Building a Tech Community Inspired by History and Inclusivity with Angeliki Patsiavou

Mark Smith: 0:06
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from London, england. She works at Avanade as a Senior Consultant Dynamics 365 and Customer Engagement. She was first awarded her MVP in 2023. Customer engagement she was first awarded her mvp in 2023 and she speaks at microsoft community events. She is an advocate as a uh, human evangelist about user-centered design. Now, that is such a topic dear to my heart. Um, she's also into enabling governance. She's got skills that build across diverse teams, particularly fusion teams and empowering users. You can find links to her bio. Show notes is where you'll find those. Social media, et cetera will all be there and with that, welcome to the show, angeliki.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 1:21
Hi Mark, Thanks for having me.

Mark Smith: 1:23
Good to have you on the show and to see you again, because it's only been what Slovenia? Since I last saw you in person. So good to see you again and catch up on your story, because I think you've got an interesting story and it'll be good to tell people that story. So let's start with food, family and fun. What do they mean to you?

Angeliki Patsiavou: 1:46
Well, it's a very deep question for me. I'm Mediterranean. I'm actually half Greek, half Italian, so, as you can imagine, all of these things mean quite a lot. Mediterranean countries are those kind of beautiful, sunshine places where food for us is a massive bonding factor, is a factor where we socialize and come together. So you can definitely call me a foodie, and with high expectations as well. So, equally, family means a lot as well. I actually have my parents visiting me as we speak and our puppy, who is my designated colleague for the month, which is amazing and it's interesting, I think. The concept of family because it's, you know, our blood ties are important, but what I found through the community is the concept of tribe and it feels like an adopted family. So it means for me even more because it binds us through the passion and the energy that we bring and the connections that we make.

Mark Smith: 2:49
It's so, so, so true. Tell me. And I mean heck, I've been able to travel the world with the MVP program and find every city I've gone to. I remember Jonas Rapp when I went to Sweden, took me out to lunch. Never met the guy before. Outside of that. It was just, yeah, amazing and just very. The family spirit is very strong in the community. Tell us about your name.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 3:18
Sure. So my full name is Angeliki Patsiavo, a very long traditional Greek name actually, and I was born and raised in Greece, but thankfully my mom, who is the Italian in the equation, raised me bilingual and always kept my Italian family ties quite close. I actually went to Italy for most summers of my life as well, so I very much feel an equal half and half and, funny enough, even though I have a Greek name and I speak all these different languages, I don't think I look necessarily like either, or because I have very fair skin as a result and I don't actually tan somehow. I probably don't look like most Mediterranean's, but definitely have it in my blood.

Mark Smith: 4:12
That's awesome. You said you holidayed a lot in Italy, where Where's your favorite?

Angeliki Patsiavou: 4:17
Sicily, sicily, so by the coast, which has been such a blessing. The south of Italy, in my opinion, is one of the best places to be the people the food, the climate and also the variety you will find in terms of destinations. I can't recommend it enough to people.

Mark Smith: 4:35
I've not been lower than Rome, so I've done a lot of northern Italy. It's my wife and my favorite country of all that we've been to. We've been to about 40, getting close to 50 countries, but Italy is our number one choice by a long shot. And we intended to go and stay for a month in Corfu, down the very south of and then, when we had our second baby and then we realised travelling across the world with you know, somebody under the age of three months old was not going to work, so we did not do that. But yeah, we'll be back in Italy, hopefully next year for a month, which will be nice.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 5:21
Oh, I can only imagine. And if you ever need tips, you know where, where to find me.

Mark Smith: 5:25
I know where to find you, so tell me a bit about. First of all, tell me a bit about your origin story and how you got into tech gosh it's.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 5:37
It's such a whirlwind. Um. Unlike many um people, I don't have a traditional technical background or a computer science degree of any sort or programming like none of these things. I was always a math geek. Very early on in school I knew I loved math, but I also knew that I wasn't going to do a math degree because I didn't necessarily want to get into teaching or research of any sort. So the next best for me was economics. So academically speaking, I'm actually an economist and I did five years of that.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 6:09
I did a four-year bachelor in Greece, then came to London, which is how I ended up in London to begin with to do my master's a very hardcore one as well and this was my introduction to tech. I had to teach myself R for my thesis, so you know nothing too crazy, just very advanced programming in a month, and I fell in love with it so much and it became a bit of a flag for me that I enjoy that more than the rest. It won me over to the point where I felt, okay, I'm young enough, it's potentially a good idea to take a bit of a leap of faith and an exciting risk to go into tech as my first job and out of all places, I went into online gambling. And so I mean, I was recruited out of uni in a CRM role. I didn't know what CRM was at the time, I just knew it was going to be a tech role.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 7:06
I was excited. I was really into behavioral economics and I thought it must be quite fascinating to work in a marketing department in a company, in a place where you're pretty much understanding human behavior under completely random circumstances or risk, under completely random circumstances at risk, and I thought, okay, that's going to be fun. And somehow CRM finds me. It was in half CRM, nothing in terms of major operators, but ultimately I enjoyed it so much I realized that that was it. Somehow, and very early on, crm became a love language, which I know sounds cheesy, but it somehow happened.

Mark Smith: 7:45
I get it. I get it Because I found that over 20 years ago when I first touched what was called MSCRM back then and I was just like I didn't know I was going to take over my career, but I did literally fall in love with it and the ease of use and what you could do and what you create was amazing. So online gambling and I nod my head because you know, I've been to Malta and I've seen, you know the setups there. I've been to Gibraltar and, of course, that's a big location for online gambling- those are both the meccas.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 8:27
All the operators are mainly licensed there and, funny enough, I got to travel a lot in those destinations because of that. So it was some exciting early 20s.

Mark Smith: 8:37
Yeah, and was it? Is it really because you know you see the external um, you know you can watch online gambling so extensively, you know it's a spectator sport and um, and particularly I suppose covid, really expanded it massively, but when you were involved was it really kind of flashy, exciting, uh, what was it like working?

Angeliki Patsiavou: 9:06
it. It had its excitement. Let me tell you this. I do want to dispel certain myths, because people's reaction is quite interesting when I tell them my origins. They expect I was some kind of professional poker player for some reason. I'm not sure why, but there's certain myths around. You know, it's all rigged, it's all about the house winning or whatever kind of negative connotations, or maybe it's not as exciting and it's all about, you know, just very depressive situations. But in fact it was very flashy in the sense that it was extremely technologically advanced.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 9:46
The things that I was exposed to very early on in my career we're talking about 11 years ago were so ahead of its time. I absolutely loved it. I learned a lot of my skills back then, things that I sometimes have not even seen now. They were very advanced. I think I was also blessed that I worked particularly for one company who ended up being now one of the biggest giants globally and they had invested a lot in their stack and it was actually quite impressive to be a techie at that time.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 10:20
It was all about really exciting integrations. Real time was very important because it is the kind of industry, especially on the sports side, because I was also partly on the sports side, where you have to be very reactive in real time, you have to be competitive. It's very similar to actually being on the stock market because you are trading prices, and it was very exciting being a marketeer who had to think and operate so much in real time and had all the tools she needed as well. I think that was probably one of the few roles I've ever had in my life where I never felt like I had the wrong tools or the wrong implementation, so I was a little bit spoiled as well.

Mark Smith: 10:59
You're right about the advancements. Years ago in my career I was in Hong Kong with the Hong Kong Jockey Club, which of course is the biggest funder of all public events, schools, everything. Because they were set up as the only official gambling mechanism under the British government when they were, you know, had colonized that region and so a phenomenal amount of money you would transact every race day, and so we're involved with them. And then that also had us in, because the regionally to go across to macau in china and the and it was all work in the casinos and this, the data points that they had on people, was off the richter scale. They could tell a, a individual coming in from China with his family. They would know the minute he got on the train, even though that train trip might be like 400 miles away.

Mark Smith: 11:58
When he got off, they knew kind of what his gambling profile was. They had somebody come and, if you like, chaperone his wife and kids and take them as far away from him as possible, because that would affect his ability to gamble. And then because of the tax laws, they couldn't take their money back into the mainland China, so to speak. And so they had then all the luxury brands in the world in the casino which they could go and spend everything that they kind of earned, um, and so the whole flush of money was they had the ability to understand the individual's wallet and how much they had depleted it and how much was left, and how to give them that dopamine spike on, you know, if he, if they sensed he was going to stop, you know, gambling, and also how to make him just have the most amazing weekend of his life.

Mark Smith: 12:57
Um, and how they set that all up was all intensive data. That was then, um, you know, positioned out to the right people at the right time over the casino. It's just phenomenal, mind-blowing. And this was, as you say, this is 10, 15 years ago. The tech was amazing.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 13:19
Even early on. I can't even imagine what's happening these days. It's actually a very interesting market here in the UK. I remember when I was starting off, someone told me there's over 300 online operators. It's mad. You know the competition that you're facing, the diversification that you have to expose yourself to and also the regulation. So, in fact, because I started there and I was so heavily regulated, funny enough, after doing a few rounds and a few roles, I moved into finance and I remember, even in my interviews because they were like, ok, but how do you think you're going to operate in an extremely regulated and pressure environment? I said, well, I'm already doing it. Whatever you have, I have equal amounts of regulation and pressure where I am probably sometimes more. So it's fascinating to see it from the inside in terms of how things actually work, especially on their version of the trading floor.

Mark Smith: 14:20
Yeah, it was interesting in what I saw. Uk tax office made a mistake in driving so much of the gambling outside of the UK to start with, which meant they set up in places like Gibraltar and Malta and things like this, and so then they realized that hang on a second, we're missing out on all that tax. That was a silly thing to do. We should have embraced them back in the UK, and I mean, at the end of the day, the UK are the masters in the world of I don't know if I'm allowed to say money laundering or washing money through particularly the city of London, at a global scale. So they've always done well in the handling or the receiving of money from their operations, right through from colonial times.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 15:09
Quite a history lesson, there, isn't it?

Mark Smith: 15:10

Yeah, their operations right through from colonial times. Quite a history lesson, there, isn't it? Yeah, and I just want to put that out there because I'll see if I get any people feedback on that comment. Tell me about STEM. What are you doing to you know STEM, IT careers, that type of thing? What are you seeing about the next generations coming through in this space?

Angeliki Patsiavou: 15:27
I think there's an insane amount of opportunity, but I also think that we have a responsibility as the community, as people in tech, as people who have been fortunate enough to have certain blessings and opportunities. I think there's a lot we can and should be doing. So I grew up in a very traditional Mediterranean country and, growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, I didn't have many opportunities to be exposed to tech. There was very particular kind of routes that you could take and the schooling system did not necessarily gear you up to a traditional kind of tech degree. I remember when I was doing a little bit of programming back in high school. It was just so basic and you know we're hearing about things like COBOL and I was thinking well, that doesn't really fill up to date with what we should be learning, and I wish that I had more opportunities back then, both in terms of actual teaching but also to be to feel inspired that there was role models out there where I could think this is a young woman I could aspire to, and lacking those role models early on in my life made me realize that there is an importance for us to become those role models, and not just in terms of. Here's what a successful techie looks like that has achieved a certain seniority level or pay grade or whatever kind of standards. I'm thinking more how can you be a relatable role model that is a tiering and relatable in terms of that kind of diversity piece so, for example, embracing maybe being on the spectrum or embracing having a diverse, non-technical background, and still inspire people to get into tech? That it's not a battery, it's actually a celebration, um so things like that, and I realized how important it was, since I didn't have those models early on, that I could, um, inspire the next generation.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 17:25
A few ago I met in one of the South Coast summits the lady who heads up learning for the National Museum of Computing and it was such a serendipitous moment. She was at the audience of one of my panels and we were talking about the importance of women in tech and I remember she asked a question the whole audience is still because she was just so fascinating in the way she spoke and I got to know her. I got to know what the museum does and, for those that might not be aware of that name, they definitely know Bletchley Park and World War II and the importance that holds. Essentially it's part of the same general organization. No-transcript.

Mark Smith: 19:03
You mentioned Bletchley Park there, Just for our international listeners. Do you want to explain what that is?

Angeliki Patsiavou: 19:10
Of course. So this is hopefully we have some history buffs out there. So Bletchley Park is a very historical place. When it comes to World War II, some people may have heard of Alan Turing or the Enigma Machine. This was where the infamous code breaking started when in World War II, they were fighting against the Germans and the Enigma Machine, and how they broke eventually the code through all the amazing academics, including, but not limited to, alan Turing, or all the fantastic female linguists and whatnot. So this is one of the famous places that started it all. It was actually classified until only a handful not a handful, but not too many years ago and now that's how we know its history, are able to visit it and appreciate the real machines that are still there today to learn about the history and see it come to life.

Mark Smith: 20:10
But does Microsoft have a presence here as well?

Angeliki Patsiavou: 20:13
So they support the National Museum of Computing? Yes, and I was actually. When I first entered the MVP program, I was already involved with a museum and I remember in my own boarding call Claire Smith, our UK lead, mentioning and I thought, oh my days, how did I not know this already? That's such a beautiful coincidence. So, yeah, there's definitely support and I'm really glad because the kind of impact they have on these young kids is priceless.

Mark Smith: 20:47
London, you know, recently for that Slovenia trip and stuff. There was lots of mention of Bletchley Park by people in the room, as though there was some user group activities happening out there or that type of thing as well, and that's. I was ignorant to the name prior to that.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 20:58
Yes, there is actually a user group that some of our friends here in the UK are running. So Stephanie Stacey, louis Bapert and Chris Handingford, among others, are running. So Stephanie Stacey, louis Bapert and Chris Handingford, among others, are running the user group and supporting it in so many ways. So that's one of the reasons why you probably heard it.

Mark Smith: 21:15
Awesome, awesome. Tell us about your work in the co-pilot space. What are you up to there?

Angeliki Patsiavou: 21:28
So, on a personal slash, mvp level, I mean, actually I'm not even going to start there. I love AI and the exciting features. I am a geek at heart, so that is actually not an expected answer there, but I think there is a lot we can do to help others grow. As I mentioned earlier, we have certain opportunities and blessings as being MVPs and being in the community, and for me, it's all about giving back to others, to our clients. So it actually means a lot to me in terms of leveraging its full potential, being realistic as well, but also demystifying it in a practical and relatable way, and that's probably the exchange manager in me talking as well as the marketeer. I want to make it tangible, I want to make it exciting and I want to make it as it has human impact.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 22:21
So, on a community level, I love doing sessions that are having some kind of movie theme and bringing one of the co-pilots to life. So there's a few that are out there. There's a really cool. There's a couple actually of multilingual co-pilot sessions that I do and it's really fun because there's so many new functionalities coming out, including on the customer service space. So it's the gift that keeps on giving Copilot for sales. Obviously, being a sales and customer insights person, that always keeps me busy and I love collaborating with the FastTrack team and bringing out their new features to life. So that's on the community side.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 23:03
But at work, something that I've been extremely passionate about since last year actually is driving what started as a regional but has now become a global initiative on building a co-pilot community on the BizUp side, and it started off more as it was a grassroots initiative. As much as it may sound cheesy, cheesy, it was a movement from the people for the people. Um, exactly because I realized that, um, I mean early on. You know, we faced even simple struggles like we couldn't spell copilot properly, and by we I mean generally people. Right, we still face it sometimes even bill gates.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 23:42
I was reading an article of his in his gates notes yesterday and he spelt it c capital, c o dash pilot um, I still see it to this day, to be honest, from various people, um, I chuckle sometimes it triggers me, others, um, but that's just an example of all the um, uh enlightenment that we could contribute in um, because it's it, you know, there's so many of them and it's not just about doing kind of that level 100 description of what it does, but also really getting to the bottom of how we can leverage it and make the most out of it when it comes to integrating with all sorts of systems and truly bringing the customer to life or the customer experience.

Angeliki Patsiavou: 24:25
So, building that community app, creating specialists that are truly equally passionate about this, and also creating a community that spans above and beyond the day-to-day work and is organically thriving, that has meant the most to me, because I was finally able to bring to life one of the most important things for me, which is the importance of having that tribe of people that you can rely to and connect with, and in a way, it connected my MVP slash personal persona with my work persona. So it was such a blessing and something that I'm still very much growing and driving.

Mark Smith: 25:11
If people want to get involved in that community, how do they get involved?

Angeliki Patsiavou: 25:14
So this is an internal work community. So we've been doing various activities to evangelize, socialize and connect people together and it's actually people attend our sessions or find our content and end up reaching out and say, oh, can I be part of it? And it's been amazing how much it's organically grown through word of mouth as well as people that have come to a session or seen the content and feel I want to be a part of this. So I've never seen that kind of movement or growth before internally in a work initiative. I don't know, but you'd love to hear other people's stories on that. Actually, because if you asked me, when I started I never thought it would be like this. I thought it was going to be a very limited group and lifespan, but it turns out. There is beauty in bringing people together.

Mark Smith: 26:08
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom forward slash NZ365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you.