Why Loop Is Changing the Way We Collaborate

00:00:06 Mark Smith
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called How to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, Let's get on with the show. Welcome back to the MVP Show. Today's guest is from Stockholm, Sweden. She's an employee experience and productivity expert. Fooling through in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Amanda.

00:00:47 Amanda Sterner
Thank you. Nice to be here.

00:00:49 Mark Smith
Good to have you on. It's good to speak with somebody that's familiar with the software that we use. Anna's doing a lot of great stuff in the co-pilot space, particularly at the moment, which is a big focus of mine. Tell me about food, family, and fun. What do they mean to you?

00:01:08 Amanda Sterner
I think it's funny that you ask about food, family, and fun, because if people ask me about my hobbies, I would say food, family, and fun. Exactly those things. I love to eat. I love trying new restaurants. Eating is a big hobby. I enjoy my family, of course. And fun right now, besides community stuff, because that sounds like a very weird hobby for people outside of our Microsoft community, I really like reading.

00:01:36 Mark Smith
Interesting. Like, what type of books are you into?

00:01:39 Amanda Sterner
I very, very rarely read factual books, so it's mostly like fiction. I like every kind of book. I don't know, right now I'm reading some sort of romantic rom-com. It's in the Canadian Western somewhere. It's with horses and I'm hoping for some spicy parts soon. But I read every kind of book.

00:02:03 Mark Smith
I love it. I love it. So good. Tell me, like I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions and in the research that I've done on what you talk about online and things like that. But one that really grabbed my attention And not either people are either polarized by this or they're not. And that is a question about Loop. Why is Loop changing collaboration?

00:02:30 Amanda Sterner
You know, I really love Loop. And I think that's something that I enjoy is testing new things. You know, Microsoft releases a lot of things on a daily basis. I always try things out. And to be honest, before Loop, I was a writing manual notes with a pen kind of gal, meaning that, okay, here we have Loop. You know, one note is so ugly. I don't want to use it, but it's nice to have notes online. And Loop came. It looks beautiful. It's like fluent, pretty emojis, nice colors. And I was hooked immediately. But I can see that people still have a problem with Loop because for me, Loop is all about me work. I still find it lacking in functionality for proper teamwork, but it's getting slowly better.

00:03:29 Mark Smith
Interesting.

00:03:31 Amanda Sterner
Do you like Loop?

00:03:33 Mark Smith
I'm an absolute convert to Loop. As in, after 10 years of using OneNote,

00:03:39 Mark Smith
I don't have OneNote on anything now. Like I've archived off into OneDrive all my historic OneNotes. I've found I've gone about six months now and never had to refer back to them. Right now, even this podcast, my talk screen up to my right here is all in loop. I use the heaps of expanding menus so I can do my research piece first, then kind of what do I perceive Amanda's North Star is, and then What are the key topics Amanda talks about, which is, you know, I've gone out and used a Copilot prompt to research. What are the things that you talk about more frequently than anything else to go, again, I know I'm going to be able to talk about stuff that's on your radar. So I love Loop. I think it's an amazing tool. And I only found Loop through Copilot, you know, six, nine months ago.

00:04:32 Amanda Sterner
I love that. I mean, it's very easy to start using. And the only thing that I'm really, really missing to make it perfect. I mean, of course, there's always things to improve it, but I want to be able to use it when I don't have Wi-Fi or internet. It's very annoying.

00:04:48 Mark Smith
Offline?

00:04:49 Amanda Sterner
Yeah. I write all of my social media ideas in loop. So I have a long list of random thoughts. I just put them in. And when I'm flying, I like to write my drafts, but I can't. Then I'm on the notes, and that's very annoying. But otherwise, chef's kiss. I love loop.

00:05:10 Mark Smith
I love that chef's kiss. So, you know, when it comes to collaboration and, you know, a few limitations I've found is like, when you create a PDF out of a loop, it puts all the Chroma stuff in the PDF. In other words, it'll put like a reference to the Chrome URL, but in a weird format, and it's like, That's meaningless to whoever's getting a PDF off here. They don't need any of that. Just give the nice clean format layout experience. Do you use Copilot much with Loop? Like as an inside Loop using Copilot?

00:05:48 Amanda Sterner
Yeah, I use it sometimes to draft new ideas and I really like that co-pilot and loop is collaborative. Like the whole idea of loop is being together, even though I'm saying I usually use it by myself. But I like that I can easily flip between different drafts with co-pilot and see if some of my co-workers made changes.

00:06:12 Mark Smith
Yeah.

00:06:13 Amanda Sterner
And of course, I do a lot like a demo content with co-piloting loop when I'm talking about it in conferences.

00:06:20 Mark Smith
So where do you think pages then fit into this equation?

00:06:23 Amanda Sterner
I mean, I want to say that I love pages, but I am still not there, to be frank. I'm not using pages a lot. And same with notebooks. That is, I feel like notebooks, it came with such like a fast blast. And then it was Swedish summer and I was off for six weeks. And I'm still trying to remember who I am after my vacation.

00:06:52 Mark Smith
Nice.

00:06:53 Amanda Sterner
Yeah. So somewhere like I want, to, I will get there, I think. But I'm thinking of it more as they're based on loop. But it's not loop, even though it's loop.

00:07:07 Mark Smith
I couldn't figure why we just didn't keep those as loops and why we needed to come up with a new concept. But of course, all of this is so iterative. And I assume that there's so much telemetry data coming back from Microsoft on what people are adopting and what are they getting into.

00:07:24 Amanda Sterner
Yeah.

00:07:25 Mark Smith
I'm interested to find somebody that's really leaned into using notebook, notebooks inside.

00:07:32 Amanda Sterner
Me too. I will let you know if I find someone.

00:07:36 Mark Smith
Yeah, I haven't found anybody that's gone full in that. I mean, research and analysts are great tools. I think they're amazing. But then along comes GPT-5, and then you go, do I need to still switch over and use those tools as much, right?

00:07:56 Amanda Sterner
But I don't know. Sometimes I say I was born in the cloud. I have I don't think I've ever worked with like an on-prem project. Maybe I have and I just, I don't think, I don't think about that. But what I understood from people working more with on-prem things is that one of the magical things with the cloud is that it's going very fast. And I actually prefer, I don't know, I prefer things fast that are broken. rather than waiting for something to be released once a year. I don't know. I want to try things. And of course, I'm disappointed sometimes when Microsoft removes features, but rather fast and sturdy than quick and I don't know.

00:08:46 Mark Smith
When I started my career, it was three-year release cycles with Microsoft. Every three years, you got a new feature dump, and then you had that for three years, and there might've been the odd patch. or kind of like interim release, but it was never really anything. And otherwise it was three years between drinks and it was crazy slow.

00:09:05 Amanda Sterner
I can't even like imagine that world. It feels very, very far away from me.

00:09:12 Mark Smith
Well, you think it'd be like when they released Copilot on day one and we wouldn't get an update till next year.

00:09:20 Amanda Sterner
That would be crazy, right? Yeah, I remember how bad Copilot was in the beginning. And I mean, there's still flaws here and there, but yeah, no, that would be awful.

00:09:34 Mark Smith
Oh, horrible, horrible. How are you helping organizations in the way staff do their work? And I'm not just limiting this to Copilot, but all the M365 suite. I'm constantly surprised at how many people, for example, don't know what OneDrive is or even how to share files outside, there's often a total no understanding of where documents sit inside, you know, SharePoint or what that means and how to use search. And I find that Copilot, in my experience, is starting to open up those tools that have been around for ages to actually start servicing and people going, Oh my gosh, I didn't realize we could do this. What are you seeing when it comes to, productivity, efficiency, and even re-engineering the way people do work now with the new technological tools that we have.

00:10:32 Amanda Sterner
I think that there's like many different things to add here. First of all, something that I talk with all of my customers about is, I mean, it comes back to my vision on the cloud that people have to be eager to try out things. They have to test things. They have to explore. They cannot be afraid of breaking things. I usually say that it's very hard for you to break things in Microsoft 365. Just try different apps. You like them, use them again. You don't like them, don't use them again. And what I really like about the rise of Copilot, that sounds very lame, but you get it. I mean, Copilot, it's here and something that I like is besides all the things Copilot can do, Copilot can help us in apps that we're not used to working with. So for example, I really... I really love how Copilot takes the use of, for example, forms and whiteboard to the next step. You don't have to be like a super user. I mean, those apps aren't very hard to use, but you get it. But you go in there and Copilot can help you very quickly. And the same with like Excel. I hate Excel. But now all of a sudden, I'm like a very... average user of Excel because Copilot can help me with all of my issues. And yeah, I think it just all ties in together with exploring, having fun. You can't break things.

00:12:03 Mark Smith
Have you found, like when you said I hate Excel then, I was like, there's so many tools and even business processes that have come across in my career that I hated doing. And then recently, because of circumstances, had to do them, had Copilot, and I'm like, Oh my gosh, I can do this. I never thought I'd bother to take the time, but now I feel I'm doing stuff with tools that I just, in the past, I'm just like, I don't have time to learn how to do that well, so I'm not going to touch the tool. And now I'm getting massive value out of it because of what I can do with Copilot.

00:12:45 Amanda Sterner
Yeah, I mean, it just makes things so much easier to have that little help. And another example, I mean, sometimes I'm in the admin center and M365, not very often, but sometimes I'm in my own tenant, of course, and I, don't know, search for settings. And like Copilot, they're magical. I just ask any kind of question, Copilot fixes it for me, or at least points me in a direction. It just, it makes it easier to be in the same context that you want to be. Yeah, maybe I will go practice on Excel. I will. I like Excel more now with Copilot. I do.

00:13:21 Mark Smith
Yes, 100%. I wish I could like PowerPoint more with Copilot.

00:13:27 Amanda Sterner
Yeah, if only Copilot and PowerPoint actually make beautiful things. I always laugh about the marketing videos Microsoft released for Copilot and PowerPoint and why did it make it look so nice looking when it's not.

00:13:45 Mark Smith
I think that the day Microsoft gets PowerPoint and Copilot right, it's going to explode. I think it'll easily eclipse all the kind of PowerPoint killers that everybody feels that they've got in market that are AI enabled. Because at the moment, the biggest thing that AI and PowerPoint is not doing is AI is not understanding the context of the information on the website, on the slide, and then producing a visual experience to complement the data that's been presented. And I'm not talking about just finding a 1980s clip art picture and chucking it in behind the image.

00:14:30 Amanda Sterner
No, I mean, it can't be, it can't be that hard. I don't know. I don't do the LMS. No, but that would be a lovely use case because Copilot makes so ugly things.

00:14:45 Mark Smith
Yeah, yeah. You know, if you've ever seen, like on TikTok or there's YouTube reels, every now and again you might see some on LinkedIn as well, where creators are using PowerPoint and they create visually stunning you know, merging graphics together, having them zoom out, like the morphing techniques to the nth degree. And I'm like, Microsoft owned the entire code base of PowerPoint. They know programmatically all these features that have been built over the last 25, 30 years. Surely they can write a piece of AI to interrogate that and say, let's create the most movie esque type presentations that are possible that when people see them, they'll be like, wow, did you pay $10,000 to have that movie shot for this sales presentation?

00:15:40 Amanda Sterner
It's funny to mention that because I actually follow some people on TikTok that makes beautiful slides. And I have, I am doing some of those things. And there's a guy from New Zealand, I think he's from New Zealand.

00:15:55 Mark Smith
Australia, I reckon he is. There's an MVP that has a TikTok channel and he has something like 300,000 followers and he's a PowerPoint MVP. I contacted him and like if he does one slide for somebody, like a presentation, he charges like $1,000 to $2,000 a presentation. But they look amazing.

00:16:19 Amanda Sterner
Yeah. Yeah. Is it now? I'm sorry for those of you listening.

00:16:26 Mark Smith
Yeah, he's in Sydney.

00:16:27 Amanda Sterner
Yeah. And did you know who nominated him for being an MVP?

00:16:32 Mark Smith
It was me. Is that right?

00:16:34 Amanda Sterner
It was me. It was amazing. It was a very stiff move. I was like, he's amazing. He should be an MVP. So I slid into his DM and said, hey, have you heard about this thing called the MVP program? And then I nominated him.

00:16:51 Mark Smith
Yeah. Honestly, he's the. Like, there is-- I love him. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that is the type of talent. Like, this is what I'm like, hang on a second. As I say, Microsoft owns the code base to this. It's not like a third party having to work it out. They own the code base to PowerPoint and all these epic type animations, transitions, morphing, all that kind of stuff. It could be absolutely epic. Yeah, but anyhow, time will tell whether we get...

00:17:24 Amanda Sterner
You should link him, Luis. He's, no, I mean, I think that my PowerPoint skill has been like 100% better since I started following him.

00:17:34 Mark Smith
Absolutely amazing. Absolutely amazing. My last question, because we're already up at 20 minutes and our time has flown, it's been so nice to talk to you. Tell me about Champions programs. What's your experience with them?

00:17:50 Amanda Sterner
They are needed a lot. No, but I mean, companies, they implement changes and there's several ways of driving change. I've done a workshop on a couple of conference together with another one of my MVP best is Carolina from Finland. And one of the first thing that we mentioned in this workshop is that Champions is the most flexible, like price-worthy and good way of driving change. And it's just like a perfect place of gathering people who, I don't know, who like to not promote things, but like to be in the forefront, like to test things. They are internal influencers. And if we can get them on board, it will be much easier to get the rest of the company on board. And I mean, I could talk hours for champions. There's so many good things and fun things you can do, but You should have them. That's like my takeaway. Oh, that's a nice question that we also talk about. Like either you nominate them yourself or it's a manager nomination. And I think that it's a nice combination because some people need a push from the manager. The manager can see that you're a good sport, Amanda. You should be a champion. But I know that Carolina, for a fact, she thinks it should probably just be self-nomination, because we want people that want to do this. They want to be active. They need to participate. You don't need lurkers. You don't need people who are champions who aren't there being a part of it. So in a magical word, a combination, and maybe not just a manager nomination. It should be people who want to be champions.

00:19:42 Mark Smith
What has surprised you? in any of the champion programs you've been involved in? And what surprised you, but also kind of like what's had the biggest impact in a champions program in your experience?

00:19:55 Amanda Sterner
Oh, that's like a tough question because it really depends on the organization. But I think that a mix of different kind of activities is the best thing that drives change. I mean, me personally, I love a big champions like tiny conference day where people meet and actually, I don't know, get swag, see different sessions, network, just like a real conference. I love that, but not every company has money for it. But that's, everybody should have money for it. They should put money on a community champions mini conference with stickers and other nice things.

00:20:38 Mark Smith
Have you come across any scenario where Copilot adoption hasn't happened and the customer has wanted to get rid of the licenses?

00:20:47 Amanda Sterner
Definitely. I think people often believe that change just magically happens by itself, and that's not the case. We need to invest time and money and letting people actually getting used to that new habit. And definitely Copilot, that is a very new habit. It's not just, I don't know, saving your files in the cloud, but it's a matter of how you work. It doesn't come naturally to talk with Copilot in every scenario. And that's sad. I mean, if, but if people also don't want to put the time on it, sure, remove their license, it's their own fault.

00:21:32 Mark Smith
I love it. Amanda, it's been enjoyable talking to you. I can't wait to see you at the next MVP Summit.

00:21:37 Amanda Sterner
It was really nice to be here, Mark. Thank you.

00:21:45 Mark Smith
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host, Business Application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the nz365guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffee.com forward slash nz365guy. Thanks again and see you next time.