Vp/Gm Product - Ecosystem

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 GM Product - Ecosystem, you will own the strategy for our Ecosystem product portfolio, which includes our Developer Platform that provides access to our APIs, and Xero’s App Store that enables our customers to find and integrate third-party software to run their business. You will provide oversight across your portfolio, ensuring the right things are built at the right time and through doing so you’ll contribute to Xero achieving its goals, particularly Xero’s ongoing strategy to accelerate growth globally. By seizing key opportunities for your portfolio in terms of new product offerings & segments, you will generate competitive advantage and enable the division to grow faster.

With a global business, you will lead a large multidisciplinary and cross functional team around the world 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.

What you’ll do

Product strategy

• 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

• Work with the portfolio leadership team (Product, Engineering, Marketing, Developer Relations), and other stakeholders such as regional go-to-market Managing Directors to advance and evolve the portfolio strategy, with a primary focus on Xero’s App Store and Developer Platform

• Regularly review this strategy, updating it to reflect changes in Xero’s overall strategy, market changes, and lessons learned from customers and initiatives. For example, you will help evaluate the benefits of deeper white-label and/or distribution partnerships with third parties as an option to build on our App Store partnerships. You will also be involved in efforts to extend Xero beyond our platform through embedded or white-label partnership models.

• Define, own and communicate the product roadmap and prioritization (including development of business cases) to best determine how to service customer needs

• Be accountable for the commercial success of the products you and your team create and manage, including achieving financial targets with close collaboration with our Marketing, Partnerships, Developer Relations and other teams

Delivery

• 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

• Partner with Engineering & Architecture, Design, Marketing, Regions, Sales and Customer Experience to execute on your product roadmaps and business objectives

People Leadership

• 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. This is both for the product organization you will manage, and for the broader Ecosystem team.

• Effectively communicating and cascading information appropriately to ensure teams are engaged and are connected to strategy

• Actively engage with your team members to help with their career planning, provide ongoing coaching & feedback, and support their growth and development into larger roles over time

• 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

• Foster a safe environment for people to experiment and learn

Success looks like

• You have strong relationships with your stakeholders who are engaged and have a thorough understanding of your vision, strategy and roadmap

• Your team members are able to see the big picture and connect their work and their team’s to strategy

• You lead and enable your product leadership team to produce accessible, transparent, prioritized and well executed roadmaps, which focuses on value to Xero and our customers

• You continuously deliver industry-leading products for Xero partners and customers, which includes our tools and APIs to enable third parties to build to Xero, as well as the collection of Apps and other integrations our customers and partners can access

• You are an effective coach, asking the important questions, listening and having the real and conversions

• You support your team to remove barriers and ensure timely decisions are made

• You build inclusive, resilient and psychologically safe teams

• You collaborate to create alignment across Xero with other product areas and key stakeholders

• You demonstrate and amplify Xero’s Values

What you’ll bring with you

Experience

• Experience working on SAAS products and ecosystems is preferred. Experience with Accounting is a benefit but not required

• Significant people leadership experience, with the ability to successfully motivate individuals and teams and develop individuals capabilities. Experience leading global teams would be advantageous.

• Demonstrated experience in defining overall business & product strategy, as well as product roadmaps

• Proven experience collaborating with a diverse stakeholder group to develop products & realize commercial targets

• Proven ability to influence outcomes at all levels

• Previous experience in leading people leaders and forming high-performing teams

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.

About Xero?

Diversity of people brings diversity of thought, and we like that. A collaborative and inclusive environment is important to us. Working at Xero will provide you with a diverse and inclusive environment alongside people who will respect, challenge and support you to have fun while you do the best work of your life. We are a place where personal development, innovation, and well-being are not just inspired but celebrated.

We value our people and offer a wide range of compelling benefits and perks, including Xero shares and great parental leave policies. Xero’s collaborative culture is underscored by our values - #Ownership, #Challenge, #Beautiful, #Human and #Team - which empower us to understand and serve customers, attract top talent and continuously innovate. From the moment you step through our doors, you’ll feel welcome and supported to do the best work of your life.