HomeAuthor InterviewsInterview with Srikumar Nair- Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft

Interview with Srikumar Nair- Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft

Srikumar Nair is the author of Digital Transformation with Dataverse for Teams we got the chance to sit down with him and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt.

Q: What is/are your specialist tech area(s)?

Srikumar : Product Management Leadership

Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?

Srikumar : During this COVID pandemic, a lot of people lost their livelihood and businesses had to shut down due to lack of any digital presence. It is around the same time, remote work saw a boom and Microsoft announced “Dataverse for Teams”. This situation pushed me to carve out some extra time for leveraging my skills to help more people become #citizendevelopers. It is around the same time that Pavan Ramchandani, from Packt publishing team, reached out to me with this proposal and I decided to take a plunge.

Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?

Srikumar : I started writing this book just around the time Microsoft Dataverse for Teams was announced and as I built some portions of the product, it helped me internalize some of the aspects that a new citizen developer would like to know before becoming an expert citizen developer. So it took about a month of investment in research, content design and flow of topics, along with 12 months of writing this book.

Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?

Srikumar : The biggest challenge in writing process was to carve out time for writing the content during busy week and weekends, while also handling your day job. The multiple drafts and ensuring that all the step by step instructions are accompanied by good resolution pic requires a lot of time and effort. Hope this effort is seen and acknowledged by the readers.

Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?

Srikumar : As per an industry prediction from IDC FutureScape, there is an estimate of about 500M apps that will be created in next 5 years, while there is enormous gap in the amount of talent available, due shortage of professional developers. To meet this demand, we need to equip everyone to be a developer and this is possible today, thanks to the low code-no code platforms like Microsoft Power Platform, Google Appsheet, Amazon Honeycode etc . These low code-no code platforms empower everyone – from citizen to professional developers and IT admins – to achieve their organization goals much faster, and often at a lower cost.

Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?

Srikumar : This book is written to ensure that there is broader knowledge of Power Platform, while also covering details about app development, process automation, etc. in a simple language with detailed steps to build an end to end digital solution. It also covers some of the best practices about application lifecycle management and best practices while administering and governing such applications.

Q. What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away from the book with?

Srikumar : The low-code/no-code app building experience helps readers learn skills from this book which can help build confidence in tackling gnarly problems that plague every organization, due to lack of digital transformation.

Q. What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?

Srikumar : The top tip to readers learning this tech would to just dive in head-on and start building alongside with reading the book, and I am sure you will be addicted once you have built your first app.

Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?

Srikumar : No

Q. Can you share any blogs, websites and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?

Srikumar : https://www.youtube.com/c/mspowerplatform/videos

Q. How would you describe your author journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?

Srikumar : I wouldn’t have been able to author this book without the support of the amazing team at Packt. Right from initial conversation for this proposal with Pavan, to the final publishing, it was a thorough professional and satisfying experience.

Q. Do you belong to any tech community groups?

Srikumar : Not really.

Q. What are your favorite tech journals? How do you keep yourself up to date on tech?

Srikumar : No

Q. How did you organize, plan, and prioritize your work and write the book?

Srikumar : Writing a book, while also working full time requires a lot of sacrifices. I would reserve 4-6 hours every weekend (early hours or late in night) to focus on the core content writing.

Q. What is that one writing tip that you found most crucial and would like to share with aspiring authors?

Srikumar : For me, something that worked was to first write down the core content of the chapter and keep refining it or adding the missing parts as read it from a reader’s perspective.

You can find Srikumar’s book on Amazon by following this link: Please click here

Digital Transformation with Dataverse for Teams is Available on Amazon.com