MYOB, one of the most recognized companies in Australia and New Zealand, serving 1.3 million+ small-to-medium businesses, partnered with Thoughtworks to chart a path forward. Together, we built the foundations for MYOB to support their customer-led SaaS transformation: embracing new ways of working, shifting mindset and building the right capabilities to enable MYOB to innovate at speed and scale to meet evolving customer needs. We sat down with Thoughtworkers Meg Blake, Product and Experience Design Principal, and Katie Marcar, Product Manager, to share their experience working on the project with MYOB. Watch the video to hear more about how they overcame challenges as a team, what they learnt and how working on this project has helped them to grow professionally.
Introduce yourself and tell us about the project with MYOB
Meg: My name’s Meg Blake. I'm a product CX and design consultant at Thoughtworks. The kind of work we work on can be capability uplift like with MYOB, but quite often it's delivering a brand new product into market or delivering a new feature for a really high profile product.
Katie: I'm Katie Marcar. I'm a Thoughtworks consultant and I was the engagement lead and product subject matter expert. I brought my experience as a product manager into the team to help understand where we might be able to improve things for people working at MYOB so that they can get out that product to their customers.
What was your experience working on this project?
Meg: What Thoughtworks consultants really like is a really challenging and wicked problem. Those are the kinds of problems that we like to solve for our clients. So whether that be around how to connect better with their customers, deliver better commercial outcomes or think more strategically about what their business could be solving for in the future. For MYOB that was around orienting their product management ability, teams and business around their ambitions to support their customers better.
Katie: We worked with both MYOB and some of the consultants that they also worked with around product. We were able to really connect together and form that one united team — it almost felt like we weren't there but of course we were bringing our own Thoughtworks experience and the wider experience of the Thoughtworks network into the team.
Looking back on this project, what are some of the things you learnt?
Meg: What I've experienced at Thoughtworks is that generally we pull together in high pressure environments. There's an inherent trust in each other that we can deliver on what we're there to deliver. Another great thing is that you have a global network of people around the world who are on "speed dial" twenty-four-seven. It was also nice to have a community at MYOB who are aligned around thinking about customer and solving customer problems. It's like a mini Thoughtworks within Thoughtworks.
How did working on this project help you grow?
Katie: I think I was really lucky to have exposure to strong executives who I was able to help with my experience, but also to learn from them and how they managed the change within MYOB. In the past I might have had more surface level experience with adapting and being a change agent where I was adopting and rolling out the changes that were brought to me. But this is probably one of the times where I've been part of the team that's designing the change, designing the new way of working and then rolling it out. So that's just been a really great experience for me professionally to be able to see that end-to-end.
What are you most proud of?
Katie: I'm most proud that we really stuck together as a team, that we really had each other's back, that we really collaborated and respected each other and all of the awesome value and experience each one of us brought to the picture. I really am so proud of that teamwork.
For more on the project with MYOB, check out the full partnership story (includes video).
Disclaimer: The statements and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Thoughtworks.
