As Liquid marks 25 years as one of Australia’s leading independent strategic design and digital consultancies, we took the opportunity to sit down with our new CEO and Partner, Fiona Armstrong, and reflect on her career to date and the radical evolution of the Liquid brand.
Fiona cuts an impressive figure in the world of digital and strategic design.
With over 20 years’ experience in senior executive public service positions leading major reform in the UK and Australia, and a resume abundant with award-winning, innovative and first-of-its-kind projects, Fiona is perfectly suited to take the helm at Liquid as it ushers in an era of change.
Indeed, members of the Liquid Executive Management Team profess that there was nobody else who could have taken on the role, such is the impact and alignment of Fiona’s leadership and vision.
Originally from St Andrews in Fife, Scotland, Fiona's early career as Associate Director of a London PR agency saw her responsible for delivering PR and communication strategies for a swathe of government, international technology and corporate clients. Working with booming tech companies and innovators, Fiona applied her innate understanding of customer needs and demands, connecting the dots between cutting-edge tech products and the customer experience.
Fiona Armstrong, CEO & Partner at Liquid
A chance to make a difference
Working at this juncture proved to be a critical turning point in Fiona’s career. After six years she decided she wanted to “use her skills for good” and made the life-changing decision to leave her comfortable, high-paying position in the corporate sector to pursue a career as a public servant, where she could tackle head-on deep societal issues such as racism, domestic violence and mental health.
“People thought I was crazy when I went to work for the government. But I had grown to love that space and I had a really wonderful opportunity to tackle big challenges and create real impact,” she reflected.
Awarded two Prime Minister Innovation Awards throughout the decade spent working in Scottish government, Fiona was a trailblazer in developing ICT-enabled strategies that delivered better, more efficient government services and meaningful public and social reform.
In 2000, her team created the first CMS-driven dynamic website for the whole of government, the precursor to the wildly successful and enabling GOV.UK. In 2003 her team developed the first integrated, automated communication system that delivered automated multichannel severe weather event notifications, and in 2005 developed the world-first “Tell us Once” service, working with all tiers of UK government to integrate a death notification system that notified local and central government organisations of a death at once, helping people manage life events more easily.
New challenges in a new country
A decade later, Fiona had achieved remarkable success, and decided it was time for a new challenge. “I’m an adventurer at heart, I like to push the boundaries and experience new things. Australia seemed like a nice place, so I thought – why not?”
Arriving in Perth in 2009, Fiona hit her straps working first with local government and then moving in executive leadership roles in Queensland Government, where she established the One-Stop Shop Strategy & Implementation Office and focused on delivering customer-centric services for all Queensland government departments. In just 3 years, Queensland Government went from providing 30 online services to 470 – making it much easier and quicker to transact with Government.
Fiona was a key figure in establishing human-centred design capability and customer-centric digital service transformation in Queensland Government. A mammoth project, it involved understanding and redesigning services in collaboration with state, local and federal government departments, and received Best in Class and overall joint winner at the Good Design Awards in 2018.
Change in the making
Then (in our entirely unbiased opinion) came the really good stuff – her appointment to Liquid.
In 2018 Fiona started at Liquid as Head of Strategy where she applied her deep understanding of customer needs and behaviours, and contributed to building out the capability and service offering in relation to strategic customer experience.
Throughout this time, Fiona led the Liquid teams that delivered key, award-winning human-centred design projects in collaboration with the Australian Government. They tackled big social issues and drove population-wide behaviour change, including improving mental health outcomes and aged care services in Australia.
These projects were focused on person-centred reform and digital innovation, and the team at Liquid recognised that technology wasn’t a panacea.
“We are focused on supporting organisations to tackle the more complex challenges that exist and unpacking how they design better approaches, ecosystems and connection to solve previously intractable problems ... and how to harness digital technology to deliver it,” Fiona said.
As a result, Liquid has evolved from being a digital agency that designs websites to a full-service consultancy with services stretching across strategic design, product and service design and AI and innovation.
Entrenching this radical evolution and ushering in an era of ambitious growth, at the beginning of 2024 Fiona was promoted to CEO and Partner and the company’s founder and managing director Michael Burke to Executive Chair.
In just a few short months Fiona has spearheaded a re-imagining of Liquid’s brand, vision and mission, defined by a world freed of complex problems and delivered through strategic design, applied technology and human interaction. This vision centres firmly on humans creating change, with technology enabling that change.
“Our superpower is bridging the gap between solving a meaningful problem for a client and understanding the guts and detail of how you deliver change. We understand the practicalities, and can deliver change in a way that secures buy-in and drives adoption by bringing together deep technical knowledge with a strategic and customer lens,” she told us.
Fiona believes that bravery and collaboration are at the heart of creating real change, and she embodies this in her role at Liquid. We can’t help but be bolstered by this new wave of energy, as Fiona harnesses her unique experience to steer Liquid into an era of new possibility.