When I got home from my very first MVP Summit, LinkedIn was already full of recap posts from fellow MVPs, many of whom I now get to call peers. Beautiful, enthusiastic, polished recaps. I did not want to add another one. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I wanted to wait until I actually knew what I wanted to say. A crazy work schedule in the days after the event also helped with that. The best thing I could do was focus on work, let the dust settle, and come back to it when the noise wore off.

So here is my honest reflection, a few weeks late and probably better because of it.

I expected clarity. I found the opposite.

I thought walking into Microsoft HQ, surrounded by product teams, mentors, and people I had admired for years, would feel like finally stepping into the room where everything makes sense. Instead, I found something much more human. In some ways, nobody has it fully figured out either.

AI is moving so fast that even the people building it are still catching up. I did not find that discouraging. I found it relieving. If the people you look up to are still learning in real time, then you are allowed to be learning too.

That was especially reassuring because outside rooms like that, tech can sound very different. Especially AI. There is a lot of chest beating, a lot of people acting like they have seen the future and already own property there. Meanwhile, I am still trying to wrap my head around things like Copilot Cowork, the deeper architecture behind it, and the partnerships reshaping the space in real time. The more I learn, the more I realize how much I do not know.

And maybe that is the point.

I am still here. Still asking questions. Still learning. Not planning to go anywhere.

Being selective was not optional. It was survival.

My friend Joy Apple (pictured above) wrote something that really resonated with me about the FOMO that comes with an event like this. I felt it. The sessions, the hallway conversations, the side meetings, the dinners, the after-hours moments where relationships actually get built. There is too much happening for any one person to do it all, and pretending otherwise is how you fry yourself.

That part does not get talked about enough. The community is very good at performing enthusiasm at conferences. But when the pace is that intense and the content is that dense, choosing what to skip becomes a skill, not a failure.

So I made some deliberate choices. I skipped a few things. I protected my energy. Even without stepping away from the experience, I had to be intentional about how I moved through it. With so many interesting sessions covering just about every Microsoft application under the sun, I could have wandered more. Instead, I mostly stayed in my lane, often watching which sessions the people I admire were heading into and taking that as a pretty good signal.

I was in survival mode at times, and I am not embarrassed to say it. My after-hours involvement was pretty minimal. Also, Miami has completely distorted my expectations of what a good night out looks like, so conference happy hours were never really going to win that fight.

Learning alongside the people I learned from.

There is a very specific feeling that comes from sitting in a session next to someone whose blog you were reading five, ten, or even fifteen years ago, when you were still trying to figure out what SharePoint governance even meant. It does not feel like arrival, exactly. It feels more like belonging.

And that is better.

I will also allow myself one brief moment of bragging. I got to stand on that stage too (alongside fellow MVP’s Agnieszka Maria Mietz-Blijleven, Jeremy Sinclair, and Sucheta Gawade) and talk about mentorship. What I said there is still what I believe. Whether you are the mentor or the mentee, there is always something to learn from each other. Collaboration is not some soft, optional extra. It is how this community actually works when it is working well.

As for what I learned in the sessions…

That part will have to wait. NDA is still NDA.

What I can say is this: I left Redmond feeling less like I had found answers, and more like I had found the right kind of questions. That turned out to be more valuable than certainty.

And yes, I will still be out there asking them.

If you are heading to the Microsoft 365 Community Conference in Orlando next week, or M365 DC and M365 Philly the month after that, come find me. I will be the one still figuring it out, still asking questions, and still very okay with that.