A project is moving from the design phase to the build phase. What should a Revenue Cloud Consultant do to ensure a successful build cycle?

Transitioning from design to build requires establishing the technical foundation for the development lifecycle. This involves creating a structured environment strategy with separate sandboxes for development (e.g., Developer, Developer Pro) and testing (e.g., Partial Copy, Full). This isolation prevents destabilizing the production environment and allows for controlled quality assurance. Concurrently, selecting a deployment tool (e.g., Change Sets, Salesforce CLI, DevOps Center) is crucial for creating a repeatable and reliable process for migrating configurations and code from lower environments to production. This foundational setup is essential for an organized and successful build cycle.

B. Write user stories, have user workshops to confirm requirements, and build test use cases.

These activities are characteristic of the analysis and design phases, which precede the build phase. They should be largely complete before building begins.

C. Build in the production environment, let users test it live, and provide feedback in real time.

This is a direct violation of software development best practices. Building in production is extremely risky, bypasses quality assurance, and can cause significant business disruption.

1. Salesforce Developer Documentation, Application Lifecycle Management Guide: This guide outlines the standard phases of development on the Salesforce platform. The "Develop" phase explicitly follows the "Plan" and "Design" phases. The guide states, "The first step in customizing or building an app is to set up the proper work environment for your developers... The best practice is to do your development and testing in a non-production environment." This directly supports setting up environments before building. (See the "Lifecycle Stages" and "Environments" sections).

2. Trailhead, Module: Application Lifecycle and Development Models, Unit: Plan Your Release Cycle: This official Salesforce training material emphasizes the importance of a structured release process. It details, "Before your team starts building, you need a plan for how you’ll get your changes from development to production... Your plan includes the environments you’ll use for development and testing, and how and when you’ll move changes between them." This confirms that environment setup and deployment planning are prerequisites for the build phase.

3. Salesforce Developer Documentation, Sandbox Licenses and Storage Limits by Type: This document details the different types of sandboxes (Developer, Developer Pro, Partial Copy, Full) and their intended uses within the application lifecycle (e.g., development, integration testing, user acceptance testing, staging). This supports the concept of setting up multiple, distinct environments for a successful build and deployment process.