SEEK
Senior Strategy Manager · 2020–2025
Five years inside one of Australia's most important digital marketplaces, from ANZ strategy to shaping the group's commercial future.
What I Learned
- Working inside a scaled marketplace teaches you about incentive design faster than any MBA module.
- The 10-year narrative forced clarity -- if you can't explain where a business is going in plain language, the strategy probably isn't good enough yet.
- The difference between a good strategy and a great one is often just specificity. Vague goals are comfortable because they can't be falsified.
I joined SEEK as Strategy Manager for ANZ in 2020, which in hindsight was excellent timing -- the jobs market was about to do something wild, and being close to the data as it happened was genuinely interesting.
The role evolved. ANZ eventually became one thread in a bigger group-wide brief, specifically around what SEEK called "Ad Scale/Aggregation" -- the question of how a mature marketplace protects and extends its revenue model when the advertising landscape keeps shifting underneath it.
The work I'm most proud of from that period was leading the 10-year financial narrative for the Board. It sounds bureaucratic. It wasn't. Building a credible 10-year view of a marketplace requires you to have actual opinions about structural trends -- how hiring behaviour changes as remote work normalises, what happens to premium job ads when AI reshapes the application process, how a dominant incumbent defends against aggregation pressure from both sides. Getting the Board aligned on a single version of that story, with real numbers behind it, was harder and more interesting than most of the consulting projects I'd done prior.
The product work was a different kind of challenge. Designing something estimated to add $150m per year in revenue means you're not doing product management in the usual sense -- you're doing economic architecture. What price signal do you set? What behaviour does that create? Where does the margin actually sit, and who captures it? I kept coming back to the same observation: most product teams optimise for engagement metrics without ever asking whose interests that engagement actually serves.
Five years is long enough to see a few full cycles. Long enough to learn what "good" looks like in a mature corporate, and what "good" looks like but isn't.