I’d heard Adelaide’s tech ecosystem was built on defence tech and deep research, and I wanted to know what that meant for the product managers there. Not the abstract version. The actual, on-the-ground, ‘get stuck into the day-to-day’ version. So last Thursday we took Leading the Product to Adelaide for a meetup at Lot Fourteen, hosted at Stone and Chalk.
Lot Fourteen is worth thinking about. It’s an innovation precinct sitting right next to the university, home to a thriving startup community, and it’s not a small bet. It’s a $2.2 billion development with more than $760 million in government backing, and it’s attracted AWS, Google, and Microsoft, along with more than 100 space-related companies. South Australia now has over 900 verified startups that have raised $1.6 billion between them since 2017. So the ambition seems very real, and it’s quite specific: space, defence, cyber, deep tech. The kind of thing that makes you want to know whether product management is keeping pace with it.
What I found at the meetup was a room of about 50 people with a real gap between the maturity of the people and the maturity of the organisations they work in.
I want to be careful here, because I haven’t honed my product radar in Adelaide yet. This was one meetup in one evening. But the questions being asked were exactly the questions I’d hear in Sydney or Melbourne. The room was mixed too: founders, product owners, project directors, engineers, product designers, all in one place and they were all engaged. If you judged the state of product in Adelaide purely on the people who showed up and how they spoke about their work, you’d say the craft is on par with Sydney and Melbourne. It’s the organisations around them that are still catching up.
You could hear it in the words the panel reached for. Asked for one word to describe the state of product in Adelaide right now, Emily Swanson, who runs digital services for the Department for Education, said “emerging.” She’s responsible for the system behind 782 public schools and is in the middle of the same shift a lot of government is going through, from projects to product, and she was candid that they’re still working out what managing a product actually means day to day. Sebastian Thiele, VP Product at the legal tech company Josef, went with “token,” or more precisely, tokenised. He was making a joke about AI, but he was also pointing at something real: Adelaide has the components. The talent, the people, the ideas. What’s missing is the wiring that turns those components into something connected. Patrick Haddock, freshly installed as GM of Qantas’s new Product Innovation Centre, said “growing,” and backed it with a number that stuck with me: more than 45% of the centre’s new joiners are coming from outside South Australia. That’s a community being built, but it’s also a reminder that some of what’s landing in Adelaide right now is imported rather than grown.
Put those three words together, emerging, growing, tokenised, and you get a picture that matches what I saw in the room. Bits of the puzzle. Not yet the whole picture.
What struck me is that this gap isn’t really about capability. Qantas chose that week to publicly launch its Product Innovation Centre, moving away from a project-based model into proper product squads and a platform model, which is a serious organisational bet on product as a discipline. Josef, originally built by two lawyers in Melbourne as a legal automation tool for community law centres, now runs enterprise legal work for the likes of Bupa, Nike and the Australian Retirement Trust, without ever really calling itself a “product company” in the traditional sense. SA Health rebuilt the working with children check from scratch, brought in service designers, and deliberately reduced how much personal data it was holding onto in the process. And a Stone and Chalk resident called Super IT is, by the panel’s account, doing excellent product thinking.
None of that reads like an immature ecosystem to me. It reads like an ecosystem where product judgement exists ahead of the organisational structures built to house it. The people have kept up with the times. The organisations, in a lot of cases, are still catching up to their own people.
The conversation on the night also confirmed something I already suspected: Adelaide’s product people are wrestling with the same questions the rest of us are, just with their own local flavour. What does discovery mean when AI has made building nearly free but understanding your customer just as hard as it ever was? Do the old frameworks still hold when a VP of product can spin up a working prototype on their own machine before lunch? Nobody in that room had it solved. Nobody in Sydney or Melbourne has it solved either.
So here’s what I took away. Adelaide has deep research, defence-grade engineering, and a genuine appetite for building global products, sitting right alongside a product community that is clearly switched on. What it needs now is for the organisations to close the gap the people have already opened up. When that wiring connects, and I don’t think it’s far off, that combination of hard tech and product craft has the makings of something that competes globally, not just within Australia.
Thank you to Stone and Chalk for hosting us, and to everyone who showed up on a Thursday night to argue about product with a room full of strangers. We’ll be back.
