What is an ALM MVP?
If you asked me 12 months ago what an ALM MVP was, I would likely have told you something—unfortunately, that something would have been completely wrong. One of the most important things I learned this year from being an ALM MVP is what an ALM MVP actually is.
What is an MVP?
First, it is an award—this means you receive it as recognition for doing something that benefits the community of people who use a Microsoft product (or products). It is also important to note that the reason it is awarded to one person is seldom the same as it is awarded to another—no two people are alike, nor are their community contributions, and so the award is unique per person.
I think it’s safe to assume that if you are going to do something that benefits many people using a specific product, you need to know something about that product 😉. However, being an MVP is not meant to indicate that this person is an expert in certain product(s) and knows everything about the product.
This doesn’t mean that a lot of MVPs aren’t brilliant—many are scary smart. The first two that jump to mind are Ed Blankenship, an ALM MVP, and Jon Skeet, a C# MVP—but at the end of the day, all MVPs are people, like you, with limits and gaps in knowledge.
The ALM Stadium
ALM MVPs have an additional layer of complexity since the community they help revolves around not one single product, like Zune MVPs for instance, but is actually made up of many products and components. Above is the “stadium” picture, which shows a lot of (most of?) the components that make up ALM.
An ALM MVP may know and work in one product/component and never encounter the others. An example is Zayd Kara, an ALM MVP, who is deeply IT Pro-focused—so he understands installing systems, building in TFS, etc.—but he seldom opens or works in the Visual Studio IDE, so he may not know as much about it as another ALM MVP.
As I stated above, the reasons someone is awarded differ, and so the areas and skills of ALM MVPs vary from person to person.