Strategy + studio

The ask was "put Power BI on HoloLens." The better question was what data means for people whose work isn't at a desk: the pipeline inspector, the technician at the machine.

We talked with customers, including a pipeline company and a museum, about their jobs, not the technology. When do they need their hands free? When does data help them do the work? We broke each job into steps and the information each step needs. Then we sketched every moment and wrote down why each thing appears on its own. That told us what the systems had to know. A mini-map, for example, needs the worker's location, a map of the pipeline, a digital copy of the site (a digital twin), and which way the worker is facing. We drew it all as a comic-book storyboard and found real locations for each frame.

I drew the sketches myself in January 2017, in PowerPoint on a giant touchscreen, before Surface Hub existed: a sketch slide, then a pixel slide, and reviews by circling and annotating on the big screen. A month later we filmed it. That's me walking the pipes. Nothing was rendered in the headset; I knew where every element sat from the storyboards and put my finger where each button would be.

Power BI's leadership greenlit it as the product's vision, then took it to Satya Nadella. When the video played, he recognized me on screen, stopped the meeting and asked me to introduce myself. I explained what we'd learned and why we'd made each decision. He greenlit it, and it became Power BI for HoloLens.

Power BI for HoloLens launched in the Microsoft Store in May 2018.

One activity-based surface across Dynamics 365, Power BI, Power Apps and Office. "In the same way we're unifying our data, we need to unify the user interface. They're two sides of the same coin." AI would learn the patterns in how people work and assemble the experience around the activity. We developed it with customers and took it to Business Applications leadership in 2019. I wrote and narrated the vision film.

The idea kept going. Years later I drove the same idea as Unified Copilot for Fabric. And Fabric's Real-Time Intelligence team, led by my engineering partner from those years, is building much of the back end Bifrost needed.

Studio X leaned on me too much. When I went on leave, it stalled. I never got to hire that team; it existed to support my vision work. I carried that lesson into everything after: build teams that could take my seat.