About

I'm a Salesforce solution architect and delivery leader. And I only open with that because the content on this site is going to relate largely to that small piece of my life, but I am also a husband, father, introvert, millennial, elder emo, musician, sports fan, and nature lover. Above all of that, I am someone who cares deeply. A craftsman. I fully believe that anything worth doing is worth doing well. That, and I was blessed with the super special kind of general anxiety that makes me a perfectionist.

Perfection is a funny thing. It's never effortless. Even when you think you've found it, the only way to keep it is to keep pouring effort into it. I used to think there was a threshold to success and happiness (and perfection). Like there was a sequence of events I could follow to find my way into those spaces permanently. But there isn't. And it took me way too long to realize that. You have to show up and fight for it. Every time. And I believe that so much that I have it tattooed on my arm. "Cada Vez". I'll be here fighting.

The "professional" version of that fight: ten years in the ecosystem as a consultant, admin, senior consultant, lead in-house, and now Director of Technical Solutions at TrebleHook, which builds a CRM and project pursuit platform for architecture, engineering, and construction firms. I've seen plenty of different industries get the same things wrong with Salesforce. Public sector, healthcare/pharmacy technology, financial services, home mortgage lending, and now AEC. The technical capabilities of the platform are never the main cause of heartache for organizations with Salesforce. The part that gets discounted way too much is the decision making that goes before the build.

I'm also knee deep in the artificial intelligence onslaught. I feel the pressure from the industry, from my employer, from my clients, from my competitors to be at the forefront of this wave: AI is already deeply entrenched in this space. And while I think it will take years for the whole ecosystem to be impacted significantly (feels like there will always be a need for simple CRM solutions), I know that AI is going to reduce the amount of human effort needed to run a business and eventually the humans who can work with AI to achieve amazing results will be the most valuable. So for now I want to focus on sharpening my ability to partner with AI to achieve those amazing results.

I lead a team of consultants, own delivery and solution architecture across our product implementations, and still build custom solutions for our customers. The mix is deliberate. I don't think you can set technical standards for work you've stopped doing. Before any of it, I forecasted inventory for a pet products manufacturer and got handed the job of training the sales planners on software that was completely correct and completely useless. That's where most of what I think about this work comes from.

If any of this resonates with you and you want to have a conversation about it, the Contact page has my real email address on it.

Thomas Lange Jr is a Salesforce solution architect and delivery leader with ten years in the ecosystem, currently Director of Technical Solutions at TrebleHook. He writes about the gap between systems that are technically correct and systems people actually use, and about partnering with AI to build things that close it. He lives near Charlotte, North Carolina.