MYOB Product Manager Spotlight: James Roberts - AU + NZ Tax

Hello everyone!

 

Welcome back to our Product Manager spotlight series. This month, we've got James in the light. After you learn more below, if you have any questions make sure to head over to our Q&A board to ask questions before 5pm 5th of September.

 

Name: James Roberts

Role: Product Manager

Product/workflow you manage: Tax and Activity Statements for Accountants in Australia and New Zealand

How long you have been at MYOB: 8 and a half years

 

 

What inspired you to pursue a career in product management?

Coming from support, I encountered a lot of frustrations with the product and how it could be used. Moving into Product Management allows me to speak with customers and solve really important problems for them. 

 

Can you share a little about your background and how you arrived in your current role?

Joined MYOB in the support centre a long time ago. Slowly moved through different roles being able to influence and understand complex areas, and was asked to join Product due to my knowledge and experience, and my passion for fixing problems. (Not that i know how to fix it, I leave that to the very capable developers and accountants, I can do the directing.)

 

What has been your favorite project or feature to work on, and why?

It has to be our Tax in Practice Compliance. When I joined it was in its infancy, and we are continuously making great strides to have a native cloud tax product completed, to be an option for Accountants to use with their other tools. Tax has a mix of regular regulatory compliance changes, new feature development with accuracy and precision. I get to work with some extremely intelligent people, to advise and help build the best Tax solution that we can. 

 

What do you enjoy doing outside of work? Any hobbies or passions? 

I do love motorsport, so either going to races or on my racing simulator at home, otherwise snowboarding when its cold, and golf in the warmer months. 

 

What’s one thing you’d like the community to know about your product or team?

Our tax product has a team of passionate and experienced accountants involved in every aspect of our delivery. Together they have a combined industry experience over 100 years. They actually write and test the tax returns, schedules and worksheets themselves, along with advising our developers on capabilities that customers are asking for in the feedback from our surveys and when returns are deleted, along with customer interviews. 

 

What’s your favorite productivity hack or tool?

It has to be AI using Chat GPT. Being able to walk around and use it to take notes and summarise my points. Or create SQL scripts for me to connect and understand data in new ways. Recently I've been using it in my personal life to build a table of houses I'm interested in purchasing, and scraping the web for more info so I don't have to copy and paste it all myself into Excel. 

 

What’s the most exciting thing happening with your product right now?

New tax year always brings a very busy period and new bugs and issues to solve. We are soon to be releasing a long awaited Capital Gains Tax worksheet which with complex calculations takes a lot longer than anyone would have thought. We are also in a redesign of our Tax UI, which should make the data denser for less scrolling, and will unlock us to develop the ability to itemise tax fields to add extra rows for a bit of extra detail in the return.  

 

If you have any questions for James, head on over to the Q&A board now to ask.

This question board will remain open until 5pm on the 5th of September so make sure you post your question there before its closed.