Our Purpose
At Xero, weʼre here to make running a business beautiful. By making small business more efficient every day, connecting them with big business technology and empowering a community behind them, their potential is limitless. When that happens, weʼre not only helping small business, weʼll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.
How youʼll make an impact
As a Product Manager you will be responsible for driving customer and business value through ownership of new and existing products. You will manage products end-to-end, from early-stage research and ideation, through to implementation and improvement over time. Your impact will be measured by key commercial and customer success metrics. You will be comfortable working autonomously where appropriate, with the support of your product leadership team.
What youʼll do
● 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, getting support from the broader product function as required.
● 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 with the support from relevant team members
● Build strong relationships with the broader product function’s teams, collaborating effectively with your internal stakeholders
● Participate in developing a strategy for the product line, including securing funding, resourcing
● Taking an active role in the annual and quarterly OKR process, with support from product leadership
● 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 product roadmaps to execute on the product strategy, and can manage a product to its roadmap
● Take responsibility for establishing team delivery cadence and rituals, and facilitating these as required
● Develop an effective release strategy, with the support from relevant team members
● Work collaboratively with the product function to ensure an effective launch
● Monitor the overall commercial & customer results of the product line, working with other product team members to support as 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
● Work as a tie-breaking decision-maker, ensuring where the product team cannot get to consensus, the product manager will weigh up all inputs and make the decision
● Support recruitment of new Xero's as required, ensuring team members are high quality, fit Xero's culture, and are on-boarded effectively
Success looks like
● Your work is contributing to team OKRs
● You are responsible for the establishment of OKRs for your product
● You understand our customers and their problems
● Your roadmap is being executed according to plan and you 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
What youʼll bring with you
Critical competencies
● Love customer problems:
○ Plans, runs, documents and synthesises user research initiatives using standard frameworks to deliver impactful insights for Xero
○ Uses multiple techniques to interrogate customer evidence to accurately identify and define problems customers care about
○ Develops and justifies well thought through MVP/MLP solutions to solve customer problems
○ Designs and executes experiments to validate solution options with quantitative and qualitative evidence
● Look to the future:
○ Clearly articulates the product’s value, functionality, and competitive industry trends, to act as a trusted source of information for the product/domain
○ Develops a product strategy and roadmap in line with Xero’s strategy to guide product decision-making and long-term goals
○ Generates new ideas to drive more innovative and creative products
● Work the Xero way:
○ Effectively groups and prioritises stories, bugs and chores, managing both team capacity and release timeframes
○ Effectively applies and advocates for Xero’s PM ways of working to improve team operations
○ Effectively manages releases, including developing accompanying assets, to deliver incremental value to the customer
● Demonstrate commercial acumen:
○ Accurately sizes market / segments by number of customers and financial value, relative to acquisition and pricing assumptions
○ Defines a product’s success criteria to align stakeholders to a shared idea of product success
○ Makes evidence-based decisions based on analysis of commercial, customer and product requirements to guide team progress
● Do it together:
○ Facilitates meetings with predefined structures or scripts (e.g., stand ups, IPM’s, and retro’s) leading to clear actions for a team to progress with
○ Communicates effectively as a product evangelist across the entire product lifecycle foster alignment and buy-in to the product vision
○ Actively collaborates with other functions to drive successful collaboration on products and outcomes
● Explore the data:
○ Conducts objective, rigorous and accurate analysis, making logical and defensible inferences where data is incomplete
○ Communicates complex data and insights with impact across both junior and senior stakeholders
○ Integrates data from multiple systems, sources, and people to deliver new insights to the team
Experience
● 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
● Experience with accounting software desired but not a must
● Understanding of the SaaS / Fintech / Accounting industry and / or adjacent sectors relevant to Xero
● Demonstrated experience in managing and leading a cross-functional team to deliver customer / business outcomes
EA licence 15C7529
EA Personnel R1985185
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