Reflections on MVP Summit

I had a great time at MVP Summit this week.  I learn a lot of new things. It was great to be able to network, provide customer feedback and talk about the ever evolving Data & AI landscape. With the speed of change seemingly increasing all the time it is good to stop and have a clear week reflecting on things that work and don't work and how to improve our practices when working with data and AI.

I think the biggest take away is that the Data & AI community is always approachable and helpful. There is always someone with deep knowledge of an area who can help and the community just gives up so much time to help others learn and grow from helping children learn coding skills, to creating and running conferences, speaking, mentoring and so much more. 

I have been privileged to be a Data Platform MVP for the last 7 years and would like to thank Microsoft for providing an amazing opportunity to attend the conference.

MVP Virtual Summit

The COVID-19 virus has resulted in Microsoft converting this year’s MVP/ Regional Director Summit to an online-only / virtual event. It was scheduled for the same week (Mar 16-19). Microsoft have worked hard to plan and prepare an alternate experience that still provides the exclusive in-depth technical sessions in an online-only format and is inclusive to our globally distributed community.

After day 2 of the summit it is still an amazing event. Using Microsoft Teams has been brilliant and the team have done an amazing job bringing it all together in such short notice.

My First MVP Summit

I had an amazing time at my first MVP Global Summit.  The MVP Global Summit was hosted in Bellevue and at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It featured a large catalog of in-depth technical discussions and feedback sessions combined with networking opportunities among fellow MVPs and the Microsoft product groups.

It was held the week of 17 March 2019. There were community pre-day sessions on Sunday 17 March and the product group technical sessions ran from Monday 18 March until Wednesday 20 March. On Thursday 21 March and Friday 22 March the Power BI and Azure product teams hosted additional sessions and workshops on campus.

As a first time attendee I didn’t know anything about the conference.There was finding out about transfers to and from the airport to the hotel, having a map of the Microsoft campus and the need to download a few apps such as Uber and the event mobile app to select the sessions I wanted to attend for my award category and for conference updates when I was there.

The conference hotels were in Bellevue and I stayed in the main hotel, the Hyatt Regency. The sessions on the Sunday and a number of evening events were all held in the Hyatt.  

Every day there were buses that took MVPs from the hotels to the main conference centre at Redmond. These ran regularly throughout the five days. From the conference centre there were transfer buses that could take you to any of the other buildings. Some of the building were within 5 mins walk. With the weather like summer it was a pleasant stroll through the tree lined undulating campus roads and paths between the buildings. By one of the buildings was the three tree houses which can be used for meetings.

The Microsoft Store was in another part of the campus. During the week I also had to travel to another building Advanta which was 15 mins away from the main campus.

The events on Sunday covered important topics such as diversity and inclusion and how to improve your presentation skills. It was a very helpful day to focus on soft skills. Also I was very grateful to have a new professional headshot taken for LinkedIn. Then five days of sessions with the different product groups. There was so much content to learn and absorb. In the evenings there was plenty of time to network with other MVPs and the product groups. One evening meetup was with the MVP leads, a couple were with the Data Platform product group on Tuesday and Thursday on campus. Then there was the main attendee celebration to celebrate one global community on Wednesday. Throughout the whole event there were opportunities to network, meet new people, catch up with people I knew and discuss data platform things. It was also a great opportunity to have a Data Relay team meeting. 

It is such an amazing privilege to be a part of this community with so many amazing people.