People ask me this a lot: “So what’s your specialty: M365, Copilot, or Dynamics?”
Honestly? None of them. All of them. It depends on the day.
For a long time I thought I needed to pick a lane. Go deep on one product, become THE person for it, put it in my bio in bold letters. That’s how you’re “supposed” to build a career in tech.
But here’s what I kept noticing in the field: the problems that actually stall a rollout are almost never inside one product. They’re in the gaps between them. Someone’s confused about why Copilot in Teams behaves differently to Copilot in Outlook. A Dynamics 365 change gets blocked because nobody thought about the change management side. A brilliant AI pilot goes nowhere because the training plan was an afterthought.
That’s the space I actually live in. Not the deepest expert in any one box, but the person who can stand in the middle of all the boxes and help people make sense of how they fit together.
Copilot isn’t one product
This is where being a generalist really pays off. Copilot doesn’t live in one app. It shows up across Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365: your inbox, your OneDrive, your Teams, your SharePoint, and your sales, service and finance systems. If the foundations are a mess, Copilot struggles, no matter how good your prompts are.
I saw this in a recent project. The client told me their people were already advanced Copilot users. Within the first session, it was clear most of them were using it like a search engine. Some had never opened the Microsoft 365 app. So before we touched a single business scenario, we went back to the foundations: where files live, how Teams works, how to write a clear email. A Copilot specialist might have gone straight to the clever prompts. A generalist sees that the house needs a floor first.
What “generalist” doesn’t mean
It doesn’t mean I know a little about everything and a lot about nothing. My certifications go from Dynamics 365 Finance and Customer Service to Copilot and AI, and I’m a Microsoft Certified Trainer. I go deep when a project needs it.
And I’m still learning. Right now I’m studying for a Power Platform exam, for the second time. I didn’t pass the first try. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have it. It just means I need to understand it better, and I’d rather really know it than just pass it. I tell the people I train that it’s okay not to know everything yet. That goes for me too.
It means I know enough about each piece to see how they connect. And I know when to bring in a specialist.
Years ago, at a SharePoint Saturday (back when those were big events, before COVID), my aunt, Tracy van der Schyff, said something that has stuck with me ever since:
I’ve carried that with me in work, in life and through every season. Whatever is happening, it’s not about having all the answers yourself. It’s about making sure you have your community by your side, especially when things get difficult.
That’s how some of my favourite projects work: a deep expert on the technical side, and me making sure the people side lands.
Why it works for the people I train
The people I train don’t think in products. They think in problems: “I can’t find that file.” “I’m drowning in emails.” “Where do I save this?” Their answer usually crosses three or four apps. If I only knew one of them, I’d only solve a quarter of the problem.
That’s also why I started my I Asked Copilot series: real problems, solved across Outlook, OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint, one post at a time.
So yes. I’m a Microsoft Generalist. On purpose.
Chat soon,
xoxo
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