One on One: with MongoDB's Jeremy Powers

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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What has been your biggest business mistake, and the lessons you've learnt from that experience?

When I was fresh in my role at MongoDB, I had no lack of ideas, excitement and ambitions. I could see the huge potential and I knew from experience that there were some changes we needed to make to unlock these opportunities.

So I tried to do everything in one giant swoop. From introducing new processes, setting new standards, making big hiring plans and the rest. I took it all on.

It didn't work. We all got exhausted and the lack of focus meant we didn't make progress at the speed we could have.

Luckily, I have a great network of people I’ve built up over the years that lend me words of wisdom when I need it most. They helped me take a step back and analyse the situation from the outside. With my consulting glasses on, it was clear that we needed to break up the priority projects into small, manageable chunks that we could quickly make progress on and build momentum.

That worked. In large part thanks to the great team who took ownership of their piece of the transformation and, I have to admit, gave me some necessary lessons on perspective.

That experience led to a better outcome for our team, our business and, most importantly, our customers.

It sounds obvious and simple when I talk about it after the fact, but in the moment of transformation and opportunity, it can be difficult to keep things simple and focused. To identify the biggest opportunity and prioritise launching that successfully, then expanding to other areas.

What are some of your ambitions - personally and professionally? 

Every day, companies in Australia are tackling this really hard issue: how they will modernise, move away from legacy systems and be able to deliver the technology that will help them thrive in the future.

Success for me is helping those companies to understand the role MongoDB plays in solving their key challenges on this journey. Be that related to improving time to market, moving to the cloud, reducing costs, increasing innovation, hardening security or doing all those things and staying compliant.

On the personal side, my journey from the States to Australia is an opportunity to put my 15 years of transformation experience into practice. I believe that in every industry, in every country, the right mix of people, processes and technology hold the key to modernisation and transformation.

A year in and I'm still astounded by the huge potential in this market. I'm not thinking too far ahead – I just know right now is a special time and if we can help Australian business innovate, grow and capitalise on their opportunity, then this could be a transformative moment in our careers.

What has been the best piece of advice you've ever received?

Honestly, I’ve had some cracking advice over the years. One that sticks in my mind, and is particularly relevant to the journey MongoDB is on right now is: “If you want something done, make it easy to do.”

This applies to almost everything in life. In most organisations siloed teams, departments, processes and technologies all work together to make change hard. So what can we do to make change easy?

That's also the philosophy our founders took – how can we make the experience of working with data easy? How can we make building with data easy? How can we make moving to the cloud easy?

That's what I spend a lot of my time focused on – considering how I can make things easy for our team. How I can remove barriers and encourage momentum, so that we can all stay focused on helping Aussie businesses transform, modernise and grow. And, dare I say it, how I can make it easy.