>> Hello. I'm Donna.
>> I'm Sarah.
>> I'm Ryan.
>> You absolutely do not want to
miss this week's episode of Less Code,
More Power because Ryan Cunningham,
who heads a product for Power Apps
is going to tell us all his secrets.
>> Stay tuned, it is an episode not to be missed.
[MUSIC]
>> Hi, welcome once again to the Less Code,
More Power Show. I'm Sarah.
>> I'm Donna, and today we have a very special guest.
This is Ryan Cunningham who heads
a product for the Power Apps team.
>> You're right, it's great to be here.
>> Thank you so much for joining us.
>> Thank you so much.
>> Thanks for having me. I love the name of your show.
>> Thank you.
>> Isn't it cool?
>> So he came up with this name,
by the way, just so you know.
He came up with it on an airplane. Yes.
>> You should have trademarked it or something.
>> No, I did something much more important.
I gave it to Donna.
>> That's nice.
>> He came up with the name.
The next thing you know, we have hashtags and stickers.
>> There we go. Yes.
>> But Sarah and I just plucked Ryan out of an EBC,
an executive briefing center,
where he was having a very deep conversation with customers,
because we wanted him to come talk to all of you instead.
>> Thank you.
>> Think that's pretty fair.
>> Thank you. Yes.
>> You're welcome. So tell us about you, Ryan.
What brought you to Power Platform?
Did you invent it? The word, the deal.
>> The word, the deal, the thing.
So I wrote at Microsoft about four years ago, give or take,
right when Power Apps was
a glimmer in the eye of many people here.
In fact, we were just on the brink of
announcing it as a private preview.
In fact, one of my first jobs
here was to fly all the way to Barcelona
to a business applications summit
and convince people it was a real thing.
>> This is real. Can you believe that?
Isn't that a little bit of a pinch [inaudible]
>> Yes, that's still my primary job.
>> It's real. It's a thing really.
>> It's real. It is a thing.
I'm much more credible in that message
now than four years ago.
>> No really, it's private. You have to
sign these forms and maybe we'll show you.
>> Exactly.
>> Yeah.
>> Actually, this idea is not new.
I think we like to talk about citizen development and
the industry is getting excited about
low-code and analysts have coined terms.
But I think this is the company that made a thing called Excel
that people have been using for the better part of four decades
to work around the boundaries of their software.
This idea has been around for a very long time.
So I think it's very compelling when you're working
on a new product to think that you're doing something new.
That can actually often be really dangerous and distracting.
You get overenthusiastic about the new parts.
I think from that very heady time
four years ago to where we're at now with
millions of people around the world using this stuff,
a lot of that progress has been actually embracing with, not new,
but embracing what people are
doing and what they need to be doing
and what's just a little bit hard about
that and trying to make it a little easier.
>> That must be quite hard because a lot of people are
still running on-prem systems.
The Cloud is still technically new for them.
>> Absolutely, yeah.
That's not just theoretical.
It happens at this company too, right?
When I got here four years ago,
reporting time off is
like sending three faxes ad using Morse code.
>> Faxes is really big in America, right?
>> Yes.
>> We love to fax, it's wonderful, yes.
>> Oh my God, we used to fax all kinds of things.
>> Absolutely.
>> All sorts of documents.
>> That's amazing. I think they were all kicked out of the UK.
>> Yeah, sure.
>> That was the first Brexit.
>> We got rid off them this year, 2020.
>> That's amazing.
>> Yeah.
>> Brilliant.
>> So that's what brought you to Microsoft.
Now, what are you working on?
>> So for us,
Power Apps has been through this really
interesting growth stage in the last couple of years.
We have gone from, "Hey, check this out,
it's cool," to your companies are now increasingly really running
on Power Apps and relying on it for really critical things, and
not just one or two really critical things
but often dozens or hundreds and in some cases thousands
of processes for often tens of thousands of people.
We've had to mature a lot as a product and as a product
of the organization to really go from the shiny,
new thing, look what you can do,
to you can trust us with some of your most crucial processes.
I would say we're still on that journey.
>> That's right.
>> A lot of my role today is, yes,
we still care a lot about
the nitty-gritty details of building
a great product and a great platform.
We put a lot of effort into that.
But increasingly, a lot of my job is doing
what you and I were just doing an hour to go,
which is talking to senior leaders,
customers of all kinds,
large and small, every sector
and spending time getting inside their heads.
What does it take to move this forward
in your business and trying to bring that back?
That's the other part of product development, right?
>> That's right.
>> It's really hard to do either of those things in isolation.
It's only really when
you do them together that you build great stuff.
>> That's right. What I loved about
the customer engagements that you do are
you really get down to
the nitty-gritty business problem
that the CEO or CTO was trying to solve.
You show how other people who are similar vertical system,
like the people we were talking
to were a very large retail company.
He's showing examples of
other very large retail company who's transform their businesses.
By the time you are done explaining the small tweaks that you do,
it wasn't, "Go get a new database."
It was, "Use the database you got."
>> Start with what you've got.
>> Exactly. Start with what you've got.
I think that's a very powerful message because
you're not telling them you need
to throw away whatever you've got.
>> Exactly.
>> You throw away your millions of pounds of investments
in the past five years is never
really going to land to people, is it?
>> No.
>> But that's classically why
business software is so hard to build.
None of these things happen in a vacuum.
Everybody already has a CRM system or six,
everybody has an ERP system or seven,
and they've got a bunch of other stuff around it,
and none of us were born yesterday, right?
>> No.
>> It's being able to work in that environment and not
require major shifts in fundamental underlying things.
That's part of just lowering the cost of building stuff.
There's so much about software,
why it's hard and time-consuming to make software.
It's not actually about software.
>> That's right. Yeah.
>> We've done a lot of things
around software to compensate for the fact
that the software part is hard and it's expensive
and to compensate for the fact that they don't happen in a vacuum.
A lot of that is just the really unglamorous stuff.
>> That's right. Yes.
>> What does it mean to integrate with
three data sources and combine these APIs and do
a multi-tenant join? What does it mean
to do hierarchical role-based access control?
>> You modify this thing, what happens to that thing?
>> Exactly, right. This is
where the magic of the Power Platform comes in.
It's really not magical.
It's just take that frankly uninteresting,
very repeatable but costly stuff
and start to standardize it and start to make it easier.
I think if you look at Power Apps
through the lens of a professional,
through a classic developer,
through a classic IT person-
because often, it's very easy to look down your nose at it.
"I don't need that."
>> Yeah, I'm a coder.
>> "You can't build real things in low-code,"
or "I just don't need to slum in
low-code because I have these skills, right?"
>> That's right.
>> "Then I'm going to go off and spend six months trying
to figure out all my database schema and all my whatever."
>> Six months, it's like two-and-a-half years.
>> Sure.
>> [inaudible] two years experience.
>> Two years.
>> Sure. Right. At the end of the day,
the parts of that time,
whether it's six months or two years,
I'm actually spending on the interesting problem
is actually really small.
>> Mostly the compliance.
>> Totally. Yes.
>> It's compliance, it's governance,
it's getting the thing to work with the previous things
and making sure you don't
break all of the back compat stuff, right?
>> You got it. Yeah.
>> The breaking existing customers because you move
your data store? End of days. It's just not happening.
>> Totally. That's where
you can look at low-code,
you can look at Power Apps as the next Access,
the next InfoPath, the next VBA in Excel,
as a professional and look down into it or even get scared of it.
But you could also look at it as something else.
You could look at it as just the next logical step
that we've been doing in software development
for the last 30 years.
>> Just modern software dev.
>> Just better tools, better abstraction.
We're just getting lazier.
>>That's right, and that's good.
>> That's good for you. It's our job to do the boring stuff.
>> [inaudible] so much more practice.
>> yes. Let the platform company do the boring platform thing
and you build the thing you want to build. We like that.
>> Look, there's another piece or two though
which is to me is really cool.
The actually innovative part of this is
it's not because we can do the boring stuff,
because we can lower the cost, and
because other people can now start
to tinker on top of a pretty robust platform.
You change the relationship a little bit.
The other part of all this software stuff that we do that's
not software is all the things around it.
Because what it means to be a really deep person who understands
C# code and dependency analysis and scale
and everything that a professional needs to
understand and what it means to understand
how to repair a jet engine
or how to provide great customer experience in an airport
or how to repair a windshield.
These are total islands of expertise, right?
>> Yeah.
>> So we spend a lot of time
creating stuff that is not software to try to
get expertise out of the head of
a real human and put it in the head of an engineer.
who are not really humans.
>> That's very special.
>> We call that design, but it's really about guesswork
and it's about description.
We write these documents and we make these schedules,
and we hope that in
all these months, that the
good is going to come out the other side.
We all know that it often is not quite as good as we thought.
>> You leave the engineer alone for two years,
you're not going to get the solution to your problem.
You're going to get a different solution,
but it won't be the solution.
>> You're going to get the person as being
frustrated in having a problem [inaudible]
>> Absolutely.
>> Part of this to me is you start to change that relationship.
You start to get people moving faster and
even starting to solve part of the problem themselves.
>> That's right.
>> You just get higher-quality stuff out of it.
>> Absolutely.
>> People feel better about it.
>> We see you brought friends.
>> Yeah.
>> I have. Yes.
>> We've got two things. Can you
just tell us who's on your screen right
now before you show us some things
that you've got to show everyone?
>> Sure. I have many things to show everyone.
>> Oh my gosh.
>> So these are my friends at Schlumberger, the organization.
In the middle is Alan Chai,
on the left is Ladd Laird, and on the right is Ken
who goes by Dr. No internally.
>> Doctor Know. He's such a know-it-everything.
>> No. Their roles here are being a professional developer.
Actually, Ladd has classically has run
the professional development appdev shop
inside of this organization, has 50,
60 people who have .NET coding
backgrounds, Yammer encoding backgrounds.
Ken, Dr. No, is the global IT admin.
This is how he gets the moniker.
"No, you can't," for good reason.
We've got to keep this global organization secure.
Alan is a citizen developer.
A lot of people who have never met a citizen developer often ask,
what really is a citizen developer?
I've never seen one in the wild.
>> Yeah. How do you spot one?
>> A bit of a jackal.
>> What kind of career fair do you go to?
I want to catch one.
>> Yes, it's actually a secret handshake.
It's all very clandestine.
>> It's like "You got any Excel sheets?"
I don't know. Yeah.
>> What I love about this particular set of humans,
not only are they individually
all wonderful people but the fact that they even know each other.
>> Yeah.
>> Because in a lot of large organizations, these people
do not.
>> Well, they'll be separate, right?
>> Yeah, totally.
The fact that not only do they know each other,
they work together and they're driving a ton of value together.
They're doing it because of Power Platform
and largely Power Apps. It is really special.
There's a new paradigm here, and that for us is the real mission.
It's not just about
we're software professionals and
we work at a large technology company.
>> That's right.
>> Not my goal to put software development out of business.
>> No.
>> It's not in our interest.
It's not our goal to put IT out of business.
>> No.
>> But it is our goal to figure out how to make this whole thing
work a bit more efficiently and how to
make everybody's life a little bit better.
How do we empower everybody in this ecosystem and not just
create some rogue third-party shadow citizen developer?
>> Which we don't want. No.
>> Whatever, no. What's interesting about this story,
what I love about it is Power Apps
was actually brought into this organization through Alan,
through a citizen developer, somebody not
classically in the seat of IT decision-making.
>> Right.
>> Initially, the other characters in this story,
and I think a lot of people watching this show can relate,
very skeptical of this for a good reason.
"You can't build real apps in low-code.
We can't let people build apps, are you crazy?
How are we going to govern it?
It'd be a nightmare. I've lived through
the Access wars and the InfoPath wars."
>> "Our data will be strewn across the Internet."
>> "Absolutely. It will be the end of times for everyone,"
and look, not for
a lack of real experience on those challenges, right?
>> Yeah.
>> That all held up fine until people actually
looked at what Alan was creating.
>> Yeah.
>> These are some of Alan's apps and I'm telling his story.
He tells it much better himself and has publicly
so I'm not stealing any thunder here.
But they're really phenomenal apps
that are very effective at what they do.
They look great, they're awesome to use,
and most importantly, they're highly reputable.
>> Yeah.
>> Alan has personally rolled out
more than 80 apps for this organization
and that number's probably already out of date.
>> Eighty? Wow.
>> Eighty, eight zero.
>> My devs, have you written 80 apps?
Because I haven't.
>> This is in about the last 18 months or so.
>> Wow. Eighteen-month period, 80?
>> Eight zero, 80. Wow.
>> But what's even cooler about that is now, he's
empowered lots of other people to do this as well.
So Alan has templatized and he has figured out how to
build kits apart and adapt training programs.
He can get people productive in a few weeks and get them building
apps in a few days even without experience in this area,
and they're quite impactful apps,
they are doing fairly sophisticated things.
>> So it's actually scaled.
>> Yes, absolutely.
>> He scaled this knowledge that he originally took.
and made it available to everyone else.
I think that's an amazing story for those people watching,
that this isn't just about
finding a citizen developer Internet org.
It's very much about scaling that knowledge so there's going to be
more people like that that will then enable everyone else.
>> You got it.
>> Having IT deploy these apps to the right people.
>> You got it. So if we come back around to this relationship,
what brought this whole organization around it
including these other characters is realizing, wait a minute,
maybe you can build real things here.
Maybe if we encourage it and empower it and enable it,
something special can happen in this organization.
That's exactly what has happened.
Ladd now runs
the Center of Excellence for Power Platform in Schlumberger.
>> Wow.
>> Still has 50 or 60 professionals
who still don't know how to write code,
but there's not doing every project from
scratch full stack anymore.
They are writing APIs and exposing them to the right users.
>> That's right.
>> They're writing building blocks.
They're monitoring using the governance tools.
They're figuring out which projects are fine
for an individual in their department to own on their own.
>> That's right.
>> Because 20 people are going to
use it and I don't need to manage that
any more than IT manages this PowerPoint presentation.
But which tools are going to go to 20,000
people who need access to SAP and need
a governance model and need to move from dev
to test to prod and be automated in Azure DevOps?
I can do all of that on the same platform left to right.
That's part of the new piece
of this and that's what makes it work.
>> I love that.
>> For my dear friend, Dr. No,
this becomes actually a level of visibility
and control and governance that does
not exist in a shadow IT world.
>> That's right.
>> When people are working on the platform,
you see what happens and you are able
to log all of that and audit all of it
and automate things instead of policies and engage and
intervene when you need to in
both a good way and a defensive way.
>> Yes.
>> You just don't get that
with business as usual or you don't get that
pretending and defending against shadow IT and other forms.
>> It's a different mindset, isn't it?
That mindset is a very closed-off,
don't communicate.
>> Yeah.
>> It's like "My job is to block this."
>> Yeah. Imagine if you walk into
a room and people don't want to talk to you.
>> It's awful.
>> Suppose these people are now working together to
go encourage this across the organization,
they hold global hackathons private to just their company.
>> That's right.
>> They've dozens of locations participating, hundreds of people.
The last one, I think they built something like 130 apps in a week.
>> One hundred and thirty apps?
>> Look, did all of those persist?
Were they all amazing? Maybe not.
But some of them actually turned around and save
millions of dollars for their operating units.
>> Amazing.
>> They never would have come to
the traditional foot of an IT developer or a professional.
>> No. They wouldn't have met the bar of the dev shop
at all.
>> Right.
>> Who would have had the confidence as well to even do that?
So it's also about access within the org.
It goes back to the people who repairs windshields.
How are they going to have the confidence to go and say,
"I've got an amazing idea. Where do I put that?"
If you've got an innovation idea,
put it in, but most of them don't.
So this shines a light on those people which is why it's so cool.
>> You got it.
>> So before we let Ryan get back to his customer engagement,
what is a call to action you have for our audience?
>> This is about now, right?
>> Yeah. What do you want everyone to do today?
>> Right now.
>> I want you to meet some of these people, seriously.
>> That's amazing.
>> Sure. Try Power Apps,
use the tools, tinker, build.
>> Do it. Use MS Learn.
>> You people know how to do that,
but I want people to actually also get out of your desk
or your house or your office building
or whatever it is and go actually
meet some of the real humans who are doing this.
Meet a couple of citizen developers in the wild
and you'll find that there is really
a big range of humans across that spectrum.
>> That's right.
>> There are Ladds out there
and Kens out there
and Alans out there
and Clarissas out there
and Manuellas out there
and lots of people who are really doing
amazing things with this platform
from a whole range of walks of life,
some of which are completely non-technical.
I've been a developer for 25 years and this is
just a really powerful way to go
do parts of my job that I never had before.
The user groups are a great way to do that.
They're in dozens of cities.
If there isn't one in your city yet,
it's really easy to start one.
>> Go say I want to create one.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
>> They're quite responsive and it's our mission,
Sarah and I, to make sure that every major city has user groups.
>> Yeah.
>> So she's making a user group-in-a-box sort of thing.
>> Yeah.
>> You don't actually have to be in the box.
>> Not have to be in the box.
>> Oh, no way.
>> User group doesn't have to be in the box either.
>> Yeah, you should be anywhere. In the box,
out the box, on the side of the box.
>> Check those sites. See if there's a user group in
your city because many cities
have them and people don't even know.
>> No. Exactly. So that is amazing. Well, thank you so much.
>> Thank you so much.
>> It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for
what you do and the message you're sending to everybody.
>> Of course.
>> That's amazing.
>> Good project.
>> Cheers.
>> Well, thank you so much.
>> We need all the players.
>> Yeah.
>> All right.
>> Thanks very much for watching
the show and you've got the call to action now.
>> Next time, less code.
>> More power.
>> Bye.
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