Episode 070 — Paul Calf: From audit fail to DevOps pipeline success!

Jack sits down with Paul Calf (Salesforce Release Manager at Standard Life, and Gearset DevOps Leader for 2026) to talk through a decade-long Salesforce journey that took him from accidental admin to release manager. Paul gets candid about the failed audit that forced his team to get serious about governance, what it looked like to build a compliant release process from scratch, and why cherry-picking components in VS Code nearly broke him (and the team). The conversation goes beyond tooling. Paul opens up about the culture-first approach his team takes to collaboration, from daily standups to blameless post-mortems, and what happens when someone accidentally data loads the wrong file into prod. He also shares his take on evaluating DevOps tools, approval bottlenecks, and how his financial services org is treading carefully, but deliberately, into AI territory. About DevOps Diaries: Salesforce DevOps Advocate Jack McCurdy chats to members of the Salesforce community about their experience in the Salesforce ecosystem. Expect to hear and learn from inspirational stories of personal growth and business success, whilst discovering all the trials, tribulations, and joy that comes with delivering Salesforce for companies of all shapes and sizes. New episodes bi-weekly on YouTube as well as on your preferred podcast platform. Podcast produced and sponsored by Gearset. Learn more about Gearset: https://grst.co/4iCnas2 About Gearset: Gearset is the leading Salesforce DevOps platform, with powerful solutions for metadata and CPQ deployments, CI/CD, automated testing, sandbox seeding and backups. It helps Salesforce teams apply DevOps best practices to their development and release process, so they can rapidly and securely deliver higher-quality projects. Get full access to all of Gearset's features for free with a 30-day trial: https://grst.co/4iKysKW Chapters: 00:00 – Intro & Meet Paul Calf 02:00 – The Accidental Admin Origin Story 03:44 – The Audit That Changed Everything 05:28 – Building a Release Process from Scratch 08:00 – From Change Sets to Gearset 09:34 – Tackling Approval Bottlenecks 12:43 – Breaking Down Silos & Building a Collaborative Culture 15:42 – Blameless Culture & Owning Your Mistakes 18:55 – Lessons from Building a DevOps Pipeline 22:29 – Cherry Picking: A Horror Story 25:40 – How to Evaluate DevOps Tooling 28:11 – Continuous Improvement as a Mindset 30:15 – Approaching AI in a Regulated Industry 33:46 – Final Advice for Salesforce & DevOps Teams 37:20 – Wrapping Up