From Applied Math to Power Platform Mastery: Drew Poggemann’s Journey with Mentorship, AI Innovations, and Business Transformations

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 Appleton, Wisconsin in the United States. He works at HBS as a Director of Solution Architecture. He's first awarded as MVP in 2022. As a Microsoft MVP and Power Platform expert, he enjoys contributing to the Microsoft community and sharing his knowledge and insights with others who are interested in learning and growing with the platform. You can find links to his bio, social media, et cetera, in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, drew. Thank you, mark. Nice to meet you. You too Good to have you on and really get to know you a bit. I always like to start with food, family and fun. What do they mean to you?

Drew Poggemann: 1:16
Food I'd like to say I focus on healthy foods, but that's probably inaccurate. I like the burger and fries every, probably once or twice a week, and then other than that I love just standard healthy food and chicken and all that good stuff. But you know, I enjoy going out to new restaurants just trying new foods. You know, whether it's Korean, whether it's any style, you know that's something new and interesting flavors. So I enjoy that a lot.

Drew Poggemann: 1:49
From a family perspective, I have three children one that actually works with me full time here at Heartland Business Systems as a power platform engineer, and another one that's an intern, and another one that's an intern this summer just learning the ropes, and a 16-year-old in high school still trying to figure out that world.

Drew Poggemann: 2:19
But I love spending time with them. You know, coaching my son in the past and things like soccer, and my daughters are big into dance and a lot of the theater and those type of things. And family food and fun was the third one. All right, so from a fun, my whole life I've enjoyed everything sports-related more doing the sports than actually watching. Unless it's the Packers, then I'm definitely watching, but overall just enjoying things like golf and tennis and any sport that I can get my hands on. I'm usually excited to go out and do and I love going up north into northern Wisconsin, being on the lake, fishing, relaxing, those type of things as well. And then my wife and I actually met in Scotland many, many years ago, back in 1990, on an overseas study. So we like to go back every once in a while and do some traveling and see the Great Britain, scotland.

Mark Smith: 3:23
London, all that good stuff. Yeah, do you like whiskey then from Scotland.

Drew Poggemann: 3:28
I do, it's good stuff, it's good stuff, it's good stuff. Yeah, so I had some Highlands whiskey Nice Probably three weeks ago I was there.

Mark Smith: 3:37
Nice, very nice. Oh wow, how did you end up with the Power Platform? How did your career take you to this tech?

Drew Poggemann: 3:47
That's an interesting question. So I started out really graduated applied mathematics degree and kind of got into computer science, working in a number of larger organizations in logistics and in distribution pro-deaf in logistics and in distribution pro-deaf. So architect level, really focusing on being a solution architect within our organizations and leading teams of developers implementing ERP systems, crm, you name it, but it was always pro-deaf. And I came to my company now and an individual that was here at the time was an MVP in the CRM you know, dynamics 365, sales or CRM at that time and introduced me to the XRM framework and I'm like what the heck is that? And once he showed it to me I fell in love.

Drew Poggemann: 4:41
To be honest, I'm like, well, I can do this in about a third of the time that I could do pro dev. So I know it had its places and it really kind of attached and fell in love with it and I still architect pro dev solutions. But the low code, no code, is an area that I really enjoy and find the right fit for our customers. So that was kind of my, you know, got into the CRM side. And then all of a sudden Microsoft went into the Power Platform and kind of that changed the dataverse and Power Apps and kind of my love there.

Mark Smith: 5:16
Yeah, makes sense. So tell me then about HBS what type of work do they do?

Drew Poggemann: 5:23
Sure, yeah, we are, I think, as a standard IT services provider throughout the United States. We're primarily in the Midwest. We have approximately probably 500 engineers in our organization, and that covers everything from standard infrastructure that you'd expect, like networking and physical security, all the way up to enterprise security, risk management, to cloud, to servers and data centers you name it right Across all of the big vendors out there. Our group in the application side is solely focused on the Microsoft stack, so we have about 100 individuals just in our team that focus on everything that Microsoft focuses on, from modern work to security, to power, platform dynamics, standard data and AI and BI. All those the full stack keeps us busy.

Mark Smith: 6:32
Are you individually involved in pre-sales at all?

Drew Poggemann: 6:35
Yes, so I'm the director of our solution architecture, so I do a lot of pre-sales and designs for our customers, but then also some of the implementation and you know, get my hands dirty as well.

Mark Smith: 6:47
How do you have the discussion around when customers are using basic licensing? You know so what's come through M365. When it comes to Power Apps, power BI, how do you take them on the journey to premium and all the benefits, which is, you know, back to the XRM story you had there. Premium is XRM, right. So you've got Dataverse in play and it's where all that rich functionality, security, you know everything where you can really make the magic happen, right Right down to RBAC and all those type of good things that you want in a robust solution for ALM process solution management. So how do you take them on that journey?

Drew Poggemann: 7:36
Yeah, I honestly focus on their. I listen to their business requirements. That's really what I'm sitting down and understanding. What are they trying to get done? I definitely don't step in and say, hey, you need to get Dataverse and model-based power apps and premium connectors. I really just what kind of solutions are they looking for? Are they looking for asset management? Are they looking for simply to hey, I want to be able to record that I got an incident that people slipped on a floor somewhere or are they looking for a complex system to manage relationships across a number of different business entities that gets into workflows and gets into strong role-based security?

Drew Poggemann: 8:19
So we have those discussions and a lot of times, to be honest, we kind of introduce them to a simple Canvas app that might get them started. We kind of introduce them to a simple Canvas app that might get them started, get them their appetite to understand the art of the possible and then step into some of the more complex apps and really model-driven Dataverse is really where we're trying to help them understand the benefits, because there's so many benefits of that platform. Them understand the benefits because there's so many benefits of that platform. But the way Microsoft has kind of grown these apps and their platform. You can now bring in Canvas apps into that, bring other connectors into it. There's so many different capabilities you can do.

Drew Poggemann: 9:02
So long story short I guess on that is focus on the requirements. A lot of times they're going to have standalone systems that are in Access or in Excel and they want to be able to do approvals, they want to manage workflows, they want to do the work anyways that these advanced products have and then help them realize that they got to look past the first app into a platform. So if they think of one app, they start going, oh, that's this many dollars per month and you can quickly break that down and help them understand. Well. Okay, now let's look at this as overall platform and build number apps on the same database right, same data platform, and start sharing information across your organization. So it goes well.

Mark Smith: 9:51
It's good. Tell me about how you became an MVP. What was involved? Who nominated you? How did you get that status?

Drew Poggemann: 10:01
It was back in probably early 2022, late 2021. I was very involved in the forums for the Dynamics CRM forum, for lack of a better term and did a lot of community involvement. I was proud that I was in the top 10 contributing resources for different months and stuff and was trying to tracking it Just the awards to myself of, hey, you're, you're out there contributing, uh, and I started seeing um the power platform come up right and then that. So I started digging in to get into that forum. But had already created a relationship with aiden cascala, um back then in the cr forums because I was really impressed with his answers and what he had contributed into that forum. So and I saw that he became an MVP and I was that just kind of started getting my idea of could I get there? And then I started doing the same thing in the Dataverse forums and really dug in deep there and I actually reached out to Aiden and said, hey, this is what I've been doing. I'm a super user, I'm managing a user group, I'm spending a lot of time answering questions in the forums. Do you think this makes sense? Am I contributing in what you'd expect to see from an MVP? And he gave me some great guidance, some focus, instead of me being kind of everywhere in different things. He said become an expert in one thing and have that be your thing, and I liked that.

Drew Poggemann: 11:42
I really did kind of knuckle down into the Dataverse side and what I could contribute to the community there and just continued to get involved, continued to kind of broaden my touch on the community there with getting into now it's called the Power Up program and some other things as well getting into now it's called the Power Up program and some other things as well and applied for the MVP Actually I shouldn't say Aiden recommended me for MVP and I got awarded and I think it was April 2022. So it was really exciting for me. And then you realize it's your first step and you got to keep doing it and keep going because you know, but it's it's. It's exciting. You get to meet a lot of great people. You get to meet a lot of you know, work with Microsoft and have conversations that you might not be able to do. But just the friendships that I've established with other MVPs has been great Nice.

Mark Smith: 12:50
Nice, when you look across your career, what have been some of the key highlights that stand out in your mind? Maybe pivot points, maybe influence of specific people, maybe moving to a new job. What were those? You know? What are the stories that you tell about? You know those key points in your career, yeah, Good question, mark.

Drew Poggemann: 13:14
So there's been a number of them. One was probably you know, go way back I'm old Back in you know, probably it was 1994. At a company called Schneider National at the time big orange trucks that go down the highway and I was doing I got involved in the payroll side, so I was doing COBOL and JCL and I said this is not what I went to school for. So I really kind of went to my leadership team and said I'd love to get into this. There's an optimization programs that they had doing, network algorithms and C and some really great you know low level development and I. So I was able to get into that and that really broadened a lot of my experience at Schneider at the time, getting in working with some really really great teams in an areas that I wanted to focus on. So having that that kind of first step to just ask if I could get into something else and really focus on learning what I needed to learn there, that was a good pivot for me. I was able to get into a number of different logistics applications at the time and working with very smart individuals like John Kring and others that were great mentors to me as far as how to build scalable, large-scale applications. So that was great.

Drew Poggemann: 14:48
I think one of my next pivot points was really in the next level of my career getting into the management leadership side, which I had done a little bit of that at Schneider, but really got into managing a large team implementing an ERP system, which was new to me as well. But I had a team of about 20, some developers, and just being able to focus on that one thing for like seven months, to start from scratch and implement, you know, an ERP system, and developed great friendships with individuals from all over the country and from other countries while doing that, and it gave me a taste to really help guide others and work with great people to develop something bigger than I can do myself. So that was a great pivot. That project was probably still the most fun project I've ever had in my life. It's probably the hardest I've ever worked, but we went from nothing to implementing an ERP in seven months. So it's not something you normally do.

Drew Poggemann: 15:58
So and then you know, finally coming over to Heartland in a role where I was in consulting which again, mark, as you know, probably familiar consulting is a whole different type of career, type of career and taking that leap and really being able to. I guess the biggest leap I had here was diving into the low-code, no-code platforms and really being able to work with customers in helping them come up with business solutions across many different stacks within the Microsoft ecosystem. And then I would say, the super user and then the MVP were just great progressions from the Microsoft stack that have introduced me to a number of additional people technologies options. So it's been great.

Mark Smith: 17:00
AI is on everybody's lips. At the moment in tech, it's becoming an ever-increasing large thing. When you look at the next 12 months and I don't want you to really go beyond 12 months, but really because it's changing so quickly but what are your thoughts?

Drew Poggemann: 17:19
Everybody's doing it right. Whether you're looking at Google and you're looking at, of course, Microsoft, any of the major players out there, Amazon, they're all investing heavily in this from a strategy. They're all investing heavily in this from a strategy. I've been very impressed with Microsoft's approach and with their drive to create co-pilots in all of their different products in a way that's focused on responsible AI. So that is a key thing. I had a speaking session I did about a year ago on that, on responsible AI. So that is a key thing. I had a speaking session I did about a year ago on that, on responsible AI, and it's just people don't know how important that is, and I think it's an exciting trend at Microsoft not trend. It's an exciting realization that Microsoft has kind of put that at the heart of what they're doing with AI. It's security, it's responsible, and then they're adding the features on.

Drew Poggemann: 18:22
I think there's a long way to go till some of their co-pilots are really fully useful, especially in the business application side, but I'm seeing some promising developments, especially in areas like Power Automate. Looking at the co-pilot for CRM that goes across the different CRM platforms, like Salesforce and like Dynamics it's a great next step. It's a great next step and the biggest, I think, in the next 12 months. What's going to take off the most, in my opinion, in the Microsoft world is going to be Copilot Studio, so that leveraging the generative AI within a chatbot framework that is low code-code, that can actually have plugins into many different systems to pull back information. I see that as the biggest growth area, just as far as straight-up solutions that people are going to start plugging into everything from their websites to custom applications to you name it, and I'll tell you I don't know what. I don't know because there's so many things changing so fast, Mark, that it's hard to keep up, but it's an exciting space to be in, Totally totally.

Mark Smith: 19:47
My final question, as we wrap up, is you mentioned two of your children in the business, one in an internship. What advice do you give them about starting off on their career? What advice do you try to impart to set them up for success?

Drew Poggemann: 20:08
I'm going to use a little bit of what my dad told me when I first started working, and I think other people have had this similar phrase. But I always say you know, be the first one to work and be the last one to leave. Of course you know you have to focus on family and all of that, but the goal was work hard. Don't just go there and sit around, work hard, learn. And that's go there and sit around, work hard, learn. And that's what I've told them. Just learn the most you can Determine if you like what you're doing. Long term you can change. It's all good. But then the second thing my dad always told me was if you're standing around, pick up a broom. So you know it's never.

Drew Poggemann: 20:55
I never worry about thing being beneath me right In any way, shape or form. It's about being a servant leader and someone that's just focused on helping get things done. And if you do that, you'll be well-respected, you'll be proud of what you're doing and that's just that's I was. I laughed because when I used to my first job, I was bagging groceries and I had fun doing it. I have fun doing what I'm doing now. It's just a little bit more financially scalable than bagging groceries. But it really is just finding a love in what you're doing and you make it fun, you make it rewarding, no matter what kind of career it is.

Mark Smith: 21:43
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 nz365guy. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you.