Power BI Contributor’s Program

What is a Power BI Contributor?

A Power BI Contributor is a member of the Power BI community who can build new capabilities and features into the Power BI product itself. This year I was very lucky to be invited to take part in this new program and am the first to go through the process of being inducted in the Power BI Desktop development team, and to deliver new features into Power BI.

What have I contributed to Power BI?

My first contributions have focussed around adding new capabilities to existing visuals. Specifically, the KPI visual and the Table and Matrix visuals. See the December 2019 Power BI Desktop Updates blog post for more information.

Why those features?

These were identified by two of our customers as additions to existing visuals that would make a big difference to the reports that they were developing. Therefore, they were ideal candidates to be considered as my first contributions.

What does it mean to our customers?

Being part of this program means, that if a customer identifies a gap in Power BI, with the agreement of the Microsoft Power BI product team, I may be able to develop that functionality into the product. This is likely to be a feature that is going to be beneficial to a wider number of organisations but isn’t high enough priority for the product team to develop it in the short term. This program allows some of those lower priority features to make it into the product quicker and allow the product team to focus on the more strategic developments.