Luise Freese
Changing the world one app at a time
Düsseldorf, Germany
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Luise is an Azure & Power Platform Architect based in Germany. She is an awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) working with organizations that want to move beyond digital theatre. Her focus is on AI-enabled solutions that are designed to last in real-world environments. She helps teams build accessible apps, robust data models, and automation that respects governance, compliance, and human effort. A recurring theme in her work is making the invisible visible: unmeasured work, emotional load, operational friction, and the real cost of “quick wins”. Her motto "Changing the world one app at a time" stems from her extensive work with non-profit organizations.
Alongside client work, Luise writes and speaks about productivity myths, pseudo-agile practices, AI readiness, and why many digital initiatives fail long before technology becomes the problem. She is known for combining clear technical guidance with a sharp eye for organizational patterns; and for asking the uncomfortable questions others tend to avoid.
When not working and traveling, she is a runner, a mother of (teenage) dragons, a LEGO-builder and a lover of the number 42. Her favorite color is #ff69b4.
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AI can’t replace you - unless you’re replaceable
Software development is more than just writing syntactically correct code. It’s problem-solving, designing resilient systems, understanding patterns, and delivering real solutions. AI tools like Copilot and ChatGPT excel at syntax, automation, and speeding up repetitive tasks, but they can’t replace the human skills that make software truly valuable: critical thinking, architecture, security, and adaptability across domains.
This session challenges you to step beyond code-as-commodity thinking by leveraging AI as your assistant, not your crutch. The developers who thrive are the ones who embrace complexity, expand their knowledge, and focus on skills that AI can’t mimic. Don’t just be a code writer, be a system thinker, a solution creator, and someone AI complements, not replaces.
Automating Dataverse Table Creation with Mermaid: Infrastructure as Code for Power Platform
Creating Dataverse tables and relationships manually can be a tedious task, especially in complex Power Platform solutions. What if you could streamline the entire process and ensure your documentation is not an afterthought but a foundation? Enter my custom-built tool, designed to transform your Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) in Mermaid syntax into fully functional Dataverse tables, complete with relationships and accurately typed columns: all via the Dataverse API.
This session shows how this approach eliminates repetitive tasks, reduces errors, and speeds up solution development. By leveraging Mermaid diagrams as the starting point, we embrace an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) methodology, where the very design documentation becomes the blueprint for deployment.
You’ll learn how to simplify the creation of large, multi-table Dataverse schemas with a single input and how to keep your design and implementation in sync by starting with the documentationls
If you’re ready to level up your Dataverse development workflow and adopt a documentation-first approach that scales, this session is for you.
How to use requirements engineering techniques and Behavior Driven Development to build shared under
I’ve worked with teams that had great engineers, solid architecture, and all the right agile rituals in place. And still; delivery felt exhausting. Releases kept being postponed over and over, QA found issues “no one expected”, and product kept saying “this isn’t what we discussed”.
What I learned the hard way is this: most delivery problems are not technical. They come from small, invisible misunderstandings that compound over time.
Developers, product, QA, and (internal) customers often believe they are aligned because they use the same words. In reality, everyone fills in the gaps differently. Requirements become assumptions and acceptance criteria become interpretations. And by the time the mismatch shows up, it’s already expensive, both emotionally and technically.
In this session, I’ll share concrete patterns I’ve seen across real product teams; what went wrong, what helped, and what made delivery noticeably calmer.
We’ll look at how:
- treating requirements as conversations changed how teams worked together
- example-driven thinking exposed gaps before code was written
- Gherkin and BDD helped non-technical and - technical roles align on behavior, not implementation
- clearer communication reduced rework and took pressure out of releases
This is not theory nor a framework pitch, but a practical perspective on how shared understanding across roles can turn delivery from a nerve-wracking event into a predictable, collaborative process.
Hard to swallow pills: Unpopular truths about software development
"Don’t deploy on Fridays", "We’ll refactor that later", "If it works, don’t touch it." These mantras have become the soundtrack of software development, repeated so often they’ve started to sound like wisdom. But what if they’re just comforting lies we tell ourselves to avoid the hard work of doing things better?
This is a wake-up call for devs who’ve grown way too comfortable with excuses. We’ll tackle the uncomfortable truths: technical debt isn’t the villain, and overengineering is just ego dressed up as cleverness. If deployments terrify you, it’s not the calendar’s fault: it’s your process. And that code you “won’t touch because it works”? It’s quietly becoming tomorrow’s biggest problem.
You’ll walk away with a renewed perspective on building resilient systems, and creating a development culture you can trust. It’s time to stop joking about survival-mode mantras and start building software that’s reliable, maintainable, and deployable: yes, even on a Friday.
"I will remember that" and other lies - Why documentation matters and it makes your apps better
If we mention to write documentation, this goes very often with some rolling eyes 🙄 as documenting is considered to be one of the least attractive tasks. Learn in this session not only why complete documentation (no, inline comments are not sufficient) matters, but how changing your view and approach of writing the docs can lead to a better understanding of your app, easier onboarding for your team, smoother delivery, and better user-experience. Luise will provide you with some eye-opening insights on the why, how and what of proper documentation.
Building smart agents with Azure and Microsoft Foundry
AI solutions often rely on a single OpenAI call, but what if you need more flexibility? Different models, custom options, and seamless integration: This is where Azure and Microsoft Foundry come in. In this session, Luise will show you how to build smart AI agents that go beyond a single model, giving you more control and customization. You'll see how to create and deploy AI solutions with Azure and Microsoft Foundry and even integrate them with Copilot Studio to bring your use case to life.
3 key-highlights:
1. Learn how Microsoft Foundry enables flexibility by integrating multiple AI models beyond OpenAI
2. See how to build, fine-tune, and deploy smart AI agents tailored to your needs
3. Discover how to connect Azure with Copilot Studio to bring AI solutions to life
Let's deploy on Fridays!
Your team sticks to the Friday-freeze-policy? This is super common, but also it gives a certain smell. A smell of low delivery confidence and of low trust in your processes around Testing, QA and rollback. This session won't make you suddenly trust your bubblegum-and-duct-taped delivery pipeline but aims at stripping away the superstition and look at what’s really broken when teams are too scared to ship.
We’ll dig into the real indicators of healthy delivery, like deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, recovery time, and why they matter more than any velocity chart ever will. You’ll not only learn how to read them, but how to improve them, and stop using "we'll refactor later" as a survival strategy. We'll talk culture, pipelines, and the small (and big) lies teams tell themselves to feel safe instead of getting better. And then we'll fix them.
So what you get is a playbook for deploying any day of the week; not because you’re reckless, but because you finally built a system that deserves that confidence.
POC Prison: Why agentic systems never escape the lab and how to fix that in 90 days
Most organizations experimenting with agentic AI aren’t blocked by models, frameworks, or orchestration. They’re blocked by something far more basic: the everyday realities of how enterprises actually work.
Agents look brilliant in controlled demos, but the moment you try to plug them into real systems (legacy data, governance, identity, compliance, and unclear ownership) they collapse into the same pile of abandoned POCs as everything else.
My talk cuts through the hype and gets straight to the uncomfortable truth:
- why agentic systems end up as flashy prototypes instead of production tools,
- how Excel-based “data estates” quietly choke autonomy before it even starts,
- why most so-called “AI use cases” are still rule-based automation wearing an AI sticker, and
- how to build the minimal delivery backbone needed for any intelligent agent to run safely in a real enterprise.
This isn’t yet another vision talk, but the reality check most teams never get: the engineering and organizational work required to move agents from the lab into the world where the constraints are real and the stakes are even higher.
Care about getting agentic systems running rather than demoing? This session gives you the hard truths and the practical steps to finally make that possible.
Your Testing Strategy is broken - lets fix it!
Testing is essential for delivering reliable software, but too often, teams fall into the trap of testing everything and testing it poorly. Endless unit tests for trivial code create a false sense of security while ignoring the areas that matter most—like how your system behaves when it really counts. This session takes a hard look at what makes a good testing strategy. Instead of chasing meaningless metrics like 100% coverage, learn how to test behaviors, focus on integration points, and embrace a leaner, smarter approach to quality assurance. Your users don’t care about how many tests you’ve written—they care about software that works. This is your guide to writing fewer tests, but better ones, that actually make a difference.
How to get from Dev?! Oooops! to proper DevOps in Power Platform with Azure DevOps
Join Luise as she dives into Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for Power Platform solutions, making the case for why Azure DevOps is a game-changer for managing low-code projects. She'll tackle the big no-nos like sticking to a one-environment strategy, skipping source control, and the manual slog of build processes. Luise will explain how these common mistakes can make your solutions a moving target for users and a nightmare of irreversible changes for developers. She will show you how to keep your projects stable and stress-free by smartly using source control, creating clear boundaries between development environments, and automating the heck out of your build and deployment routines. Expect to get the lowdown on understanding the critical differences between managed and unmanaged solutions, and why Azure DevOps Build Tools should be your new best friend.
ESPC25 Sessionize Event
Codemotion Milan 2025 Sessionize Event
WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2025 Sessionize Event
European Power Platform Conference (EPPC25) Sessionize Event
Azure Community Day Köln x Global Azure 2025 Sessionize Event
ColorCloud Hamburg 2025 Sessionize Event
ESPC24 Sessionize Event
WPC 2024 Sessionize Event
Directions EMEA 2024 Sessionize Event
Codemotion Milan 2024 Sessionize Event
M365 Community Days NYC Sessionize Event
WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2024 Sessionize Event
Experts Live Netherlands 2024 Sessionize Event
Techorama Netherlands 2023 Sessionize Event
WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2023 Sessionize Event
Azure Lowlands 2023 Sessionize Event
NDC Oslo 2023 Sessionize Event
Techorama 2023 Belgium Sessionize Event
May 2023 Microsoft 365 Conference Sessionize Event
Techorama Netherlands 2022 Sessionize Event
Power Platform Conference (Community Content) Sessionize Event
Scottish Summit 2022 Sessionize Event
CollabDays UK 2022 - Bletchley Park Sessionize Event
Modern Workplace Conference Paris 2022 Sessionize Event
Office365 & SharePoint Connect Community Edition Sessionize Event
SharePoint Saturday London 2019 Sessionize Event
SharePoint Saturday Cologne Sessionize Event
SharePoint Saturday Warsaw 2019 Sessionize Event
SharePoint Saturday Bremen/North Germany 2019 Sessionize Event
Luise Freese
Changing the world one app at a time
Düsseldorf, Germany
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