Around 18 years ago — just one year into Salesforce's existence — Andrea Leszek joined the company as a technical writer and developed the very first online help documents for the product. Now she's leading an entire arm of the company, but her objective remains the same: to help people engage with Salesforce faster and better.
From writing customer how-to guides and designing lessons on Salesforce's training platform Trailhead, to making sure internal engineers and product managers get on-boarded quickly, Leszek and her team play a fundamental role bringing new people into the fold.
Salesforce is a high-growth organization, and its Trailhead training platform is a huge part of that. Though at its core Trailhead is a tool to teach people to use Salesforce software, the company has created a whole culture around it. There are events for the community, and people who excel at it are deemed Trailblazers.
So while Leszek's role is officially "enablement" — Salesforce speak for helping people use its products — she's really a leader of culture in the organization. And that culture is a directive that comes straight from Benioff himself.
Among her most successful projects is Salesforce's Women's Leadership program, an employee development initiative she worked on with Leila Seka, the executive vice president of AppExchange, with support from CTO Parker Harris, to make sure women have equal opportunity throughout their careers at the company.