MVP Journey and the Impact of Power Platform Communities with Nati Turtledove

Mark Smith: 0:37
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 the United Kingdom. He works at CarePoint 365 as a lead solution architect. He was first awarded as MVP in 2024. He gave up living on the beaches or the beach life in Cape Town to join the amazing Microsoft Power Platform community in the United Kingdom. I can testify to that after living there. With a passion for developing enterprise workflow solutions and engaging with the Power Platform community, his ultimate goal is to make a difference whilst learning from and helping others. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Nati.

Nati Turtledove: 1:41
Thank you, mark, good to be here. Thank you so much for having me on.

Mark Smith: 1:44
Good to have you on. I see another export from South Africa to the United Kingdom. I assume that Mr Hunnigan must have helped you get there.

Nati Turtledove: 1:53
I assume that Mr Hunnicutt must have helped you get there. Yeah, it was a fantastic journey. Originally, my wife was from the UK so when we got married she came to South Africa to live with us for a bit. We gave it a shot, but it got to that point where the UK community was just so, so warm and opening to me being involved with it and the South African issues we were having were just. It was getting to that point where we couldn't take them anymore. So it just made sense everyone was here, the community was here, work was here, family was here. Why don't we just move? And yeah, Chris was a big help with it. But it's been a phenomenal journey so far and I think five months in, we settled.

Mark Smith: 2:31
We're happy, not looking back so good, so good I can. I can testify to that uk community when I moved to london and when was it? 2017, I've got a feeling yeah, 2017, I think I moved to london, um, my wife and I and, yeah, the community was totally embracing. It's vibrant, probably one of the most vibrant power platform communities around the world, so it's definitely a good place to be located in the UK if you're in this community. Absolutely, I couldn't agree with you more.

Nati Turtledove: 3:03
It's incredibly vibrant and it's probably the most welcoming community I've been a part of so far on this journey.

Mark Smith: 3:10
Food, family and fun what do they mean to you?

Nati Turtledove: 3:15
Food's a rough one at the moment. Coming from South Africa to England, there's a vast variety of food now that I've got that I've been exposed to. So I'm on a diet I'm not eating at the moment. I've cut out all sugar. But food I love. A good burger, I love a good pizza, good barbecue. That that's me to the t. What?

Nati Turtledove: 3:38
do you do for fun I enjoy writing blogs and doing content for the community. That that's my fun. Um, I had the stage where I used to do a bit of lego a couple of years ago. Um, uh, I was very into my music, so I love my drums, drums, my guitars, my keyboard. I used to compose a lot of music as well. Unfortunately, I've given that up. Having a family takes a lot of time, apparently. But, yeah, I think I want to get back into it, but right now my focus is just being with my family. Spending time with my family, that's fun for me. Going out on a Sunday, taking my daughter to the park, going on trips together that, that's fun for me. Going out on a Sunday taking my daughter to the park, going on trips together that's the weekends, that's fun.

Mark Smith: 4:17
I love it. I love it. So are you London-based or further afield?

Nati Turtledove: 4:22
I am Manchester-based. It's rainy, gloomy Manchester compared to Cape Town.

Mark Smith: 4:27
Yeah, yeah, I know Manchester. It was definitely an eye-opener when I first visited.

Nati Turtledove: 4:33
It's not as bad as people say it is. I've got to be honest it's really not as bad.

Mark Smith: 4:39
No comment. Tell you what. Tell you what. Tell you what. Tell me how you know why technology. Why was that your career path? What brought you on that journey?

Nati Turtledove: 4:51
I think it was just a bunch of coincidental events that led me to this path so far. I actually started my career seven years ago. I actually started as an intern worker at a manufacturing company and my job for three months was unpacking boxes and packing boxes off and onto trucks, and we're talking about 45 kilo boxes. So I remember my first day. I rocked up there. I was in my button-up shirt, my jeans, looking more smart, with my smart shoes, and I was given an apron saying go offload this truck. And one thing I can definitely advise you is don't spend seven and a half hours offloading boxes dressed to the T.

Nati Turtledove: 5:32
Does not work well for your feet, but that's how I got into it and I was doing that while I was studying industrial psychology and in my second year I eventually showed a bit of IT skills in the company. I drew out their whole bin location system for them. I mapped it out into what they were using Sage 200, back in the day and within a couple of months they had me heading their IT department and I was running all their systems, from ERP systems to their servers to their PABX systems. And I think I was exploring Microsoft Office one day and I came across Power BI and I thought, okay, this is a pretty nifty tool to come and build reports with. At the time, sage 200, you've got Crystal Reporting, which is okay, but if you want to run BRC modules or BRC reports from that, you're looking at a couple of hours sometimes to export data and it's a nightmare to model it afterwards.

Nati Turtledove: 6:27
So I kind of figured if I can get like the base data out of Sage into Excel and bring it into Power BI.

Nati Turtledove: 6:33
You can make some really, really, really cool reports and good visualizations. That's where I started and as I went down that journey a bit more and a bit more, I figured out you can create gateways on servers to Excel spreadsheets and to SharePoint sites and that would sync to Power BI, keeping it a bit more live. And then I realized, oh gosh, you've got SQL, let's dive into this. So we started creating, I learned how to code in SQL, I learned how to do data warehousing. I built up some complex data queries, a bunch of views put them into their Power BI reports to the point where I completely migrated the company out of Sage reporting into a whole Power BI reporting system.

Nati Turtledove: 7:16
That's where they did all their financial reports going forward and I liked the idea of Power BI and I saw another power word in the office suite called Power Apps, and that was another journey on its own, just being able to transact with that data and now create what was it called for supply chain management, inventory orders, inventory tracking, work orders and then tying it up with the data. So slowly but surely, I started getting into the Power Apps side and the Power Automate side and I think that's where I left Power BI behind and made my way up until where I am now, fortunately, where I'm enjoying every second of the Power Platform building solutions not just Power Apps now, but for enterprise-scale solutions and learning every single day.

Nati Turtledove: 8:02
So I think that's where I've been led to. It's a pity because I gave up my industrial psychology degree. I literally dropped out of college and focused on the Microsoft certifications, but I think it was a good journey. I'm happy with my decision.

Mark Smith: 8:16
Industrial psychology. What is it? I don't think I've even heard the phrase before, and so when you said it I was like what is this?

Nati Turtledove: 8:29
It's basically hr. I didn't realize that until someone told me it's hr, I thought it was okay. Well, I like business. I like I like being involved in business, like entrepreneurship. I've run a few businesses when I was a kid uh, from from um, photography companies, music companies. And I like psychology. I like speaking to people. I'm good at understanding. I'm good at reading people's emotions and hopefully guiding them through certain processes. I thought put the two together business psychology, industrial psychology, great.

Mark Smith: 8:59
And then I heard that it's basically HR and at the time I wasn't a fan of my HR department, so it was another reason to get out of that degree Interesting, because when you said it I was like, oh, perhaps it's like a degree that really focuses on industrial systems and business systems and things like that, and I was like, hey, that makes sense. So I was surprised at it's HR.

Nati Turtledove: 9:25
That's kind of what I thought at the beginning and it turns out that most people with industrial psychology degrees just end up in that HR role. If you're fortunate enough to be unique, then you do a lot of business coaching, where you you take a company's journey and kind of dissect the psychology of how the company runs, how the systems run, and consult to them. That's in South Africa at the time was a very niche market and it was very, very tough to get into.

Mark Smith: 9:51
I find it interesting that HR, the Department of HR, the role of HR, in the last I don't know five years it seems to have taken on a massively, a massive different meaning. Everyone thought that HR was out to look after them, to protect them against the corporation, et cetera. And I think what people have found out? No, hr has always worked for the corporation. They're in the interest of mitigating and defending the interests of the corporation and you, in your false sense of belief as an employee, have thought that they battered for you, but definitely do not inside the organization.

Nati Turtledove: 10:28
There was. A harsh reality that I learned as well is that HR is not on your side. You're the problem. They're there to make sure you don't become more of a problem.

Mark Smith: 10:37
You know, the other area I came across it was in negotiation of salary is that you think right, because often you you in a in a big organization you're never negotiating with the, the hiring manager. You're negotiating with hr on your salary and I think a lot of people don't realize that hr are compensated on how low they keep your salary, like not how high they make it. It's like what's the lowest point that you will sign to come on board and you think they're giving you a few scraps and meeting your needs, but their job is to make sure you land at the lowest level possible. I went through this in joining the company I've just recently resigned from and the HR. I had already pre-negotiated my salary because it was a headhunt situation that had come after me, and so then it came to HR and they were like oh, you know, in the geography you're in, we only pay this much.

Mark Smith: 11:35
I'm like, mate, this is not up for discussion. The only reason I'm here is because you came after me. As an organization, we set the price. There's no changing. Well, that's just not our policy. I'm like I don't care what your policy is, you know, and that's when I really realized their job is to get you down into their banding systems to the lowest price point possible oh wow, that's, that's a rough one.

Mark Smith: 11:58
Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. Tell me about architecture, because that's your role now. You're a lead solution architect. What do you think the key skills a solution architect need? If you were to just summarize, let's say, five skills that you believe a good solution architect needs to know, have, do, what would that be?

Nati Turtledove: 12:22
This is a rough one. My brain is too fraught to even think about this now, but I'm going to give it a shot. Would that be? This is a rough one. My brain is too fried to even think about this now, but I'm going to give it a shot.

Nati Turtledove: 12:31
Definitely, data modeling when it comes to architecture, the fundamentals of your solutions, as Mike likes to say, you get your data model right, your solution builds itself. So, whether you've got a SQL background, a data engineering background, being able to understand how, what DIMM fact tables are, snowflake schemas are, being able to have primary keys, relationships, that's the fundamentals to building an architecture for a solution the data model. On top of that, I think having a very strong understanding of security, that you've got this phenomenal data model and having it in Dataverse with the security complexity that it offers, you're introducing this holy grail of an architecture that you could potentially have. So making sure that your security is right and it fits with your data model is the next step, because the last thing you want is to build this fantastic data model and realize at the end of the journey oh shoot, we need to build an RBAX model now. How on earth do we manage record assignment record privileges. So the fundamentals are data model security.

Nati Turtledove: 13:33
I think the next one for me is keeping open-minded about the solution and having a bit of a broader aspect to it. If you're maybe following an agile process, you're not going to have vision over what the entire architecture is going to look like from the beginning. So kind of thinking ahead and not locking yourself up to a fixed data model but more of a dynamic data model. So avoiding to code specific column types that may be specific, related to a customer, maybe more market general, kind of similar to what you have with a form engine, where you've got the ability to build a variety of columns and data types and then bring that into an engine itself and having that from an architecture side. So thinking a bit broader and longer term rather than what the current need is, and relying on the rest of your team has been a really, really big one for me.

Nati Turtledove: 14:29
You don't know everything. You really, really don't. And if you do, I don't want to go down that conversation, but I find it very, very helpful to say, okay, if I'm building a solution, if I'm architecting a solution, it's easier for me to pick the brain of three of my other developers within an hour and say listen, I want to try to solve this problem with this architecture. How do I do it? I'm a bit stuck. How do you approach the people? And people have got different ways of doing it You'll get three different answers. If you get an answer and that can save you hours upon hours of research to try to figure out what the best way to do it is, because there's no best way, there's always various ways of doing it. So I think those have been. The biggest learning curve for me about solution architecture is getting the data model right, making sure your RBAX is in place and kind of thinking ahead and having your team involved with it.

Mark Smith: 15:19
Not just this is up to me and I'm going to give it over to you and how you build it. Yeah, good, I like it. I like it. Tell me about becoming an MVP. How did that come about you? What was the process? Who nominated you?

Nati Turtledove: 15:33
Yeah, that's also a long story. I was approached by Alexio already a year ago about it, but that was before the beginning of the journey, so he was the one that originally nominated me. I touched base with Chris Huntingford and EY a while back. I said guys, listen, I'm struggling to break into the community where I am now. Can you help me get into the community in the UK? And we got on a call with the two of them. Ey was phenomenal. He got me my first session at the Power Platform D365 user group in Manchester, where I did a session on Power Platform pipelines versus the LM Accelerator. And the best advice that Chris and EY gave me at the time was that's your introduction to the community.

Mark Smith: 16:21
You've got a foot in there and you've just got to ride that wave and continue going with it, and that's what I did.

Nati Turtledove: 16:27
Once I really had my foot in the community, I started doing my blogs, which I was really passionate about. I found a nice niche at the time because Power Platform Power Plans had just come out and people weren't fully understanding how the LM Accelerator actually functioned. They knew how that it could work, but not the underlying concept of how it works. And I think from then I started to elaborate on how we could understand the LM Accelerator's architecture and Power Platform Python's architecture. I did a few blogs on it and then, I think, alexio confronted me and said like mate, I want to nominate you. I said, okay, that's a big one. He put the nomination in and I withdrew it. I said, okay, that's a big one. He put the nomination in and I withdrew it. I think right before the submission closes.

Nati Turtledove: 17:10
I was not in a good mind frame. I had just moved from Johannesburg to Cape Town. Mentally I was drained, I was slightly depressed. It was just a rough time for me. I couldn't take on the pressure, so I put on pause. I spoke to, I think, one of the region managers about it.

Mark Smith: 17:26
He said it's fine, We'll touch base again in a few months and see what you're holding.

Nati Turtledove: 17:30
And at the same time they re-nominated me and I had two other people approaching. I had Keith and Stuart approach me about the nomination and yeah, it went through and here we are and it's really great to be a part of the program. I feel super privileged. It definitely comes with the imposter syndrome speaking to people like yourself, and it's had its lows. I'll be honest. It's had its lows, but it's been a good journey.

Mark Smith: 18:01
We're going to jump to the lows in a second. So just confirming for me you got awarded the MVP while you were still in Joburg.

Nati Turtledove: 18:11
I got awarded with it. When I moved to Cape Town, I was nominated in sorry, I got awarded. When I moved to the UK, I was nominated when I was in Cape Town.

Mark Smith: 18:20
Oh, so you only received it when you were in the UK. Were you under the new CPM in the UK at the time? Were you still under the C? Were you under the new cpm in the uk at the time? Were you still in the under the cpm in?

Nati Turtledove: 18:29
cape town. I was still under the cp in cape town and when I rocked up onto my my cp call, she was like no, let's get you in touch with with um, with the cp in in england, in the uk. It wasn't bad, they were actually fantastic. They were really good about it. I explained the situation. I was nominated in south africa and I moved life happens.

Mark Smith: 18:48
Totally, totally, totally see, I've been, because I originated in new zealand um my mbp, then I went to australia which, interesting, had the same cpm, but then I moved to the uk. So I've been through hence. Hence now a bit about the differences and, of course, back in New Zealand now. Okay, so that's interesting.

Nati Turtledove: 19:10
Tell me about the lows, it feels like there's been this load of pressure dropped onto me that you've got to live up to this big expectation. Now I suffer from chronic anxiety, mild depression every now and then I've got ADHD and all that comes with imposter syndrome. I never feel like I'm good enough. So now that you've got this status about you and again, to me it's not about the status, I really love what I do, but you compare yourself to the people out there I've now been exposed to some other MVPs that are miles ahead of me and I've got a long way to go. And I look at it and I'd be like how am I here? I'm in the wrong place at the wrong time. I should not be in this situation and you really feel bad about yourself because you feel like you've become a fraud in a way and you're not deserving of it. And I still don't feel deserving of it. And it's a daily feeling because we all make mistakes.

Nati Turtledove: 20:09
I brought down the UAT environment on Friday with one simple issue. I imported a solution with an incorrect column type and everything just broke. But it's like that type of mistake should have been caught by an MVP. How is that slipping through?

Mark Smith: 20:29
the fingers. No, no, You've been awarded your MVP. You've got it right. There's no levels or status or hierarchies or anything like that. It's about you know helping others in their journey. That's really what it fundamentally is about. It's not how technical you are, it's not that you don't make mistakes, it's that are you helping others? And I think that that is. Can you still hear me? Yeah, Okay, I just my computer did a click and I thought I'd lost it. It's really about engaging and helping others right at the end of the day and not getting.

Mark Smith: 21:07
Don't compare with anybody because everybody's at different journey levels. Everybody's at different you know capability levels. But, mate, you've made it Like just absorb it, do what you've been doing so far and nothing will change. You'll stay an MVP and you know the concept of of um. You know I still get nervous.

Mark Smith: 21:30
I just spoke at a conference recently for the first time in five years. I did public speaking in canada after the mvp summit and um. I was nervous, like it's not that the nerves and stuff don't go away and even that kind of feeling of um imp syndrome. But the thing is, if you feel, if you didn't have imposter syndrome to a degree, I feel that people that just think they're so shit hot that they don't care, I think, are at bigger risk, because it's that lacking of self-awareness and you talked about your ability to read people and read situations and you have a a level of eq and self-awareness that automatically puts you uh, you know in the right frame of mind, I feel.

Mark Smith: 22:19
But the the biggest thing is to stop the, the, the, the chatter on the shoulder that you're not good enough or you shouldn't be here or anything like that. You met the criteria, you're here and if you just stayed the course and did what you did, like create content, like you've done, your blog posts and stuff that I've looked at, you've done, you meet the requirements. So well done, Well done. I appreciate that. Thank you that means a lot.

Mark Smith: 22:48
You don't have to ramp up to any additional level. You've done it. The biggest thing is balance right, making sure your family gets your time, and they should always have priority over the MVP program as well. I see some people burn themselves out by just they need to create more content and you just don't just maintain what you've done and, uh, you should be good, you should be good yeah, it's not about the quantity, it's about the quality that comes out exactly, exactly, and and and consistency.

Mark Smith: 23:16
You know over time, like um, that you know your story of taking down uat. There was it uat you took down thank god it wasn't only a uat.

Mark Smith: 23:24
Yeah, exactly exactly who cares. It wasn't only the UAT. Yeah, exactly Exactly who cares. It wasn't fraud. But you know, uat is like that's a good story. How did it happen? You know there's a blog post in that straight away, right? So you can, you know, show others like, yeah, be aware of this. You know Column types are going to screw you over if you've got them wrong. You know that type of thing. So I think that, yeah, that's another good post.

Mark Smith: 23:52
And this is the beauty of the MVP program. It's really about people learning. And then you know people will take from you the same topic that they could have heard from somebody else, but you explain it just in a way that resonates with them. And I find so many times in life, either it's like you're at a point of receptiveness to hearing an idea and then the person giving the idea just says it in a way that just it, it connects with you right, and you get this follow-through. And that's the beauty of the diversity of the MVP program it has all different type of voices, all at different levels. Um, and enabling Final question I have for you If you were to look back across your career, what's been the one or two biggest career highlights for you?

Nati Turtledove: 24:37
I think the MVP award has been a massive highlight for me. That's been a huge accomplishment that I look back to and, as much as I've got the imposter syndrome around it, I look at the award behind me and I feel really good about myself. That's been something about my career I've been very happy about and, I think, the switch from Power BI into Power Apps and the rest of the Power Platform. I like the data side, but I felt that there was a good journey to start off with to get into the rest of the Power Platform solution architecture, because it gave me a good concept of how to build data models and how to work with data so it works functionally within solutions without just thinking, okay, I'm going to create data on the fly solutions without just thinking, okay, I'm going to create data on the fly. So I think those two points in my career are what I look back at and be like I'm happy. I made those choices and I'm happy where I am now.

Mark Smith: 25:36
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 you.