VP Product

Our Purpose 

At Xero, we’re here to help you supercharge your business. We do this by automating routine tasks, surfacing actionable insights and connecting businesses with the right data, advisors and apps. When that happens, we’re not only making life better for small business, we’ll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.

How you’ll make an impact

As a VP product, you will own the strategy for a Product portfolio or region. You will provide oversight across your portfolio/region, ensuring the right things are built at the right time and through doing so you’ll contribute to Xero achieving its goals. By seizing key opportunities for your portfolio/region in terms of new segments and product offerings, that will add more value to our customers, ultimately generating a competitive advantage and enabling the division to grow faster. 

You will lead a large multidisciplinary and cross functional team with high levels of complexity, ambiguity, dependencies and/or stakeholder management. People leadership of experienced product leaders and their teams is a significant part of the role.

• Product strategy
• Work with the portfolio/region leadership team, existing regional Go-to-market Managing Directors to advance and evolve portfolio strategy.
• Regularly review this strategy, updating it to reflect changes in Xero’s strategy, market changes, and lessons learned from customers and initiatives
• Be accountable for the commercial success of the products you and your team create and manage
• Define, own and communicate the product roadmap and prioritization (including development of business cases) to best determine how to service customer needs
• Ensure the roadmaps produced by your product leaders are data-informed, based on customer research, have clear objectives and KPIs, balance functional and nonfunctional work and are realistic

• In collaboration with design and product teams, transform product ideas into actionable concepts, timelines, and projects while maintaining a serious consideration of the financial implications, marketing needs, and the overall objectives of the business.
• Support product leaders on major commercial, stakeholder engagements as appropriate.
• Enables product vision, ideas to translate into action that considers business outcomes and financial implications
• Work with strategy, product marketing, data, and research teams and drive user and competitive research to uncover customer needs and new product value propositions in line with Xero’s vision and commercial goals
• Establish and maintain good working relationships throughout the wider organisation, particularly Engineering & Architecture, Design, Marketing, Regions, Sales and Customer Experience.
• Work with local go-to-market teams to ensure they understand the product strategy, the team understands their challenges and there is clear messaging in place for all product launches.

• You will enable your team to do the best work of their lives.
• Coach and/or lead a number of people leaders within Product stream, ensuring a  performing and highly engaged cohesive portfolio leadership team.
• Provide team leadership, shaping the team vision, culture, product team scope and ways of working
• Effectively communicating and cascading information appropriately to ensure teams are engaged and are connected to strategy
• Enable and empower people to work autonomously where appropriate, providing guidance, coaching and mentorship.
• Actively engage with your team members about their careers, manage performance and support their growth and development
• Recruit new Xero's as required, ensuring team members are high quality, 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 Xero values
• Support the growth and development of your direct reports, ensuring they have what they need to perform their roles and feel empowered and engaged
• Foster a safe environment for people to experiment and learn
• You drive performance and results in your team

• Continuous delivery of industry-leading products for Xero partners and customers
• Creation, communication, and constant evolution of a roadmap that supports growth of the products and reflects the changing needs of customers
• You have strong relationships with your stakeholders who are engaged and have a thorough understanding of your vision, strategy and roadmap
• You lead and enable your product leadership team to produce accessible, transparent, prioritised and well executed roadmap across a portfolio / sub-portfolio which focuses on value to Xero and the customer
• 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 and  conversions
• Support your team to remove barriers 
• You build inclusive, resilient and psychologically safe teams
•  Collaborate internationally to create horizontal alignment across Xero 
• You demonstrate and amplify Xero’s Values

• Critical competencies
• Ownership and ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment
• Building effective relationships across all levels of the business
• Advocate for building quality software that are customer centric
• Ability to break down complex problems, deliver pragmatic solutions and able to manage changing priorities
• Strong understanding of business software solutions
• Broad knowledge of technology and software development
• Ability to assess commercial viability of products to either introduce, grow, mature  or retire products and to either build, buy or partner on solutions.
• Experience
• Significant people leadership experience, with the ability to successfully motivate individuals and teams and develop individuals capabilities.
• Proven experience collaborating with a diverse stakeholder group to realize commercial outcomes
• Proven ability to influence outcomes at all levels
• Demonstrated experience in defining product roadmaps and planning
• Previous experience in leading people leaders and forming high-performing teams

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.

Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single competency or experience. If you are excited about this role, but your past experience doesn't align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You could be just the right person for this role and Xero. If you have any support or access requirements, we encourage you to advise us at time of application and throughout the interview process.