There's a version of this chapter that reads like a checklist: moved to Australia, enrolled in an MBA, graduated. That version would be accurate and almost entirely beside the point. The real story of Deakin isn't the degree — it's what happens when someone who has spent a decade solving problems by instinct is finally handed the vocabulary and frameworks to know why those instincts worked, and where they didn't.
I moved to Melbourne to pursue an MBA in Project Management at Deakin University with a fairly specific goal: I wanted to stop relying purely on pattern recognition built on factory floors and inside SaaS rollouts, and start understanding the discipline underneath it. Manufacturing had taught me how to execute. Technology implementation had taught me how to build. What I hadn't formally studied was how a business decides what's worth executing or building in the first place.
Filling in the parts I'd learned the hard way
An MBA, done properly, isn't really about acquiring new information so much as it's about testing the information you already have against a much wider set of cases than your own career could ever provide. At Deakin, I deepened my understanding across four areas that, until then, I'd only encountered piecemeal:
- Product strategy — not just building a product well, but deciding which product deserves to be built at all.
- Finance & business growth — turning "the business is doing well" into numbers a decision can actually be built on.
- Marketing & customer behaviour — understanding demand as something you can study, not just something you respond to.
- Agile & continuous improvement — a formal language for the same instinct that had driven every process I'd ever fixed: ship, measure, adjust, repeat.
The MBA didn't teach me to think in new ways. It taught me to defend the ways I already thought — with evidence instead of instinct.
Connecting execution, strategy, and scalability
The most useful thing Deakin gave me wasn't any single subject — it was the connective tissue between subjects I'd previously treated as separate worlds. On the factory floor, I understood execution intimately but had only an intuitive grasp of the strategy that decided what we were executing toward. In SaaS implementation, I understood how to build scalable systems but hadn't formally studied how "scalable" gets defined and financed at the business level.
Project Management as a discipline turned out to be the right frame for someone with my background, precisely because it sits at that intersection. It's not purely strategic and it's not purely operational — it's the discipline of making strategy survive contact with execution, which is exactly the translation work I'd been doing informally for years.
Studying while still building
I didn't treat the MBA as a pause button on my career. Throughout the programme, I stayed close to real operational and consulting work, which meant every framework I studied got tested almost immediately against something real rather than sitting as theory in a folder. A case study on market entry meant something different to me because I'd already lived through the messier, less structured version of that decision on the ground.
That overlap — studying strategy in the morning and applying pieces of it in the afternoon — is, I think, the actual value of doing an MBA later in a career rather than earlier. The degree wasn't building a professional from scratch. It was sharpening tools that were already in daily use.
What changed, concretely
By the end of the programme, three things were different about how I approached work. I asked "what's the growth model here" before "how do we execute this" — a small reordering that changes almost every subsequent decision. I got comfortable using financial language to make a case, rather than relying purely on operational results to speak for themselves. And I started thinking about customers and markets with the same systems mindset I'd once reserved for production lines — as something with patterns, incentives, and levers, not just moods.
That combination — production discipline, technology fluency, and a formal grounding in strategy and growth — is exactly what I needed for what came next: not managing someone else's operation, but building a business from the ground up, in a country and an industry I was still learning. That test arrived sooner than I expected, at Aussie Home and Floor.