Leading the MYOB SaaS Transformation

A transformation at product scale

The challenge was not to reproduce a mature desktop product in a browser. It was to preserve the capability customers depended on while helping many teams deliver one coherent SaaS experience.

MYOB was moving deep accounting capability from mature desktop software into a browser-based SaaS product.

The work ran for around four years. At its largest, roughly ten cross-functional delivery teams were contributing to the same product, with around eight designers working across the program.

As Design Manager, I was accountable for experience and Design across the transformation. I participated in the leadership group from the outset, working with Product, Engineering and Business Analysis leadership as the direction moved through discovery and delivery.

Creating shared direction without controlling every decision

Customers experienced one product, even though different teams owned different workflows, priorities and technical constraints.

My job was not to design every screen. It was to create enough shared direction for designers and teams to make good decisions independently, while staying close enough to the work to recognise when an interaction, dependency or product assumption needed to be challenged.

Cross-team critique and design reviews helped us connect related work, resolve experience dependencies and avoid teams solving the same problems in different ways.

We also needed to resist simply reproducing desktop functionality. Existing capability told us what customers depended on, but not necessarily how that work should behave in a modern web product.

What is the customer trying to achieve, and how should that work in a modern SaaS product?

Making quality explicit

I helped apply and champion MYOB's Experience Level Objectives framework across key workflows. The framework gave Design, Product and Engineering a shared language for discussing experience quality alongside functional delivery.

Key released experiences achieved System Usability Scale scores above 80 against explicit experience-quality targets.

That mattered because a transformation of this scale could not rely on one Design Manager reviewing every decision. Shared measures, critique and patterns gave teams clearer expectations for what good looked like.

Leadership that scales through other teams

The transformation delivered a substantial browser-based SaaS accounting experience while preserving deep product capability customers relied on.

For me, the more useful leadership lesson was about scale. Good design leadership across ten teams is less about controlling every decision and more about creating the direction, standards and feedback loops that help teams make strong decisions without you in the room.