Product Development in Age of Digital Disruption: A Q&A with Paul Roberts

We’re living in the era of digital disruption, and we need bold digital and technology leadership now more than ever before. Leading this change demands knowledge, imagination, new thinking, an appetite to reinvent and the courage to challenge conventions.

In this series, we're celebrating our team of digital and technology experts and visionaries, spearheading the development and delivery of our technology-forward solutions for smarter working, and better living in Asia Pacific and the Middle East.

For this feature, we caught up with Paul Roberts, our Manager of Digital Products in the Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) region, to understand how digital products align with Jacobs’ vision to become a global solutions advisor and provider and how data solutions help leverage the power of digital and data to help solve the world’s most critical challenges.

Let's get to know Paul:

Hi, Paul! Tell us about you and what excites you the most about your role at Jacobs.

Potential, passion and possibilities.  

There is so much deep domain knowledge within Jacobs’ diverse workforce. We are involved in various global markets and domains that we leverage to create Digital Products to support a more connected and sustainable world.

Everyone I’ve collaborated with is willing to share their ideas and is passionate about their areas of expertise. Together we can make a difference.

Being part of Jacobs as it transforms from an engineering, design, and construction professional services provider to a global solutions advisor and provider means the timing is apt.

Using digital technology, we really do have a great opportunity to challenge today and reinvent tomorrow.

In a career spanning over 30 years delivering enterprise IT solutions, you’ve held many roles - tell us a bit about your career progression.

The first decade of my career started at a United Kingdom software and hardware company that built systems to create early digital mapping - Geographic Information Systems (GIS) weren’t even a thing then. In that role, I learned the importance of data quality. I transitioned into a sales support and customer services role. I was fortunate to travel and work in many locations around the globe, exposing me to a diverse range of cultures. I spent four years on secondment in Saudi Arabia, where I enhanced a mapping system to create flight simulator data. This made me concentrate a lot on process repeatability and efficiency. I then moved to Australia and worked for a small GIS software development company for a short while, where it was challenging to get adequate resources to perform at the desired level.

In my second decade of employment, I primarily focused on managing enterprise-scale software development and implementation. In the early 2000s, I was an early adopter of Agile software development practices, particularly the SCRUM framework; looking back, it was quite a revolution for a conservative government agency at the time. Through this period, I realized the importance of a strong shared vision within a team and the importance of enduring sponsorship.

In the last decade, I’ve used the knowledge gained previously to plan and implement improvements to the information systems used by asset owners and operators directly on the client side and, more recently, for Jacobs’ clients.

My current role allows me to leverage what I’ve experienced from both the software vendor and the client sides to guide how we can build desirable, feasible and viable digital products.

Jacobs is on a path of major transformation journey from an engineering, design and construction professional services provider to a global solutions advisor and provider - powered by Digital capabilities. How do digital products align with this vision? 

Digital products, our own or others, are a vital part of this vision as they can be combined with our skills, knowledge and services to provide unique solutions to our client's challenges. Creating standardized product offerings that can be readily configured for different clients' needs will enable us to simultaneously offer agile solutions to various client challenges. 

Leveraging our global strengths of capabilities, knowledge, client exposure and scale will enable us to create digital products that provide greater insight and value.