is live. It is live. Yeah, I do. I have one, I have a question online question before we go to the next microphone. Patrick, are you ready?

Well, I'm told you need to be ready.

Are you stoked?

Yes.

Salesforce has changed the names of so many products and capabilities that it is becoming difficult for customers to understand what they actually own and which documentation applies to them. What customer problem is being solved by the frequency of these renames and how are you measuring whether the benefit outweighs the confusion? Please and thank you. Personally, my certifications being renamed with the clouds and all of this makes my dozen... people complimented I said Sales Cloud, that is a great name, I love it.

I love that answer.

All right. We have a question in front of us and I'm sorry I need to interrupt you before you start. Your dog is the cutest little doughnut right now and I'm loving it. Thank you. Too bad he knows it.

My name is Andrew Johnson. I'm from BIT. And there's been a lot of talk this week about trapped value and Salesforce has uncaged a lot of trapped value over the years for blind people like me. The platform is so accessible that at one job no one knew I was blind in our cameras off organization for three months because I didn't need training. A nitty-gritty about Salesforce. And I love headless 360. I love having optionality, but I've also noticed that over the last year, one of the main reasons I'm logging into Salesforce less is because new rollouts or updates cause regressions that make it harder for me or sometimes impossible for me to do the work that I need to do. This is things like JD3, Flow Builder, Experience Builder. Now I'm pretty AI pilled. I love throwing tokens at problems to make my life easier. My friends say I love it too much. But I disagree. But that incurs an additional cost, specific knowledge and just this whole agentic loop of prompt, test and then sometimes like if it's visual like take a screenshot and send it to somebody else for something that sighted people can do with a couple of clicks. And I think about the guy who maybe isn't in a company like me or doesn't get to stand up here and is trying to compete in a sighted world. And I have to ask, is Salesforce still committed to making the UI a place where people like me can do real work?

I would say yes. Hi and thank you so much for the question. My name is Bonnie Paresi and I lead the product accessibility team and we love partnering with BIT. So, thank you so much. I can attest that we are deeply committed. This is actually the mission of my team to ensure that everybody can use and get value from our products as we ship them. And so I encourage you, we have a dedicated accessibility support team who would love to know about issues or regressions in the product as you're using them. Please, please file them. We will work closely with that team to understand them and get them unblocked. But this is our remit is to make sure that we don't have challenges with people who are using assistive technology or who have a diverse set of abilities. And so I am here offering time to discuss more but this is a top level commitment all the way to the time it takes us to remediate defects that goes all the way to the top. So I can assure you that that commitment is still there and would love to discuss further issues or just ongoing roadmap.

Yeah. Would you mind connecting just after we're done here and just have a quick discussion on this get into more detail? That'd be great.

Yeah. Thank you. And I will say I've had great conversations with people. It's not that I don't think that the company is committed, but I think the work is fragmented and it felt like something that I wanted to bring to true to the core because yeah, I think accessibility has to be a core issue or it's just impossible.

Yes. And in many ways you go above and beyond like this isn't you know meeting some legal standard or whatever but just making this place like a first class platform where people like me can unleash their full potential and be competitive in a sighted world. It's really important.

Thank you very much.

Yeah. I just want to add over here. So first thank you. We take this feedback very seriously. Bonnie and the platform team work very closely to each other. The tools that you articulated, we have efforts around them to improve the accessibility in terms of any new applications that are being generated whether or agents that are being generated whether that is pro code, whether that is from our no code set of tools, accessibility is number one and top of mind for us as well. It's built in from get-go. So again, we'd love to keep partnering with you and you have our commitment.

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you.

So hello I'm Maham Hassan. I am a Salesforce solutions architect based in Dubai. So forward deployed engineering seems to be an important part of the future of the Salesforce career and Salesforce is doing an amazing job enabling the partners to build the skills and get certified FTE predictions. But the challenge is these programs are primarily for the partners and for the solo consultants the opportunities to participate in these workshops are quite limited. So my question is what roadmap or pathways are available for the solo consultants to participate in these certified FTE practitioners program and help themselves accelerate their careers.