April Dunnam, Microsoft

Thank you for tuning in to today’s episode of the Breaking Changes podcast. I’m your host and chief evangelist for Postman, Kin Lane. With Breaking Changes we explore specific topics from the world of APIs, but through the lens of business and engineering leadership. Joining me today we have April Dunnam, Power Platform advocacy lead at Microsoft. April shared with me her frontline view of the low-code, no-code evolution that is happening right now, helping define how business users are putting APIs to work. All right, well, start with the basics: who are you and what do you do, April?

Hey, yeah, so my name is April Dunnam, and I lead the Power Platform developer advocacy team at Microsoft.

So what is it, is that like a special team dedicated to a certain line of business? What do you guys do there?

Yeah, so the Power Platform at Microsoft is our low-code platform for low-code, no-code development. So we have a suite of products ranging from being able to build low-code mobile and desktop applications, to automations and chatbots and dashboard and reporting and all of that. So I’m kind of responsible for the advocacy of that particular suite of tools.

So who are you targeting with that suite of tools? Is it developers, is it non-developers, or is it a mix?

It’s a mix. So one of the things that I love about the Power Platform, and low-code in general, is it can really help your local developers, so business users, citizen devs, whatever you want to call them, but also your traditional developers, code-first pro devs, and even IT pros. So it’s kind of a little bit in there for everyone, and we advocate to all of those different audiences.

And is it targeting specifically integrations and automations with Microsoft products, or does it work with other products as well?

That’s a great question. So even though it is a Microsoft product, and we obviously have integrations into all of our Microsoft services, we also have integrations to over 600 different first- and third-party services as well. So really the possibilities are endless for the integrations that we have in the low-code stack that we offer.

So we hear a lot about low-code, no-code lately, and I know there’s a lot of promises being made about what’s possible. Is it possible for non-developers and business users to actually put this to work, or does it take teamwork to do it? Do you need someone who’s going to help with the technical and someone who’s going to help with the business? How does it usually work when someone’s doing an implementation?

Well, yeah, and that’s another great question, and I would say it really varies on what you’re trying to build. But we’re definitely seeing that this whole concept of what we’re referring to is fusion development and fusion development teams kind of coming into play here. If you’re building enterprise-wide applications, being able to collaborate with the low-code developers, with the code-first developers and IT pros, and working together with the mix of tools, so mixing in maybe some more pro-code type scenarios, like React components or connectors into other APIs, and then also the low-code in things by being able to enable business users to know the process very well to be involved in actually building the process, and be involved in helping with the front end, the UI, the UX of the process and all of that. So it’s really kind of like a team — we’re seeing the fusion development teams pop up to really scale out some of the solutions that you build with low-code tech.

Really sounds like the sweet spot, because developers are often really good at their job, but when they put their blinders on they’re not really paying attention to the bigger business picture. So it sounds like kind of the sweet spot of having them working together with the optimal business outcome as well as covering all the technical bases. So it’s not just no-code, I guess that’s why it’s called low-code too, there’s still potentially coding that’s needed, but it seems like once you get your environment and your world set up with the APIs that you need and the services you’re using, it could really empower business users to do a lot without needing too much code.

Yeah, exactly, and that is the reason why we don’t really call it a no-code platform. Although there are some things you can do, drag and drop, but it really is low-code, because we do have all these integrations into traditional code mechanisms, whether it’s through the APIs, through being able to integrate with ALM, GitHub and DevOps and all that, to really automate your builds and your development lifecycle. So yeah, it’s a matter of everyone working together to really build these scalable solutions, and allowing the traditional developer audience to really focus on what they actually want to focus on, maybe some of the back-end integration pieces, the APIs, rather than having to worry about how maybe necessarily the front end should look, because that’s something that citizen developers and business users can really help with with some of these low-code tools.

Yeah, it seems like it’s a good place for, as a developer, me, I could specialize in APIs and really be good at adding new APIs and the API integrations, and then me as a business user I could specialize in connecting up workflows and doing different things with popular app suites, SaaS services that I could really find a way to specialize in that. And I really like the fusion development, that’s a new phrase to me, I think I like that better than low-code, no-code, because I find low-code, no-code to be a mouthful and fusion development sounds a little bit more at what we’re trying to get at and make happen.

So when it comes to developer relations, what do you do, how do you get people’s attention as part of this? What are the tools, the tricks, what are you out there doing each day to get people’s attention and get them engaged, not just get their attention but actually get them using it?

Yeah, I mean, kind of one of the best jobs in the world I think, being developer relations. It’s a lot of just general engagement with the community, whether it’s through different user groups, social media, just chatting with them, figuring out like, what solutions are they trying to build, what problems are they seeing that need to be addressed, and then it’s a lot of video. I have an active YouTube channel, we do a lot of video through our Microsoft channels as well. So it’s a lot of getting the message out through demos, real-life use cases, showing people what you can actually do with low-code, no-code, and what are some use cases of this fusion development in action, and what are other companies building, what are some ideas just to get the gears rolling in your head of what you can do with it and the power. And making sure that we have the documentation once they want to start building to back it up too. So that’s typically what we do on a day-to-day basis here.

Yeah, I love — I have kind of, I don’t know if I’d call it ADD, I don’t want to get clinical on it, but like I’m “ooh, new thing, new thing.” I really like — that’s why I like APIs, because you get to do a lot of different things, and I like evangelism and advocacy because you get to focus on different problems and help people solve things, and you can do a mix of things each week. I could be doing healthcare one week, I could be doing environmental data another, and I just find it keeps me interesting, and with the podcast I get to talk to folks like you. We just did one that was on UX and DX and trying to make our apps and our APIs as easy to use as possible. So I like that diversity of it.

Is there — what does the feedback loop look like? How do you — I mean, you watch social media channels, do you talk to Microsoft customers? How do you get your ideas and keep it grounded in the problems people are facing?

Yeah, it’s a lot of social media, it’s a lot of talking to some of the customers that are building these big solutions on the platform. Lots of hackathons are a great way to kind of get that real feedback of people that might not have used the platform before going through exercises trying to build something and identifying any pain points or opportunities for improvement there. So it’s a lot of that, and then yeah, I’m having regular syncs with engineering and everything to make sure that the feedback is being heard and making its way into the product if need be.

And how do APIs make their way into this? Do you guys go out and find new APIs, or usually someone’s like, “hey, I need to integrate with Notion or something like that,” they’ll bring the API to you, or do you guys go out and find new API integrations ahead of time?

It’s a little bit of both, yeah. So one of the things that we have that we rely on is our power users forum, so we have a whole ideas section on there where lots of people can request like, “I would love to be able to integrate with this particular API,” and we kind of monitor that, and it helps move up in the priority list. And so companies themselves that own the API can build APIs and we can get those in product, but another avenue that we recently released and are exploring is what we’re calling the independent publisher connector program. This is really giving the community itself an opportunity to build their own connectors to various APIs and get those inside of the product and verified.

Oh yeah, I can see a huge opportunity around that. As a small API provider, I do one or two things really well, and this would open up a whole new marketplace of possibilities for me to be able to plug those into a whole world of people looking to put that to work. So yeah, I can see that being pretty valuable. Is there any sort of analytics, visibility, observability to this? So we build out these workflows and connections, how do I see what’s happening when those are actually working?

Yeah, that’s one of the things with the Power Platform that we offer, is lots of built-in analytics through the admin center. So you can see how often a particular connector is being used and integrations into an API, and what kind of scenarios are being used, like what’s the most common trigger for that, is it when something is added to like say a file repository, whatever it might be, and then also what subsequent actions to that API are being used the most, and of course troubleshooting any errors that might pop up as well. So we do have lots of good analytics built right in, and insights to be able to troubleshoot and identify the usage of those.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, because you don’t just integrate with an API and then it’s done, things change, things evolve, things break, you have issues. So being able to see that and then respond to it is pretty key. So I feel like tools like what you represent here are going to augment us, it’s kind of the exoskeleton for the business user in a virtual sense, provide us with all these things that we can do, we can automate to improve what we do on a daily basis, and actually make us more effective in our jobs, do more with less, all the things that our bosses want to see from us. One thing that’s really being applied to do that is artificial intelligence and machine learning. Do you guys have any sort of AI or ML layers built in?

Yeah, absolutely, and that’s a big area that we’re really focusing on. So we have baked into the whole Power Platform stack something called AI Builder, so it’s basically taking a subset of some pre-built AI models where you can just plug and play, so you can drag and drop, train your model without having to do anything else. We’ve recently announced integration with Lobe as well, to be able to pull in some of your models from there. So things like being able to do forms detection, being able to upload an invoice and have it automatically extract some of the data from that invoice and train the model that way, things like object detection and predictive text analysis, and all these different pre-built models that we have baked in with AI. And then, we talk about it’s low-code and being able to have a fusion development approach, we have the ability to extend that as well, so being able to have a traditional developer come in and integrate with cognitive services if there’s something outside the scope of what we offer in AI Builder, where that’s kind of more plug and play, that you need to do. Well, we can always integrate that and extend that with some of those technologies.

Yeah, I like that, because I’ve done quite a few projects with machine learning, and it’s not easy to get set up, and it’s not easy to deal with the compute, the GPUs, all the technical details. And I could see — I feel like that’s how we’re going to get to the next level, because there’s just not enough ML developers out there, we need that platform enablement, I would say, to help make it easier, reduce the friction when it comes to applying these, training them, and then there’s just so many opportunities to start applying them as they’re easier to use like that.

So one of the areas when it comes to low-code, no-code or fusion development that I’m seeing the biggest opportunity around is this COVID reality we live in, but also I would say this remote-first reality that is going to be just pretty much the default now. So what are examples of using the platform that you’ve seen being applied either as part of the COVID reality or just this remote-first reality that we find ourselves in?

Yeah, I mean, so there’s so many things going back there, right? With low-code, no-code, one of the things we’re trying to figure out is how do we handle, especially early on, like how many people are coming down with COVID, how do we manage shutting down an office and then returning to work? So we actually saw quite a big increase in adoption of the Power Platform during this time, because people quickly needed to set up some kind of solution. There wasn’t out-of-the-box solutions there for handling a pandemic, I mean, that’s just something that wasn’t really a thing until it became a thing and we needed it pretty quick. So you mentioned earlier there’s not enough AI, ML developers, well, there’s just not enough developers in general, we’re seeing a big gap in needing more developers to be able to meet the demand, especially since the pandemic. So that’s where low-code tech like the Power Platform really had a chance to shine, because you’re able to quickly stand up a solution to say, track how many people in your organization have COVID, to be able to have them do health attestations if they want to get into the office, to be able to go reserve a guest so you can have social distancing and stuff. So all these solutions able to be built really fast and efficiently using low-code tech and those fusion dev approaches. And in fact a lot of the vaccine portals that you saw were built using Power Apps Portals, our kind of a web product that we offer for the Power Platform and low-code development. So a lot of innovation and usage of low-code tech came out of the whole pandemic for sure.

Yeah, so this is interesting, I heard you mention this several times now, so this isn’t just low-code integrations and moving data around and syncing, this is actually publishing and presenting portals and single-page applications, and making it interactive widgets, different things like that. This is actually presentation and user interface as well.

Yeah, exactly. With the Power Platform we have so many tools, so whether you’re needing to build internal applications for your company, but then yeah, the public-facing element of it with Power Apps Portals, with Power BI, a lot of the dashboards you saw during the pandemic as well, if like COVID cases in the area, those were Power BI dashboards for data and analytics. So yeah, any solution you’re trying to build, there’s a low-code way to accomplish it.

Yeah, well, I like the low-code aspect. I’ve been dreading — I’m a web developer for a lot of years, web applications, but really dreading having to learn React. I really don’t want to go there, I would rather have a platform enable me and help me figure it out so I don’t actually have to do it. But I feel like there’s a lot of industry opportunities, because I did a lot of studying of the Salesforce ecosystem, it was one of the original — I think 2010 to 2015 where I was studying, like, what is this API thing that’s happening, and I studied from 2000 on, and there was a lot of pro users in the Salesforce API ecosystem that were not developers, but they knew their business domain and they weren’t afraid of technology. So it feels like this is kind of the next generation of that reality. Where do people go if you want to step up and be one of these new types of developers? Because, like you mentioned, there’s only so many developers, there’s like 40 million to 50 million developers in the world, and that’s just not enough, and I feel like if we’re going to get to that next level we’ve got to enable these folks. So how do they get plugged in, how do they figure it all out?

Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question. I think that’s something that we really need to tackle, there’s not enough developers, and even if — we can’t just expect everyone in school to want to become a developer, right? So how do we advocate and let people know that there’s avenues where you can build solutions and get into tech with maybe not having to go down the traditional route of learning a programming language, getting a CS degree? So I think it’s something that we need to do early on and do some outreach in middle school, high school, and let people know that this is something, low-code technology, that you can make a career out of, you don’t have to go the traditional programming route, you can build really robust, complex solutions, there’s a place for you there. On the Power Platform alone, on my team, one of the things that we track is the job opportunities that are out there, so we kind of monitor LinkedIn and see the new opportunities where people are looking for Power Platform developers. That’s something that didn’t exist five years ago, you didn’t see job opportunities for Power Platform developers. So we’re seeing new and emerging jobs become a thing because of low-code technologies. So I think it’s just important to get the message out that this is an area that’s growing and is going to become even more important as time goes on, because we have to be able to meet the app demand, low-code is a way to do it, and this is a valid career path that you can really be successful and creative in.

Cool, well, I appreciate this time today, and we’ll definitely make something like that happen, figure out some other angles. We’re going to put this on the track to become a full episode of Breaking Changes, but we also have these TLDR episodes that are like 10-minute shorts, so I’m probably going to reach out to you, maybe grab you for a few of those occasionally. If you have specific ones that you would love to do, feel free to reach out to me, I would love to see more examples of the Power Platform in action and talk through it. But until then, I appreciate your time today.

Thank you so much for having me, it’s really fun to chat.

Thanks, April. Thanks again to April for stopping by. For more from April you can find her on sharepointsiren.com and Microsoft’s Power Platform at powerplatform.microsoft.com. You can subscribe to the Breaking Changes podcast at postman.com/events/breaking-changes. I’m your host Kin Lane, and until next time, cheers.