About/
Seventeen years of CRM and Salesforce projects, usually learned the hard way. The long version of how a business philosophy ended up disguised as a career.
Mateusz Ostopinko — 17 years of CRM and Salesforce projects taught me that, usually the hard way: as an architect, occasionally as the person explaining why a brilliant platform still managed to produce a disappointing project.
My working belief, after all those years and more war stories than I care to repeat: people come first, then organisation, then process, then technology. Reverse that order, and no Salesforce licence will save the project.
I spend my days on the hard end of CRM: where the business problem has not been named yet, where stakeholders disagree about what success looks like, where the licence is already bought and the clock is running. Most of my career has been spent turning those situations into projects that actually shipped.
The route there: in-house CRM in publishing and ad sales, Siebel consulting, a Salesforce practice built from the consultant chair up, architecture at Devoteam, and now the media practice at Craftware. Independent work has run alongside since 2011 under my own MEFIOR flag. The services/ page says what that adds up to; the log/ says what I think while doing it.
People before technology
The order is people, organisation, process, technology. Every failed CRM project I've audited broke this order somewhere.
Name the problem first
I once stopped an entire RFP because the client couldn't say what problem they were solving. Best decision on that project.
Never bluff expertise
"I don't know" is a complete answer. It's usually followed by "but I know who does" or "give me a week".
Sounds like your kind of advisor/
The fastest way to find out is a short message about the problem you're untangling.