Lead Product Manager -Payroll

Xero is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors grow and thrive. 

At Xero, our purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. This purpose sits at the centre of everything we do. We support our people to do the best work of their lives so that they can help small businesses succeed through better tools, information and connections. Because when they succeed they make a difference, and when millions of small businesses are making a difference, the world is a more beautiful place.

How you’ll make an impact

As a Lead Product Manager you will be responsible for establishing and maintaining excellence in

product management practices. You will have a deep understanding of the products and customers

(external or internal) within your portfolio. Your impact will be measured by your ability to improve

product practice and capability.

You'll explain and promote a balance of ‘Best Practice’ and innovative product approaches to enable

teams to achieve world-class product management at Xero. You’ll contribute to the product strategy

being in place to enable successful implementation of roadmaps and effective delivery. You will coach

and train other product team members, and where required, step in to solve complex and protracted

product problems.

What you’ll do

• Confidently execute core product management role responsibilities including identifying customer problems and definitions solutions to test, developing and managing product roadmaps or strategies, and developing product release strategies
• Lead the development of networks across Xero to frame how products fit into Xero's strategy, objectives and future
• Consistently review, monitor and interrogate the commercial & customer results of products, areas and teams to inform product strategy and practice
• Lead and manage a product or group of products across the end-to-end lifecycle (e.g. launch through to sunset) to ensure maintenance and support throughout the life of the product
• Drive decision-making across products and/or teams weighing up all inputs and information, and working as a tie-breaker where there isn’t consensus
• Connect products and their teams in various phases of development to ensure continuity and cohesiveness, and alignment of products across Xero
• Train, coach and up-skill product team members to build product practice and embed best practice across Xero
• Develop and document, in consultation with product leadership, a suite of product practices to standardize the best way to do product at Xero.
• You will collaborate and consult effectively with the broader Portfolio leadership team on product delivery and strategy: Engineering, Product Operations and Product Strategy, Product Marketing Management and Product Design.
• Identify and roll out improvements to product practice and operations
• Develop high-level strategy for the product management craft, shaping the execution of product management within Xero
• Support recruitment of new Xero's as required, ensuring team members are high quality, fit Xero's culture, and are onboarded effectively
• Works directly with 10-20 engineers and is responsible for signing off on an overall technical direction and architecture from the product perspective (ie, that tradeoffs are aligned with product direction).

Success looks like

• You’ve supported the establishment of team OKRs and your work is contributing to team OKRs
• You deeply understand our customers and their problems across the breadth of the portfolio
• The Product team has a set of rituals and are continually improving their delivery performance
• You have strong relationships with your stakeholders who are engaged and have a thorough understanding of your vision, strategy and roadmap
• You are improving product team members skills, use of methods and tools across the portfolio
• You continually refine the product vision and strategy for your product group / area
• You are known as an advisor for product throughout the business; a respected voice in product management on best practice and improvements
• You are consistently advocating for, and either iterating or embedding, Xero’s product framework, principles and practices
• The teams impacted by you have a greater awareness of all the connecting dots and how to achieve seamless experiences
• You step into and effectively manage or solve complex and difficult issues within product teams, when others can’t.
• You demonstrate and amplify Xero’s Values

What you’ll bring with you

• Critical capabilities

Love customer problems:

• Creates new tools and processes for collecting and synthesizing feedback within and across products to shape Xero's user research methodology
• Defines "Big Bet" customer problems the market cannot articulate for itself to influence Xero’s approach to market and corporate strategy
• Leads cross functional groups in defining and developing solutions to complex problems that span products and/or geographies
• Leads the development of new discovery techniques for experimentation driving a culture of experimental design

Look to the future:

• Provides subject-matter expertise and thought leadership to Xero executives, industry or governing bodies for a given product / domain
• Leads the development of new products and initiatives, in support of Xero’s strategic intent
• Assesses global markets, technologies, disruptions and expert thought leadership to drive an innovation culture at Xero

Work the Xero way:

• Leads a culture of courageous prioritization across teams and geographies to improve Xero’s product decision-making capability
• Refines and evolves Xero’s PM ways of working to continuously improve Xero’s approach to PM
• Designs innovative release strategies and processes to reduce release lead time and impacts

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




Experience

• Extensive experience in enabling new and improved approaches to product practice
• Demonstrated experience collaborating with diverse and senior stakeholder groups to realize customer / commercial outcomes
• Strong track record of addressing customer needs through innovative use of technology
• Effectively influenced outcomes at all levels in a variety of contexts
• Extensive experience in product practice thought leadership, defining product roadmaps and long term planning at a Portfolio / Sub-portfolio(s) level
• Extensive experience in leading cross portfolio initiatives to deliver customer / business outcomes
• Extensive experience in mentoring, supporting and coaching

Why Xero? 

Diversity of people brings diversity of thought, and we like that. Our human-first culture of respect, fairness, and inclusion is what helps Xeros thrive and work and beyond. Offering very generous paid leave to use however you’d like (plus statutory holidays!), dedicated paid leave to care for your physical and mental wellbeing as well as an Employee Assistance Program to access mental health care for you and your family, employee resource groups, wellbeing programming and allowances, medical, dental, vision, and disability insurance, fertility and family forming financial support, 401k contribution matching, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices with snacks and break areas, flexible working, career development and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.