 Hey, this is Christian Buckley doing another MVP buzz chat and I'm talking today with Amanda. Hello. Hello. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you. And for folks that don't know you, who are you, where are you, and what do you do? Okay, so my name is Amanda Steiner, and I was going to say Office Apps, but it's not called it. It's M365 Apps and Services MVP, and I do mostly marks of teams, but you mean it's part of the whole M365 ecosystem? So I do, usually I say, to my friends and family customers, everything besides coding. I like to try a little bit of everything and yeah, a mix. And I'm from Stockholm, Sweden, so a few hours away from Christian. Yeah, a few hours. I love Stockholm and as I saw one of my kids is fluent in Swedish, so every once in a while I have him say something. Yeah, he lived over there for a couple years, so but yeah, he was over in the, see he didn't get as far south as Malmö. He was started in, now I can't remember the name, but he's over on the western side of the country. Maybe like Gothenburg? Gothenburg? I think so, yes, yes. Yeah. So and he moved around a little bit, but yeah it's, what I love is that his experience is first, he's first apartment over there, and we'd always joke because he was learning the language here, like we need to go hang out at Ikea and we'd kind of laugh about it. His first apartment, the view out of his window was across the road was in Ikea, so. I mean Ikea, it's a suite, we're born with it, and yeah. Well it's an institution here, so and it's like Costco has their hot dogs, Ikea has their meatballs, and. We just got Costco to Sweden, so I have to try that. Well you gotta go do the hot dog and soda, I mean here it's a buck fifty, so it's like you can't beat it for cheap filling lunch, but. I have to try it. Yeah, well so tell me a little bit about, so you focused on teams, kind of what's your role, what's your day job? My day job is, like I said, I mean I get bored if I had like one specific role, so I tend to do all different kinds of pieces, so if my current project I'm doing like training, messages program, but I'm also right now working with how you should work with apps in M365, like how you should order them, and like the governance part, and so I want to do a little bit of everything. That, hey I'm the same way, there's a benefit of, you know, when you ask somebody about, you know, M365 apps and services, MVPs, we are striped across all of those areas, and so you can have somebody who might be an outlook, or a PowerPoint MVP, or a SharePoint MVP, and you have others that, like I'm a collaboration technology expert, like that's my background for most of my career, and that stripes across several different products, several different workloads. Yeah, just having a platform that can make your day-to-day job and life easier, and like one million different kind of ways it can help you, and I like that. Yep, I love that too. Well, so what was your path to becoming an MVP? My path to becoming an MVP started when I started working a few years ago, and I had my boss, he was an MVP, and I thought he was amazing, he was so inspiring, he was that kind of person, and still is, we haven't been working with each other for a couple of years. Super talented, he, it felt like he knew everything, but he always had time to help, and that really inspired me, people that are, that want to help each other, even though that they probably like don't have time, because they're like everywhere and doing so many different things. So that inspired me back then, but it felt really hard to come me as a, like fresh in my career to a product share point that, I mean, people have been working with it since forever, what was I going to come in and do with that. So I post that, post the idea of like starting blogging and trying to do those kind of things, and then Microsoft Teams came, and I felt perfect. Now I have a fresh new product, everybody asks, this is fresh as me, and let's try blogging, because I mean, I like blogging, I like blogging, and that's how I started. So I started just to blog for normal people doing normal Teams things, and yeah, at the moment, I felt there was a lot of blogs and like very good content out there, but it felt like a lot of it was really like IT pro focused and not the ordinary user doing ordinary user stuff. So that's, that's where it started back in, it sounds like it was like one million years ago, but it was in 2018, I think, or 19. So not that long ago. We have a pandemic year, so it's kind of like dog years, you know, it's much longer. But that's great, I mean, when I became an MVP back in January of 2012, I mean, one of the things that there was, it was kind of a thing that there were now a handful of us that were non-technical MVPs. Now I've been working in technology my entire career for over 30 years, but always in project management, business analysts, operations management roles, but always in technology organizations. Two degrees in marketing and never really was in a marketing role was always in these technical roles. But it was because I saw the same gap in content in speakers at events. Now you see many more of us that are end user and power user focus that are still not IT pro admin focused that are, you know, so a lot of the productivity tips that I write about are things that I found something that I use in my own day to day. And this is a great thing. Everybody should come and take a look at it. Are there other, like I just, I just did this the last couple weeks, two or three posts on productivity tips. I had somebody reach out and it's like, yeah, that's been out there for a while. I said, well, I know, but I just found it. Exactly. Exactly. And a lot of other people are like, this is great and re-sharing it. Same thing, like we just found it, you know, but then it's my perspective. My, here's the scenarios where I found it useful. So that is, that's valid content to have out there. Yeah. Yeah. And I really liked that. That's, I mean, I learned new things every day, even from my customers as well. Like last week, I learned about this quick mute button in like teams meeting when you did and you press the control middle. I didn't know about that. I mean, I, I learned new things every day as well. And that's, that's amazing that no one is 100% known as well. We can always learn from each other. Yep. Well, and there's, the other aspects too is that, you know, there's so much content that's out there. The answer is not, hey, we need to have less people writing. No, we need better filters. We need better, you know, but, but you look around within the community, find trusted voices. And there's people who are in your industry that have similar likes and dislikes and things that are out there that you might appreciate their blog post on that same topic that you wrote. I might have written about the same thing. So yeah, we need more content and then people need to spend more time kind of filtering through and finding the things that they like and are comfortable with and yeah. Sometimes when like, when I talk to people and I've had the same feelings that where should I blog when there are so many bloggers, but there's always room for more because everybody has a different voice. And I think there's always room for people putting out content. And I mean, I blog, I don't know, 50, 50, but a lot of, a big reason is because I want to remember what I'm doing and like inviting while I'm testing and That's something I read an article, wow, more than 15 years ago, trying to think I might have, but it was a Microsoft researcher and he was working with Stanford University. I think he was based out of San Francisco. So somewhere out of the San Francisco Bay Area. It was an older gentleman. He was like in his 70s, I think, but writing about how he was capturing everything that he did in storing, I mean, every month petabytes of information. He had cameras, it was capturing like physical documents that he's working on as well as everything digital. And it was he was studying like the human brain and how much you retain and lose. And I just was inspired by that article and being in the collaboration technology space and information management and capturing all this information. And kind of the early days of some of the machine learning and AI capabilities with the with the web. So this is early 2000s. And I started, you know, so I started my blog in 2004, this one, I think in February of 2004. And it was exactly what you described. It was more for me just to retain like what was I working on? What were my thoughts on those things? Then I started using OneNote doing it the same way. I blog and capture and share things. But it was much about me working through a problem or working through an idea and then sharing that out there, but then in capturing everything else. So it's like an extension of my brain. Yeah, but it's really, it's really cool. And I very often read other people's blog posts and get like inspired, like, oh, I want to try that. And I want to like test it my own way and just creativity feeds creativity. Yeah. Well, innovation feeds innovation. Yeah. So it usually like great ideas don't just like spark like, hey, I have nothing and suddenly had this brilliant idea. It's usually it's an iterative process. That's why I love collaboration technology. You and I might be working on it. And what we come up with having work together will be different than what either one of us might have come up with on our own. Yeah. I use sometimes I say like super super cheesy code to know no person is an island. So I mean, we work together, things become better. Exactly. Well, I'm sure you've had people that have come up to you and asked about, you know, like recommendations for if they're interested in becoming an MVP. What's your guidance for somebody that is interested in investigating the program? Yeah, I think like, like I said, I started my blog. And in the beginning, I was a really good blogger blogged a lot. Now I blog very seldom. I need to get like inspiration and then I write something. But I think starting becoming active in the community, like it easily sucks you into a lot of different things. So I started my blog. And I contacted another Swedish MVP who he was the first like teams MVP in Sweden. And I said, Hey, like, how does this work? Let's let's do some things. And he started to invite me to things. And like my community grew bigger. And just when you start doing community activities, you will get sucked into a lot of different things. And if you just come on and and it should be fun. Everything should be fun. So start start doing something that you enjoy for Microsoft technology. And if you enjoy it, it will just it will just follow along. It feels like I'm going to remember that my next conversation with my manager be like, you know what, this is not as fun as I thought. I'd like to do this. Yeah, I actually sometimes say that at my like, at my clients, but not not every time, but sometimes, but I think that's really important for like being an MVP and doing this because it takes a lot of time and it should only be fun. I try to try not to do things just because I only do things that I that I enjoy because I mean, otherwise I could spend time with my family instead of my like internet buddy. Yeah, but it I mean, look, everybody has hobbies and sometimes they're in in the you know, the house sometimes they're out of the house. But it should be things that you enjoy doing. And so I just had this conversation yesterday with somebody talking to this exact same thing. It's it's like I like I blogging is a hobby for me and creating videos. I do AMAs. I know that that kind of stuff is just it's what I enjoy doing. If my we're empty nesters, if my wife is is gone, it's just me and the dog here on a Saturday and I'm I'm like what I'm going to do for the next couple hours and I'm I think about technology and I'm reading up on things and right jotting down my thoughts about things. It's become it's my hobby to go and do those things on the community side, because like, like most MVPs of like, I'm not doing it during working hours. It's well, actually, I am recording this during work hours right now. But besides, but it's so hard. So hard to like explain to friends that like don't work with tech at all. Like I I run a conference with a couple of community buddies, about Microsoft Teams, of course. And and and they're like, yeah, so it's for work. I'm like, no, it's it's what I work with. But it's not for work. It's on my free time. But I work with the same thing. And they had like a really hard time to understand like, so why are you putting a lot of time into it's not your work, but you work with it. But you find it fun. Like, yeah, it's yeah, I enjoy it. Yeah. Again, that's kind of the profile of of MVPs. It's that there's a I also describe it as like I for many years was a runner and that runner's high. And you get a very similar experience that runners high off of helping other people solve problems, directing them to useful technology, putting together same thing, I've organized many events and getting ready. We're starting our planning for our collab days event in February again. So the planning is underway. Yeah, so always a lot to do a lot of opportunity that's out there. And you need to find people who are you need to be passionate about, you know, one or more technology areas to kind of do this. But it is fun. I mean, it is really fun. I met so many great people and people that like share share the same interest that I don't share with other friends. And it's it's nice. It's nice to get into know people online. And then like the first time you meet face to face is like, wow, is this you? There's a yeah, there's a lot of people where you you look at their Twitter profile and you'd be like, did we have we met or something? No, I've just seen your face on your Twitter profile for years. And we finally meet in person. I just had that experience in June, people that I felt like I knew I was over in the UK in June. And no, it was these some of these people was the first time I'd ever seen them in person. But it's super weird. It's super weird. And like some people some people you have on Twitter and it feels like you interact a lot. But maybe maybe I'm just reading their posts and liking and they have no idea who I am. So it's just it's it's really weird. But it's nice. It's always nice putting an actual face behind a stalker on, you know, social. But well, Amanda, really appreciate your time and getting to know you for these few minutes. But for folks that want to get in touch and find you, what are the best ways to reach you? I think the best ways to reach me is Twitter, maybe not LinkedIn, but I am at LinkedIn and I post there sometimes on my blog. So we'll have the links, of course, to your blog and those resources out on the blog posted on the YouTube description as well. And hopefully, are you at ESPC next month or yeah, I'll see you there to be my my like first three session, the post pandemic. So that would be exciting me and Carolina Katka, my Finnish lovely MVP friend, we're doing a session together. So that would be really fun. That's exciting. Well, I'll see you there. I'll be there and I'm part of the community reporters as well. So I think I'll be in the expo hall in the community reporter booth much of the week. But I'll see you out there. Oh, then see you in Copenhagen in a couple of weeks.