About MI
MI (Maritime Impulse Pty Ltd) was founded in 2023 by Angus and Christine McDonald, doing maritime sustainability work that eventually led to the launch of the Maritime Emissions Reduction Coalition (MERC) as a not-for-profit in early 2026.
In late 2026 we decided to focus MI on making the most of my background in software product development, with the aim to just help a few organisations each year.
About Angus
I’ve worked in consulting, founded three companies, and led product development for three major software products - and consulted on many more.
TechnologyOne - Product Director, ECM
2018 — 2020
Objective Corp - Senior Product Manager, ECM
2012 — 2018
Elcom Technology - Technical Director, ElcomCMS
2008 — 2012
I have a Bachelors in Commerce from UNSW, majoring in Information Systems, and am certified as a Scrum Product Owner, and Scrum Master.
$4M in new annual revenue from a product nobody was investing in
Situation: One of my enterprise content management (ECM) products was a small business inside a much larger ERP suite. Half its team was assigned to a mobile project outside my control, and its biggest usability problems depended on another team’s framework. Without a rewrite nothing was going to change, but we couldn’t afford the time or resources to rewrite anything.
What others missed: The product was mostly sold as an add-on to ERP modules, yet it wasn’t integrated with about half of the modules it could serve. Integration was straightforward; the real barrier was that nobody had given the other module teams a reason to want it.
What changed: I pitched integration to the other module teams as an easy win for their own roadmaps. A significant number adopted it as their document management system, which triggered a wave of new license sales worth $4 million a year.
Restarting growth in a neglected cash cow
Situation: At another role, the legacy enterprise content management (ECM) product earned over 80% of revenue, but all the energy had moved to a new web app. Few developers wanted to work on the legacy product, and its “next release” was a three-year-old feature list that a small volunteer team couldn’t deliver on time. The consensus was that without a massive rewrite of the ECM product as a web app there was no way to grow the product’s value to customers.
What others missed: The biggest item on the list, a major search engine upgrade, delivered nothing customers would notice; the existing version was still supported and secure. Meanwhile, customers had asked for something simpler: approving workflow steps from anywhere.
What changed: I proposed to cut the upgrade to make the release date and redirect the small amount of leftover time into approving and declining workflow steps directly from email. The CEO approved the change in half an hour. The release went out on time and sales gained a mobile-friendly feature to sell. Executives could act on workflows from their phones and the first release in three years delivered real customer value, not just a back-end upgrade.
Partnerships
