Integration Love Story med Wagner Silveira

Introduktion

Hello and welcome. Glad to have you as one of our first guests in this podcast. I’d like to give you the mic to introduce yourself — and I also have a question about what it means to be a senior product manager in Logic Apps.

My name is Wagner Silveira. I’m a senior product manager with the Logic Apps team. One interesting thing before we get into the role itself: I’m one of the few people on the field side based outside the US. I actually live in New Zealand and work with the team remotely. Our whole team is quite remote and it works really well.

What does a product manager do? There are a lot of different answers depending on who you ask. From my experience over almost three years in the role: I’m one of the people responsible for a specific area of the product — thinking about how that area needs to evolve to delight the customer. My portfolio covers developer experience and community outreach. I don’t work on those alone. For developer experience, I work with the designer team, the front-end team, and other feature areas like custom code and hybrid — weaving together the story of how developers should best be served when creating integration solutions using Logic Apps.

Att hantera en enorm backlog

Your backlog must be enormous. How do you manage all the feedback you receive?

We try to find patterns. We might receive five or six different requests from customers, but when we find the similarities — the pain points that keep appearing — that’s what goes into the backlog. Prioritization is based on how important a feature is to customers and how much we can fit into a given semester, because we work in semesters.

Sometimes the most pressing request isn’t what you see being worked on, because certain features require a lot of prep work — back end, front end, infrastructure — before they can surface. We try to work out loud as much as possible, but some things need a lot of preparation before we can share them. That’s where private previews and interactions through podcasts, Logic Apps standups, and community events are so important — getting feedback early so we can course-correct before we’ve gone too far in the wrong direction.

Livet utanför Microsoft

What does the senior product manager do when not working?

I try to keep my mind clear by playing games. During COVID I got into miniature painting. After a really stressful day full of meetings, I’ll sit at the bench with a miniature and I forget about everything else because I have to focus so completely on something that small.

I’ve also played Dungeons and Dragons since university. I had a group in Brazil for almost five years, then everyone moved around, I moved to New Zealand, found a group there. One of my nephews was 14 when I started taking him to games. Then I had kids, had to stop, then my kids turned 14 and I started playing with them — until they formed their own group and kicked me out. Now I’m playing again with that nephew, who is 30-plus.

When I was 15, my dad found a secondhand motorbike he wanted to buy for me. I said: Dad, if you’re going to spend money on something, buy me a computer. He went to a corner, cried for three months, and then bought me the computer.

Sessionen på Integrate 2024 — Developer Productivity

At Integrate 2024 in London, your session was about accelerating developer productivity with Logic Apps. Why this topic?

For people to be successful using Logic Apps they need a really good developer experience. Fast time to market, secure and repeatable deployments — these are key. And we always knew this was an area we needed to improve, but it required a lot of work under the surface before we could surface anything for customers.

The first thing we focused on was the perception — and the reality — that the VS Code extension was too hard to get started with. We had a group of prerequisites that were genuinely necessary but difficult to set up, especially for developers unfamiliar with the environment. And a very specific set of frameworks that sometimes clashed with the latest versions.

The way we broke that problem: we now take care of installing those frameworks in a location that’s part of your profile but configurable. If you want to use the latest version of .NET or the Functions runtime, you can install it system-wide because Logic Apps will always direct to that specific slice. This means developers who do Logic Apps, Functions, and .NET development on the same machine no longer face those conflicts. And every time a new framework requirement is added, we add it to the onboarding so the next extension update handles it automatically.

The second area was CI/CD deployments. We worked with Azure DevOps and templates to automate the whole process. When your Logic Apps project is ready and tested, you can generate deployment scripts for the Logic App itself, any required connectors, build and deploy — all pluggable into your pipeline.

The third area was deployment slots for zero-downtime deployments. You don’t want to impact production on mission-critical applications.

Those three things together — easier installation, automated deployment scripts, zero-downtime deployments — were the first wave. Since Integrate we’ve been working on getting those components to GA, because for enterprise customers the GA stamp matters for compliance and peace of mind.

Testning — pivot från Low-code till Full-code

You also talked about unit testing at Integrate. What happened after that announcement?

Our original idea was a codeless approach — creating unit tests the same way you create Logic Apps, visually. We knew that would get customers to about 60 to 70 percent of coverage.

The problem was the feedback from customers and internal stakeholders: if we release something that takes you 70 percent of the way, customers will adopt it and then hit a cliff at that remaining 20 to 30 percent. They’ll be stuck.

So we pivoted. Instead of releasing the codeless experience first and having customers hit that wall, we’re focusing on the code-first approach — getting to 100 percent coverage — and potentially reintroducing the visual experience later based on feedback.

The code-first approach works similarly to a normal unit test in .NET. You define your mocks, you have an executor that uses the actual Logic Apps runtime behind the scenes, and you use the unit test framework of your choice for your asserts. We’ll also generate code and sample data from run history to make creating the basic cases as simple as it was before. The visual work isn’t lost — it’s set aside so we can focus on something customers can fully use.

Logic Apps som orkestrator för alla typer av utvecklare

One misconception about Logic Apps is that it sits awkwardly between Power Automate and Azure Functions. How do you think about that?

Logic Apps is meant to be the orchestrator engine for all developers — whether you’re a low-code developer, a pro-code developer, or a classic integration specialist who came from BizTalk and was somewhere in between. The people from BizTalk roots created things in a visual designer but were very savvy with C# because you needed it for pipeline extensions and expression code.

What we’re trying to ensure is that the tooling bridges that full range of developers. Custom code lets you extend Logic Apps without leaving the environment. Data mapping lets you handle transformations inside the same environment. The testing framework we’re building works with the unit test framework of your choice.

Var du följer Logic Apps-roadmapen

Where can people follow what’s happening?

Two main things, and I do these together with Kent and Alex Szünyogh — both passionate about community.

First, the Logic Apps Live standup — every last Thursday of the month at 11am Pacific. Go to aka.ms/lalive to find the next session or a recap of the last one.

Second, a monthly newsletter. Throughout the month we publish articles from the team and from the community, and we collect them into a newsletter with the best content from that month. We also use the newsletter to shout out community members who’ve been doing great work — blogging, being helpful in chats, amplifying Logic Apps on social media. We call them Aviators. It’s grassroots and community-driven, with no barrier to entry. The newsletter is at aka.ms/laistechcommunity — subscribe from the Integrations on Azure Tech Community blog.

We also have a Logic Apps Community Day. This year it’s Thursday Pacific time — go to aka.ms/lacommunityday for the agenda. Instead of renowned speakers or product team talks, it’s all community — MVPs, Ace Aviators, brand new community members. Almost five hours of content this year, streamed live and available on YouTube afterwards through the Azure Developers channel.

AI och integration — var Logic Apps passar in

We can’t end without talking about AI. What’s your view on AI in integration?

There are two ways to look at it.

The first is AI as a tool for development. Copilot and AI assistants are great for creating content faster, collating and summarizing information, and helping with code in languages you’re less familiar with. But like any tool, you need to understand what it’s doing. Using AI to help write code is not that different from copying from Stack Overflow — you still need to review what you got and make sure it’s doing what you intend.

The second is using Logic Apps as a tool to build intelligent applications. As integrators, we are custodians of data. We’re already moving data across systems, and we already have the connections to both data sources and language models. We’re very well positioned to accelerate the data collection patterns needed for AI — specifically the RAG pattern, where you ingest data to enrich a model and retrieve it to generate value.

That’s why we’ve been working on connectors and templates for the RAG pattern. And the other side of intelligent applications — the actions, the reasoning — is also something Logic Apps is uniquely positioned for. Making Logic Apps available as a plugin in Semantic Kernel or as an action in Copilot Studio means you can augment a conversation with real actions backed by Logic Apps. The time to market for those scenarios is very fast when you can leverage existing connections.

So yes — Logic Apps is an orchestrator, and it’s very well positioned to be the orchestrator for this new generation of AI-powered applications.

Integration Love Story

Where did you fall in love with integration?

Around 2005 I was being made redundant at a company and was looking at moving to consulting. The first job they had for me required working with BizTalk. I said: BizTalk what? I had no idea what it was.

I learned BizTalk in about a week and started working on a project that took about a year. I fell in love with the integration space during that project. I’ve been working in integration ever since.

Fråga till näste gäst — Kent Weare

The next guest is Kent Weare. What question would you challenge him with?

One of the things I find really interesting about Kent is how much he loves outdoor activities — running, golf, marathons — on top of an incredibly busy schedule as program manager lead, community member, and prolific content creator.

My question for him: how does he actually manage his time to fit all of that in? Not just as a question — I genuinely want the tip.

Thank you so much for having me. This was really good.

Thank you, Wagner, and we’re looking forward to having you again.