In a recent post I mused about problem domains and solution domains, how they’re context-dependent, and how interesting things tend to happen at the intersection of a problem domain and a solution domain.

In this post I’m going to talk more about that intersection, and I’m going to start by putting it into a personal context: my job. For the past^[1] few years I’ve been a member of the Power BI customer advisory team (Power BI CAT) at Microsoft. After spending almost a decade as a PM shipping data products and services, moving out of a feature role was strange, but I quickly realized this was the perfect place for me to work, and to shine, mainly because I was literally livin’ on the edge^[2]… between the problem domain and the solution domain.

Early in 2021, we realized that the CAT team had grown significantly enough during the pandemic that we should organize a virtual “offsite” meeting for the team. There were more and more team members who had never met each other^[4], and we wanted to invest in a sense of shared purpose and team identity.

To this end, some of the more tenured members of the team put together an agenda to cover the most important topics. I built a single slide to show “this is who we are, and this is what we do” to share my perspective and spark conversation. This is that slide:

The Power BI CAT team recognizes that the customer is the authoritative expert on the problem domain. They live it day in and day out, and their reality working with Power BI is their lived truth. We can work to understand it, and we can work to make their experience better, but they’re the experts. They get the final say.

We also recognize that the Power BI product team is the authoritative expert on the solution domain. The product team ultimately decides what features and capabilities to ship, how to scope them, and how to prioritize them^[5]. They also decide the implementation of each feature – the product team writes the code, which is about as authoritative a perspective as you can get.

The CAT team stands in the middle, with one foot planted firmly in the problem domain and another firmly in the solution domain. This is a key reason why we’re able to be so impactful with such a relatively small number of team members. Although we are not the authoritative experts on either side^[6], we are well-informed participants with a deep understanding of both sides. Customers often have a meaningful understanding of the solution domain and product team members typically have a meaningful understanding of the problem domain; the CAT team’s position gives us a unique perspective and advantage.

One of our team’s core function is to “build better customers.” Please keep in mind this is my personal phrases, not anything official, but I believe it effectively describes what we do. The CAT team works with some of the biggest customers in the world – enterprise customers who are pushing the limits of what Power BI and the Azure data platform do. Sometimes these customers need help, because no one has previously done what they’re trying to do. With our team’s expertise and our deep connections with the product team we can help them achieve their goals to be successful today – and as part of the same engagements we help the product team improve Power BI so that the next time a big customer is trying to do that same difficult thing, they don’t need to ask for help.

A key aspect of this function is scale. If we work with one customer to help one customer, we’ve missed a vital opportunity. To increase our team’s impact we’re continually looking for opportunities to work with one customer and help every customer. This scaling might take the form of community engagement via blogs or YouTube, or Microsoft Learn courses on commonly-needed topics like DAX and effective report design, or the Power BI guidance documentation or the Power BI Adoption Roadmap…. the list goes on and on. The team culture encourages members to ask themselves “does it scale” and to look for ways to make the answer be “yes” as often as possible.

The team’s other core function is to “build better product.” As we help customers in our ongoing engagements we’re learning from them, and we take what we learn back to the product team in a variety of structured and unstructured ways. One of my favorite books, The Customer-Driven Playbook^[7]describes this process as “sensemaking”:

Sensemaking is a process that ensures we organize the data we collect, identify patterns and meaningful insights, and refine them into a story that compels others to action.

I absolutely love this quote, because for me it elegantly captures the core of what I try to do every day. Members of the CAT team are typically technical professional with significant personal experience, and we bring that to our jobs. What we don’t bring is an agenda. We’re careful in our work with the product team to curate what we learn from customers, and to represent both the “what” and the “why” of their goals and challenges, with the goal to compel the product team to take action to address the customers’ needs^[8].

(yawn)

If you’ve made it this far, you may be asking what this has to do with you. Why should you care what’s going on behind the scenes at Microsoft, even if you use Power BI?

You should care because the role of the Power BI CAT team – standing with one foot planted firmly in the problem domain and another firmly in the solution domain – is a success pattern that you can and should generalize in your efforts to build a data culture. Your center of excellence fulfils role similar to that of the CAT team, sitting between the internal customers who are trying to use data to solve business problems and the teams responsible for building and maintaining data systems and tools in your organization.

The details will be different, because the details are always different – but the pattern can be applied wherever there is a group of people with solutions that are relevant for different groups of people with problems.

Last month I had a chance to work with MVP Chris Wagner, an analytics architect who leads a data enablement and community team at Rockwell Automation. As part of a presentation that he and I delivered for Rockwell’s BI community, Chris presented this slide:

He stole my slide! And I could not be happier to see it.

Chris recognized that my mental model for the Power BI CAT team aligned closely with his mental model for how technical community works at Rockwell… and as they say, plagiarism is the highest form of flattery.  If your job or your team has you standing on the border between the problem domain and the solution domain, you should feel free to steal my slide too.

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^[1] Checks watch… oh my goodness it’s been almost four years. Anyway…

^[2] Eat your heart out^[3], Aerosmith.

^[3] Also apparently Dio.

^[4] I’m pretty sure the team has nearly doubled in size since then, so maybe it’s time to have another offsite. I wish we could do this in person again. Please get vaccinated if you’re able to get vaccinated, so you will be part of the solution instead of being part of the problem.

^[5] If you’re interested in somewhat dated but still wonderful and relevant insights into how the Power BI product team makes these decisions, please watch this 2019 presentation from Will Thompson.

^[6] I’m always skeptical when someone describes himself as an “expert” on anything other than their own lived experiences, because the more I learn about a subject the more I realize how little my knowledge encompasses the subject as a whole.

^[7] You should read this book. If you’ve already read it, you should probably read it again because you’ll learning something new each time you do.

^[8] Although no modern cloud service or commercial software product will every be “done” I believe there is strong evidence to say that we’ve been pretty successful so far. Over the past few years I’ve had scores of customers tell me that “we know that if something we need isn’t in Power BI today, it will be there next month, or six months from now.” The real credit for this earned trust goes to the product team, but it feels pretty nice to be part of that story.