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Behind-the-Scenes of Cyber Week at Salesforce

December 21, 2021

Marketing Cloud Engineering Leaders and Architects

Woman sitting on a chair with an open laptop displaying many Salesforce stickers

Some of the biggest shopping holidays of the year happen in Q4: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Cyber Week. This cluster of shopping events is like the Super Bowl for retailers in terms of its scale and importance — and it’s also one of the busiest times of the year for our engineers here at Salesforce. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering that $275B was spent in digital sales just this year alone! We like to think our that engineers are some of the invisible magicians that make the seemingly impossible possible. 

So how does the magic happen?

A great deal of work and innovation are needed to prepare systems, websites, and e-commerce platforms to handle the holiday rush. Our software engineers are up to the challenge! At Salesforce, we’re obsessed with enabling our engineers — and all of our employees — to bring their creativity to work, innovate new solutions to their latest challenges, and do the best work of their lives. 

Our Marketing Cloud team is just one dynamic example of how we work at Salesforce. Through Marketing Cloud, we’re responding to our customers’ needs faster than ever before with our platform for delivering relevant, personalized journeys across channels and devices. Marketers can deliver the right messages at the right time throughout all phases of the customer lifecycle. This holiday season, our marketing customers used Marketing Cloud to create and deliver 6.2 billion push notifications, 40.6 billion marketing messages, and 11.9 billion real-time personalized experiences throughout Cyber Week. 

To get a peek inside the process, we spoke with Marketing Cloud Engineering Leaders & Architects. They gave us an inside look at how their teams prepared for Cyber Week to meet the needs of our customers, and how they were able to innovate quickly with Marketing Cloud. 

Q. How does the team prepare for Cyber Week, one of the biggest weeks for retailers?

Customer success has always been a cornerstone at Salesforce, and our success philosophy has driven how we continually innovate on behalf of our customers and strengthen our infrastructure to manage both planned and unplanned large-scale events. In preparation for Cyber Week, we planned months in advance and drew from our learnings from previous years. Most importantly, we connected with our customers to understand their plans and expectations around one of their biggest retail moments of the year. Throughout the week, we remained laser-focused on our operations, referenced detailed playbooks, met virtually over Slack, and consistently reviewed available metrics to check our performance. 

Q. What new challenges did the team face this year?

The pandemic has put a strain on our infrastructure, so our teams have doubled down on creatively solving for this by leveraging our deep supplier relationships and improving our forecasting. The competition for talent has been fierce, but we’ve been successful in hiring and retention, which we attribute to our empathetic and employee-friendly policies like Wellness Days (which we will continue next year). Our customers have also been strained, and many of them have reached out to us for guidance and to understand how we were responding. Through our relentless customer focus and great product experiences, we were able to navigate this year’s challenges of increased scale and supply chain difficulties to help our customers succeed and thrive.

Q: How is Marketing Cloud and Salesforce uniquely equipped to handle these challenges?

At Salesforce Marketing Cloud we have over two decades of expertise in enabling Fortune 500 customers and businesses to create personalized marketing experiences for their customers, at scale. This expertise, combined with the unique advantages that the Salesforce ecosystem provides and innovations like Slack-first collaboration, uniquely positions us to handle these challenges and deliver customer value.

Q: What are you most proud of this year, in terms of Cyber Week's success?

The camaraderie. It was heartwarming to see our vibrant and diverse teams across the world transcending time zones and coming together towards a shared goal. As a result, we had an incident-free Cyber Week, despite not having in-person meetings or a “war room,” which were mandatory in years past. We set a record of sorts by having a Slack-first and zero-incident operation. This year’s success was the result of months of preparation and hard work that leveraged our teams’ years of experience. We worked on automating a number of our processes as well as implementing built-in artificial intelligence-based alerting and remediation workflows.

Q: What key learnings came out of this week’s Cyber Week?

To paraphrase the Roman philosopher Seneca, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” Our teams’ hard work and meticulous planning paid off. By investing in automations and intelligent alerting, we were able to scale seamlessly. 

Q: How did Salesforce’s internal use of Slack transform the Cyber Week experience?

Our biggest learning of Cyber Week is that Slack is an even more incredible tool than we thought, and success from anywhere is possible — even in the midst of a 40 billion message peak! After our engineers, Slack was the unsung hero of this experience. Slack replaced in-person meetings, redefined war rooms, and removed the physical distances imposed by the pandemic.

Q: How is being a part of the Engineering at Salesforce different than any other company?

Salesforce Engineering is home to some of the most innovative and talented individuals solving the industry’s hardest and most challenging problems at scale. This team has built world-class solutions for a long list of marquee customers using big data and AI to provide solutions to their most difficult problems. Our engineers are truly purpose-driven, serving customers, partners, and communities across the world [to partner with them in their transformations. The global pandemic has accelerated this purpose.

That’s because at Salesforce, trust is our number one value. Ready to join us to build more than just software? The growth opportunities on our Technology and Product team are limitless, and we’re hiring software engineers right now. Or browse all of our open roles, and reach out with any questions to Syam Nair, EVP of Salesforce Engineering, or Vivienne Wei, VP of Technology Strategy on LinkedIn.

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