2025

Replacing core enterprise systems

Design leadership under high-stakes and high-pressure constraints

TL;DR

In 2025, MYOB undertook a huge challenge of replacing three core enterprise systems in a single year. It required collaboration from almost all areas of the business.

As Principal Designer, I led a cross-disciplinary design team of four designers through a year of high-stakes, high-constraint delivery.

I helped teams frame the right problems, make difficult trade-offs, and maintain a customer-centric perspective in a program that could easily have lost sight of the user entirely. I also delivered directly, for example, redesigning the account management portal, establishing a service design mapping framework, closing a critical gap in the checkout and payment experience, and building a scalable transactional email system.

Bedrock shipped on time. The design team matured. And the foundations for MYOB's next phase of experience investment are now in place.

Key contributions

Design leadership

Shaping the product and design direction

Design strategy

When, where and how to play

Stakeholder engagement

Leading customer-focused discussions

Hands-on experience craft

Delivering with agile teams

Context

By the end of 2024, legacy ERP, CRM, and Billing systems had accumulated decades of technical and operational debt at MYOB. Product innovation was nearly impossible because back-end changes were slow, expensive, and required highly specialised skills. Internally, support, sales and finance teams were manually cross-referencing data across multiple disconnected systems just to do their jobs.

After a series of previous isolated attempts by individual business areas to fix their own piece of the problem, the organisation recognised that the answer had to be systemic.

What followed was one of the most ambitious transformation projects in MYOB's history: replacing a series of core enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, and Billing) within a single year. The goal was to reduce technology risk, improve operational efficiency, and unlock future product innovation.

The scale, complexity, and unrelenting timeline proved to be very challenging to 300+ people involved in this project. Time was the binding constraint on every decision.

Replacing core enterprise systems context diagram

My participation

As Principal Designer, I operated at the intersection of strategy, delivery, and people leadership.

My role went well beyond traditional design execution. I functioned as a strategic partner to the product side of the program, framing what problems were worth solving, when to act, and when to hold back.

I led a design team of two Product Designers, one Service Designer, and one UX Writer.

Contributions

Getting teams ready for success

In partnership with the Head of Engineering and Senior Product Manager, we established the foundations for our teams to achieve the necessary results, framing the challenges, goals and delivery expectations to teams and internal stakeholders.

Setting design direction across the program

I established clear responsibilities for each designer on the team, ensuring everyone had ownership and clarity in an environment that was frequently ambiguous and fast-moving.

Bringing customer-centric view to conversations

Program members relied on my expertise for topics related to customer experience. I helped teams with clarity and prioritisation, translating ambiguity into direction.

Bridging the gap with delivery partner

I onboarded external teams, helped them navigate MYOB's business context, and provided structured feedback to strengthen the working relationship and improve output quality.

Maintaining momentum and morale

In a project defined by constraint, I kept the team focused on progress over perfection, helping designers understand that their impact was structural and lasting, even when individual wins felt small.

Coaching and feedback

I helped the design team navigate their concerns and anxieties in an ambiguous space where design participation was not traditional.

Jumping in and crafting experiences

The program was an extensive collection of moving parts and dependencies. To protect the design team from context switching, I strategically handled problems and unplanned work by myself.

Design team challenges

Ruthless prioritisation under pressure

The project demanded a level of prioritisation that is genuinely uncomfortable for designers. The question was rarely what is the best solution, but what is achievable given these constraints. Trade-offs were non-negotiable, and some design problems simply could not be solved at the standard the team wanted. Early on, that created real frustration.

My focus was on helping them see that keeping things moving without breaking trust with users, and keeping the ultimate goal in mind were much more important challenges than individual wins.

Context switching

The magnitude of the project forced all team members to be able to handle multiple topics in parallel, which could quickly be overwhelming, impacting the quality of the work. I acted as a buffer protecting the team from external inputs, separating what was necessary at the moment, what should be done later, what should not be done, and what I could solve personally.

Systems thinking

No decision existed in isolation. Solving a problem in one area could create friction in another, and maintaining a coherent customer experience required everyone to think beyond the immediate issue. I helped the team connect with different areas of the business, reducing the chance of assumptions and unknowns creating more issues down the line.

How design added value

Mapping current and future states

Identifying and documenting workflows connected to systems being updated. Workshops involving cross-functional representatives to capture multiple perspectives.

Translating tech solutions into customer impact

Converting back-end decisions into customer-facing workflows and evaluating them from the user's point of view.

Documenting experience debt

Capturing the design compromises made across all working areas to ensure they are visible and actionable for future investment.

Trade-off analysis

Assessing the tension between technical constraints and customer experience to inform better decisions.

Scoping the migration

Determining what needed to be carried forward into the new systems and what should be discontinued.

Alignment and visualisation

Visual artefacts helped teams stay aligned in relation to the problem to be solved and the possible solutions.

Some of my projects along the year

Besides my leadership and strategic contribution to the program, I also led several projects. The examples below highlight the nature of my role in the organisation, often jumping into an unknown space, bringing clarity to the problem, and working collaboratively towards an appropriate solution.

At the start of the project, MYOB had two Account management systems. Information and settings were scattered between them. The goal was twofold, to bring useful features from the old portal to the new one, and adapt the workflows and user interface of the new portal to the future back-end systems.

The partner organisation, Accenture, was responsible for this delivery. I helped the My Account team understand the business, develop clarity on scope and sequence, acting as both design lead and de facto product partner to move the work forward.

I also analysed all pages of the old portal, including page views and testing workflows. I engaged with owners and subject-matter experts of these features, and created a comprehensive list of what needed to be migrated and what should be left behind. I also led a product designer to bring these features to the new portal.

At the end of the project, the My Account team became fully independent and delivered the changes in scope within the project schedule.

As the company was replacing core enterprise systems, internal processes related to support, sales and finance also changed to adapt to the new systems, taking advantage of the benefits of the new tools. The process specialists initially mapped 250+ internal processes, but they only considered the staff and systems involved, missing the customer perspective. Without this view, it was impossible to tell if the solutions were actually solving customer issues and if they were making sense from the customer perspective.

I led a team of a senior product designer and a service designer to bring the customer perspective to these internal processes. The result was a comprehensive service design blueprint document called “End to End Customer Journey + Business processes maps”.

Given the complexity of the information across all stages of the lifecycle of the customer with the organisation, I prepared a structure containing four layers. This way people with all levels of experience could understand the document and how independent processes and workflows connected to the whole journey.

As the program accelerated, processes and solutions were changing by the hour and stakeholder availability evaporated. Even though the maps reached a natural ceiling before we had the access we needed to fully validate them, they provided an unprecedented starting point to discuss and improve processes and journeys, keeping a customer-centric approach to the solutions.

To give visibility to the material and to communicate their value openly, I placed what we had physically in a shared space across the business. The response was meaningful, and people from across the organisation, including outside of product and engineering, came to engage with the work.

Late in the program, the project manager identified a gap in the program; no team had ownership of the end-to-end customer experience within the self-service checkout and quote payment deliveries. This was a significant gap that risked derailing delivery for multiple downstream teams.

Within two weeks, I led the team in mapping the current and future customer journeys, identifying necessary changes and, with some creative thinking, simplifying the experiences while maintaining the solutions within the delivery window.

The result was an improved customer experience and a credible path to resolution that sat within the existing program schedule, without disrupting other workstreams.

Early in the project, I noticed that transactional emails were a central point of contact between MYOB and customers, but decades of development resulted in hundreds of unique emails, each one revealing the visual identity of their period. This proved to be not only inefficient to the business, as each template was created from scratch, but also confusing to customers, as they could receive multiple emails in the same day that looked completely different.

To solve this problem, I oversaw the creation of a consistent, scalable template system for transactional emails. Providing a reliable, scalable and brand-aligned foundation that any team could use, making independent workflows feel part of the same experience with MYOB.

Fewer legacy systems, higher design maturity, and a clear roadmap for 2026

Delivery. The Bedrock program shipped and the old systems were successfully sunset. Internal teams can now do their work in far fewer systems than before. For a transformation of this complexity and timeline, that outcome alone represents an extraordinary organisational achievement, and design played a tangible role in making it possible.

Team maturity. Individual designers grew significantly productive. One team member in particular, who started the half-year frustrated and disengaged, channelled that energy into a growth mindset. A shift directly connected to our honest and thoughtful conversations.

Cross-functional design influence. Over the course of the year, I extended design thinking and support into many different parts of the business, some of them who never interacted with a designer before. These partnerships were built through credibility and action, not title.

Strategic foundations for 2026. The experience debt incurred during the program has been documented and communicated to the right owners across the business. The Customer Journey and Business Process Maps provided an immediate starting point for the next phase of experience investment.

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