MongoDB's Jeremy Powers
Moving from the US to Australia presented MongoDB's A/NZ regional vice president Jeremy Powers with the opportunity to put his 15 years of transformation experience into practice, held together with the belief that in every industry and country, the right mix of people, processes and technology hold the key to modernisation and transformation. Powers also dives into a steep lesson learnt early into his leadership role that you can't do everything, all at once.
What was your first job?
Straight out of university, my first role was working with a management consulting firm in North Carolina, US, called Force Management. At the age of 23, I was thrown in at the deep end, focused on learning all I needed to know about the people, processes and technologies that fuel revenue growth, improve business environments and transform situations from bad to good, and good to great.
That theme has become deeply ingrained in my career and has characterised every role I've had since. Unlocking the most potential in a given situation or a given team, be that through the right set of standards, the right training or the right technology.
How did you get started in the IT industry and progress to where you are today?
Like many of us, I fell into enterprise IT. What struck me very quickly were the exceptional leaders and mentors I had front-row access to. Dave Davies, for example, an industry veteran who was committed to bestowing his 30-plus years of knowledge on me in the time we worked together.
From the beginning, it’s been the people that challenged me, trusting I was “ready”, who have motivated and inspired my career in IT.
Fast forward from the early years, I joined MongoDB in 2016 during a significant transformation in our go-to-market journey and just 18 months ahead of our IPO. Initially, I was focused on improving the performance of our sales team, which involved everything from messaging, processes and hiring, to the most important topic of all: leadership training.
What are some of your plans for the company in the coming months?
The vision we have for the region is simple. It’s all about answering the question: “how can we help businesses in Australia and New Zealand do the things they want to do?”.
MongoDB offers a fully managed cloud database service. Our customers include IAG, Macquarie Bank, Woolworths, Ticketek and ANZ Bank. Not to mention the next generation of startups like Humanitix, an organisation using technology to close the education gap for millions of children.
Not only do we want to enable all these customers to make their mark among their peers, but we also have to help them to do more with less. This includes empowering their move to the cloud and facilitating the choices that drive innovation, growth and revenue.
My team is focused on eliminating barriers to success across the technology lifecycle. But as we all know, it takes a village. To aid in our success, we continue to grow our team through great partnerships with cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft, as well as working closely with our growing base of systems integrators (SIs), such as Infosys, to execute on large-scale transformative projects.
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