Interview - Anne Krupke

Johan returns from sunny Orlando to Sweden's +1°C rain to interview Anne Krupke, Microsoft's Senior Product Marketing Manager who brings a unique perspective - starting as an implementation consultant for supply chain and manufacturing, then FastTrack solution architect, now marketing. Her journey embodies the shift Microsoft is making: selling products the way they're actually implemented.

Anne reveals the genesis of Microsoft's business process-centric approach. For years, partners were process-oriented while Microsoft marketed individual apps and features, creating a jarring disconnect when customers reached implementation. The solution? Sell products using process-centric language that customers actually understand, then show how Dynamics fits their workflows. The pitch materials launched over a year ago have seen thousands of downloads from partners and hundreds of uses internally.

The conversation explores how product teams historically organized around features - warehouse management PMs, general ledger PMs - rather than end-to-end processes. The business process catalog emerged from FastTrack escalations that kept repeating. Anne explains they were only providing best practice recommendations after dealing with problems multiple times, then realized they could just document everything proactively.

Johan and Gustav champion the catalog as crucial guidance, eliminating the "it depends" paralysis that plagued every implementation decision. The first three catalog layers remain product-agnostic, helping navigate scenarios where multiple Microsoft solutions could work - quotations in CRM versus Project Operations versus core SCM. Anne emphasizes this isn't Microsoft alone - crowdsourcing from the partner community makes the catalog a living repository, similar to FastTrack's GitHub telemetry dashboards.

A significant announcement: business process decks are now available on the FastTrack implementation portal for any customer with a Dynamics project, enabling internal pitching and discovery workshops.