Group Product Manager

How You'll Make Impact:

• As a Group Product Manager you will be responsible for driving customer and business value through the ownership of new and existing products. You will support and enable your team to do the best work of their lives through practicing the great people leader framework. You will manage a product team end-to-end, from early-stage research and ideation, through to implementation and improvement over time. Your impact will be measured by your achievement of key commercial and customer success metrics.

What You'll Do:

• Lead a product area with a low level of complexity, ambiguity, dependencies, and stakeholder management, where most time is able to be devoted to hands-on product management, along with some people leadership
• Actively network across Xero to understand how products fit into Xero's strategy, objectives and future
• Work directly with the customer to conduct research, collect insights or validate understanding
• Use customer data and insights particularly in assessing value and viability risks, to inform product roadmap and planning
• Define the scope of the customer problem and frame possible solutions to test, validate and refine
• Participate in developing a strategy for the product line, including securing funding, resourcing and taking an active role in the annual and quarterly OKR process
• Develop product roadmaps to execute on the product strategy, and manage a product to its roadmap
• Take responsibility for managing risks (in line with Xero Risk Management Standard) arising from non-functional concerns including security, privacy, regulatory change and compliance, accuracy, responsible data use and availability: consulting with stakeholders and leading trade-off decisions
• Develop a release strategy, consulting and collaborating with product leadership and internal stakeholders to support ‘best practice’ and strategy
• Work collaboratively with the broader product function and Technology to ensure an effective launch
• Monitor the overall commercial & customer results of the product line, working with other product team members to intervene if required
• Monitor and analyse the ongoing performance of a product
• Determine where improvements to the existing product can be made or scheduled
• Provide support between stages of product development to ensure continuity and cohesiveness, and alignment of product to strategy and roadmap
• Manage a product across the end-to-end lifecycle (e.g. launch through to sunset) to ensure maintenance and support throughout the life of the product
• You will enable your team to do the best work of their lives. Recruit new Xero's as required, ensuring team members are capable, contribute to Xero's culture, and are on-boarded effectively
• Manage team compliance with Xero policies, processes and requirements
• Role model exemplary leadership by developing leadership capabilities and upholding our
• You support the growth and development of your direct reports, ensuring they have what they need to perform their roles and feel empowered and engaged
• You foster a safe environment for people to experiment and learn
• Actively engage with your team members about their careers and support their growth and development
• You drive performance and results in your team
• Manage the performance of the team, providing feedback, support and career coaching as required
• Runs education sessions for teams on a product/domain to increase depth of knowledge across Xero

What Success Looks Like:

• You support and have positive feedback from your team members or coaches
• You’ve established OKRs and your team are contributing to OKRs
• You understand our customers and their problems
• Your roadmap is being executed according to plan and you and your team are focused on the most important initiatives
• All individuals working on and around your product understand what’s being built, why it’s being built and when it needs to be delivered
• You have strong relationships with your stakeholders who are engaged and have a thorough understanding of your vision, strategy and roadmap
• You have clearly defined product success for your team, with key customer and commercial metrics articulated and constantly measured
• You demonstrate and amplify Xero’s Values
• Your team members are able to see the big picture and connect their work and their team’s to strategy
• You are an effective coach, asking the important questions, listening and having the real (if
• difficult) conversions
• Support your team to remove barriers
• You build inclusive, resilient and psychologically safe teams
• Collaborate internationally to create horizontal alignment across Xero

What You'll Bring With You:

• Love customer problems:
• Leads others in the use of best practice user research approaches and methodologies to generate powerful insights
• Mentors others in problem definition and articulation techniques to expertly define customer problems
• Coaches others in techniques to create MVPs/MLPs, incremental solution decisions and solution definitions, to expertly solve customer problems
• Supports others to run complex or detailed experiments leading to validation of solution options
• Look to the future:
• Runs education sessions for teams on a product/domain to increase depth of knowledge across Xero
• Mentors others to develop product strategies and roadmaps that are compelling and align both business and product interests
• Pilots new systems that support the development of innovative ideas across product
• Work the Xero way:
• Leads the development, adoption and continuous improvement of product prioritisation approaches, processes, criteria and techniques
• Coaches teams and stakeholders on Xero’s PM ways of working to drive process improvements and build team expertise in best practice
• Leads coordination across products to deliver combinations of releases that collectively solve one or more customer problems
• Demonstrate commercial acumen:
• Leads groups and coaches others in market definition, sizing and segmentation
• Teaches others to develop product success criteria driven by an understanding of the product-market fit to ensure success criteria reflect market needs
• Monitors and guides decision-making across the product group to ensure all teams balance customer, commercial and product implications in decision-making
• Do it together:
• Effectively facilitates ad hoc meetings or redirects meetings in-flight to manage difficult situations or stakeholders, and ensure meaningful outcomes
• Mentors others in articulating a product narrative in a coherent, logical and simple way to improve product understanding and buy-in
• Teaches and supports others to practice cross-functional collaboration creating links across teams, geographies and networks to drive improved product outcomes
• Explore the data:
• Coaches others in new analytical approaches to generate insights and improve the effectiveness of product decisions
• Teaches others to meaningfully translate information and insights for different stakeholders and audiences
• Collaborates across functions to integrate information from a variety of sources and teams and generate meaningful insights
• Great People Leadership
• Clarity: See the big picture and connect the work our team does to strategy. Cascade the operating lan and enable communication and feedback
• Align & Engage: Be a good coach (ask good questions and listen to the answers). Have real, if difficult, conversations. Help your people remove barriers. Collaborates internationally to create horizontal alignment across Xero.
• Perform: Build inclusive, resilient and psychologically safe teams. Drives performance and results. Grow your people and careers.
• Experience:
• Hands on experience with agile processes in a software development environment
• Demonstrated experience collaborating with diverse stakeholder groups to realise customer / commercial outcomes
• Experience defining product roadmaps and long term planning
• Ability to influence outcomes in a variety of contexts and at various levels
• Experience within industry sectors relevant to Xero
• Demonstrated experience in managing and leading a cross-functional team to deliver customer /business outcomes
• Leadership experience and ability to successfully motivate individuals
• Relevant graduate