From Developer to Architect: Interviewing and Career Progression Best Practices

Breaking into the tech world is one thing but navigating your career path within it is another. In this session, we’ll explore the different journeys across three key roles in the Microsoft Business Applications ecosystem: Developer, Consultant, and Solution Architect. Each role demands unique skills and interview approaches, and knowing how to position yourself (or guide a candidate) can make all the difference.

From a hiring manager’s perspective, I’ll share insights into what interviewers look for in each role, how interviews differ between technical, consulting, and architectural positions, and the signals that indicate when someone is ready to take the next step. We’ll also look at best practices for candidates to prepare, common pitfalls to avoid, and practical tips for charting a career progression, whether you’re a developer looking to grow into consulting, a consultant aspiring to become an architect, or simply deciding which role fits you best.

Expect real-world examples, practical frameworks, and guidance that will help both candidates and managers make informed choices about role fit and career growth.

Using Personas to Build Solutions People Use

Sometimes we build a technical masterpiece. Yet when that masterpiece goes into production, no one wants to use it. Adoption is low even though the complexity is high.

Solution design often starts with requirements and technology choices but misses the human context that determines whether a solution is actually used. In this practical session we will explore how personas can be applied in solution design, what makes a persona truly actionable, how personas translate into design decisions, and how an AI powered agent can support the creation of meaningful personas that reflect real user goals, behaviours, skills ,and accessibility needs.

Participants will see how personas created with the help of an agent can be used throughout the design lifecycle to influence user journeys, prioritisation, acceptance criteria, and technical decisions across Power Platform and Copilot Studio.

The session includes real world examples and a reusable prompt that attendees can use with Copilot or Copilot Studio to generate personas tailored to their own organisations and solutions. Attendees will leave with a clear and repeatable approach to persona driven design that improves usability adoption and long term value.

Audience: Citizen developers, professional developers, business analysts, UX thinkers, and solution architects.

Designing Accessible and Inclusive Copilot Agents

Session Summary

Learn how to design Copilot agents that support neurodiversity by replacing "digital noise" with calm, structured, and predictable interactions. We will move beyond accessibility checklists to explore practical patterns that reduce cognitive overload and decision fatigue for every brain.

Full Session Description

We spend plenty of time discussing what AI can do but far less time discussing how it feels to use.

As Copilots become part of our daily work, we face a significant, unspoken challenge: cognitive diversity. As someone with ADHD, I know how quickly digital tools can become barriers. Long forms, walls of unstructured text, and open-ended prompts often prevent me from engaging at all. This is not a failure in understanding the technology, this is a failure in user experience and inclusive design.

For some users, a poorly designed AI agent creates cognitive overload and decision paralysis. What should be a productivity boost simply becomes more digital noise.

This session moves beyond basic accessibility checklists and into the realm of cognitive inclusion. We will explore how to build Copilot Studio agents that are easy to understand, predictable in behaviour, and are not overwhelming to use.

We will walk through real examples of how to make your Copilots feel less overwhelming and more supportive. You will see how to swap long input forms for guided choices, avoid prompt paralysis with suggested actions, and build agents that ask/confirm before they act.

Whether you are a developer, architect, or strategist, you will leave with a framework to empower every brain in your organization. When we design for the edges, we create better experiences for everyone.

Will include demo of accessible and inclusive vs inaccessible and non-inclusive agents