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Unlock More Career Opportunities With the Salesforce Strategy Designer Certification

Designer Astro and Cloudy stood next to a Salesforce certification logo against a pink backdrop.
Show your expertise using design methods to create compelling experience strategies that drive business outcomes.

Supercharge your skill set and open the door to more career opportunities with the Salesforce Strategy Designer Certification.

As the digital world continues to grow, companies are realizing more and more the importance of Salesforce skills, including admin, developer, architect, and, now, designer skills.

According to a recent IBM State of Salesforce report, Salesforce is a platform of choice for modern business, and design is key to achieving customer success with Salesforce. A McKinsey study also shows that companies that excel at design grow revenue and shareholder return at nearly twice the rate of their industry peers.

Strategy design brings together a unique combination of experience design and business skills, analytical and creative thinking—just what companies need to navigate the ambiguity of today’s business landscape and build enduring value for the future.

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What is strategy design?

Through strategy design, designers identify opportunities to drive business outcomes with designed experiences and align stakeholders behind a strategic vision for customer success. As a Salesforce Certified Strategy Designer, you focus on building “enduring advantage”—creating value in the short term, with a plan for how to grow that value over time.

Strategy designers have skill sets spanning business, innovation, design, and delivery. This ensures that your company’s great strategic thinking and inspiring product vision aren’t lost in translation during the build process.

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Employ best practices emphasizing values, relationships, and accountability.

How does strategy design differ from user experience (UX) design?

UX designers focus on the user experience—its look, feel, and behavior. As a strategy designer, you start earlier in the process, framing challenges and asking, “What should we build?” The role is equal parts creating and aligning. It’s a specialization that brings disciplines together and articulates a desired future state that works in terms of desirability to customers, viability for the business, and technical feasibility.

Strategy design complements UX design, and the overlap of skills within the two specializations is a good thing, as it ensures continuity of effort even when there’s a handoff.

You get the benefit of each specialization and a multiplier effect when you put them together.

The Abstract State of Design in 2021 report agrees, stating that if organizations want to connect design to business outcomes, they must foster collaboration and focus on streamlining communication.

Salesforce Strategy Designer Certification

Salesforce introduced the Salesforce Designer role in 2021 with the Salesforce UX Designer Certification for Trailblazers who are passionate about creating human-centered user experiences. Salesforce Designers solve complex problems and design ethical, equitable, and sustainable solutions on the Salesforce Platform, serving both businesses and communities.

Now, as a part of our commitment to empower Trailblazers to skill up and tap into the power of design, we’re excited to bring you the Salesforce Strategy Designer Certification. This certification validates a Trailblazer’s expertise in using design methods to create compelling experience strategies that drive business outcomes using the Salesforce Platform.

In leading a path from ambiguity to clarity, strategy designers illuminate the ways values can drive decisions on what we build and how we build it.

As a Salesforce Certified Strategy Designer, you build impactful solutions that express company values through the products and services it offers. This is increasingly important, according to Forbes magazine, which notes that it’s easy to define your company’s core values, but much harder to ingrain them into the culture and lean on them to drive performance.

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Skills needed to become a Salesforce Certified Strategy Designer

A Salesforce Certified Strategy Designer brings together their design expertise and business knowledge to deliver advantageous results. Maybe you’re a consultant or architect looking for a way to expand your skill set. Or maybe you’re a designer wanting to validate your design experience and Salesforce proficiency. No matter which path you’re on, this is the certification for you!

The Salesforce Certified Strategy Designer Certification Exam is for individuals who want to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and experience in the following key areas:

  • Value Design: Drive business outcomes with designed experiences.
  • Tools and Artifacts: Create tangible deliverables through the crafting and communication of strategy.
  • Intangible Deliverables: Do the “invisible” work to make the visible work successful.
  • Leveraging Adjacent Roles and Skills: Use a broad understanding across the design and build process.

As someone who’s practiced strategy design for a long time, I’ve seen its power to transform products, services, and organizations firsthand. I’m excited to bring this unique capability to everyone in the Salesforce ecosystem.

Ready to get certified? Here’s how to get started!

Check out these free resources you can use to become a strategy designer #CertifiedPro!

You got this, Trailblazer

Ready to become a Salesforce Certified Strategy Designer? Check out the Salesforce Strategy Designer credential page for all the details and to gain access to each of the study resources available to you on Trailhead. And don’t forget to share your strategy designer goals on social media so we can cheer you on!

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Denise Burchell Designer

Denise Burchell is a creative leader with more than 25 years of experience in human-centered design. She works on formalizing strategy design and relationship design practices, and creating content and experiences to share them. Denise believes design has the power to improve the world, and she brings that intention to her life and her work.

More by Denise

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