Power Platform IndiePubs: Hats I wear at AccuWeather

February 11, 2021

After 3+ months at AccuWeather, I’ve had plenty of time to consider the hats I wear at this new position. While I was brought on to build integrations using Microsoft Power Automate with Microsoft Dataverse and our Dynamics 365 instance, at any given time, I’m managing a small product backlog for workflows that are being developed, fixing errors and improving processes around how we work with different services, and making a long-term plan on connecting every part of the sales and marketing team into one tool.

Before I continue, I’m not in management, but in the traditional definition of “individual contributor”. I have a manager above me and this manager has a manager above them. I’m at the bottom of the chain. What I am though is a person with strong domain knowledge for a niche tool used at my organization. To give more context, we have 4,000 employees and my team is the only team within the company that uses Power Automate and Dataverse. There’s one other team that may start using those services in the next few months, but currently we are the pioneers. At a small company of 20-30 people, the equivalent niche domain knowledge would be held by someone who is creating some elaborate Excel workbook no one else understands.

I bring this up as I feel many people who are more familiar with the traditional path from individual contributor -> senior individual contributor -> manager don’t really understand this path well until they have worked in positions with changing requirements. At my organization, I work on a very small team and so everyone knows everyone, but in a larger corporation, you would have managers and direct leaders managing how you work. And quite often these managers would see your development and specialization and either “protect” your time from other teams and projects or “trade” your time to other teams and projects. At a small company, you can often wear many more hats as your expertise and experience allow you to be valuable at completing tasks others don’t have the time to complete or are the bottlenecks in a process.

You’ve hired a person who can create custom integrations between Service A and Service B in several hours while keeping in mind the overall architecture of the business workflows, how would you want to develop this person?