Deloitte
Manager – Tech Strategy & Innovation · 2015–2020
Five years in big consulting -- national SME for blockchain and AI in NZ, $300m tech strategies, and learning when complexity is necessary versus performed.
What I Learned
- Consulting teaches you to structure ambiguous problems quickly. What it doesn't always teach is whether the structure is actually correct.
- Being the 'national SME' on an emerging technology when the technology is still uncertain means you spend a lot of time managing client expectations rather than delivering answers.
- The best client work happened when we were genuinely embedded in their problem, not just packaging their thinking back to them with better slides.
I joined Deloitte in New Zealand in 2015, reasonably early in my career, and stayed for five years. Long enough to make Manager, long enough to build a practice area, long enough to understand both the value and the limits of the consulting model.
The first few years were fairly standard senior analyst and consultant work -- technology strategy projects, transformation programmes, the usual. I got good at structuring complex problems quickly, which is probably the most transferable skill consulting gives you.
The later years got more interesting. I became the national SME on Blockchain and Cognitive AI in New Zealand, which in 2017-2018 meant being one of the few people in the country who could speak credibly to both the technical reality and the strategic implications of technologies that most executives had heard about but nobody fully understood. That's a specific and slightly uncomfortable position to occupy: you're being paid for certainty in a space where certainty doesn't really exist yet.
The project work I'm most proud of from that period was the $300m+ technology strategy for an ASX100 client -- a genuine whole-of-enterprise view of where to invest, what to retire, and how to sequence it. And the $80m digital transformation of a large Australian super fund, which was a more operational piece but required close partnership with a client team that was learning alongside us.
I left Deloitte in 2020 having learned a lot about large organisations, about what good strategic advice looks like versus what clients often ask for, and about what I wanted to do next.