I Never Planned to Work in Tech. I Just Got Tired of Watching Things Not Work.

If you had told me years ago that I would build a career around product, systems, automation, technology, and making complicated things work better, I probably would have laughed.

Mostly because I did not consider myself a “tech person.”

I wasn't writing code in my basement as a teenager. I didn't study computer science. I didn't have a five-year plan that involved enterprise platforms, automation, product strategy, or any of the other phrases that would eventually make their way onto my résumé.

I did, however, know how to hook up a Nintendo Wii.

I could navigate a video game pretty well.

And I was absolutely the person my family called when the printer suddenly decided it had lost the will to print.

So there was that.

My career in technology really started for a much less glamorous reason:

I got tired of watching people run around in circles.

The Job That Was Supposed to Be a Stepping Stone

At the time, I was working for a small company in a sales coordination role.

“Sales coordination” sounds somewhat strategic.

In reality, a fair amount of it involved organizing paperwork for people who were making significantly more money than I was.

It wasn't supposed to become my career. It was a stepping-stone job. Something I took while figuring out what came next.

Then the company decided to implement Salesforce.

And the implementation was going… badly.

Not catastrophic, burn-the-building-down badly.

More like everyone-is-confused-and-nobody-wants-to-admit-it badly.

The junior IT person assigned to the project was genuinely lovely, but he was learning as he went. The head of operations had been tasked with leading the implementation despite knowing very little about Salesforce himself. Corporate wanted the system implemented. There was a deadline. Therefore, somehow, Salesforce was going to happen.

Whether it actually worked appeared to be a secondary concern.

Testing became especially painful.

We would test something.

It wouldn't work.

We would talk about why it didn't work.

Then, somehow, we would arrive back at essentially the same solution and test it again.

And I remember thinking:

There has to be a better way to do this.

That sentence, in one form or another, has probably driven most of my career.

Curiosity Took Over

I started digging into Salesforce because I wanted to understand enough to make useful suggestions.

That was it.

I wasn't trying to change careers.

I wasn't building a personal brand.

I wasn't “upskilling.”

I was annoyed.

Annoyance, as it turns out, can be a surprisingly effective professional development strategy.

The more I learned, the more interesting the problem became.

Salesforce wasn't just software. It was a giant collection of decisions about how a business should operate.

Who needs what information?

What should happen next?

What can be automated?

Where does something get stuck?

Why are five people doing something manually that a system could do automatically?

Why are we asking users to remember a seventeen-step process and then acting surprised when step eleven gets missed?

Suddenly, I wasn't just looking at screens and fields.

I was looking at systems.

And systems made sense to me.

Wait… People Have Entire Careers Doing This?

Somewhere during all of that research, I discovered that Salesforce administration was an actual career.

There were people whose job was essentially to understand a business, understand the technology, connect the two, solve problems, organize chaos, and make life easier for everyone using the system.

I remember thinking:

Wait. You can get paid to do that?

Because that sounded suspiciously like the thing I had already started doing for free.

I was naturally curious. I was comfortable with technology. I enjoyed figuring things out. And while I knew absolutely nothing about programming, I wasn't afraid to click around until something made sense.

So I started teaching myself.

I went to Trailhead and began working through modules.

Then more modules.

Then more modules.

Badges appeared.

A tiny cartoon ranger encouraged me.

And somewhere along the way, I became completely hooked.

I eventually mentioned to the operations manager that maybe the company should consider having a dedicated Salesforce administrator.

He dismissed the idea.

Which, apparently, was exactly the motivation I needed.

There are probably healthier origin stories.

Mine occasionally involves spite.

Becoming an Administrator

For roughly the next year, I learned everything I could.

I studied.

I practiced.

I built things.

I broke things.

I fixed the things I broke.

And eventually, I took the Salesforce Administrator certification exam.

I failed.

Completely.

Which was humbling...

But Salesforce certification exams are notoriously detailed, and plenty of people don't pass the first time. More importantly, failing the exam didn't suddenly erase everything I had learned.

So I studied again.

And I passed.

That certification meant far more to me than a line on LinkedIn.

It represented the first time I had deliberately taught myself an entirely new profession.

Not because someone handed me a roadmap.

Not because I went back to school.

Not because I had some perfectly constructed career strategy.

I simply found something I was curious about and kept following it.

Then Someone Actually Let Me Run the Thing

Shortly afterward, I landed my first role managing Salesforce.

My official title was CRM and Communications Administrator.

And the company needed Salesforce implemented from scratch.

There was just one tiny complication:

I was the Salesforce team.

All of it.

One person.

Me.

No senior administrator sitting next to me.

No architect.

No developer team.

No experienced mentor quietly preventing me from making terrible decisions.

Just me, Salesforce, Google, documentation, Trailhead, and what I can only describe as an extremely aggressive amount of figuring it out.

Looking back, I had no idea how much I didn't know.

But being a solo administrator taught me something that shaped the rest of my career.

Technology was only part of the job.

The harder part was everything surrounding it.

I had to manage users.

Stakeholders.

Requests.

Priorities.

Deadlines.

Expectations.

Data.

Projects.

The system itself.

And, possibly most importantly, myself.

The Skill Behind All the Other Skills

That experience taught me how much self-management matters.

When nobody is standing over you telling you what to do next, you learn very quickly whether you can create structure for yourself.

I had to figure out what was important.

What could wait.

What was actually a problem.

What someone merely felt was a problem.

What needed a technical solution.

What needed a process change.

And what probably needed everyone to stop sending spreadsheets back and forth.

I learned how to take something messy and make it understandable.

Then take something understandable and make it manageable.

Then take something manageable and make it better.

That pattern has followed me through almost every role I've had since.

The platforms got bigger.

The organizations got more complex.

The stakeholders became more senior.

Eventually Salesforce became only one piece of a much larger world that included product management, business systems, customer experience, operations, automation, RPA, AI, integrations, and enterprise strategy.

But the instinct underneath all of it never really changed.

I still see something confusing, inefficient, repetitive, or unnecessarily difficult and immediately start wondering:

Why are we doing it this way?

And then:

What would happen if we made it better?

Looking Back

There wasn't one grand decision that led me here.

There were hundreds of small ones.

Opening Trailhead for the first time.

Failing an exam and taking it again.

Accepting a job I wasn't entirely sure I was ready for.

Learning things because nobody else was around to teach me.

Raising my hand.

Asking questions.

Getting irritated by inefficient processes.

And repeatedly believing that there had to be a better way.

In a strange way, my career started exactly where it continues today.

Not with technology.

With curiosity.

With empathy for the people struggling with a broken process.

And with a very persistent inability to leave something alone once I know it could work better.

Apparently, that can become an entire career.

Who knew?