Principal Product Manager

Our Purpose

At Xero, we’re here to make running a business beautiful. By making small businesses more eff icient every day, connecting them with big business technology and empowering a community behind them, their potential is limitless. When that happens, we’re not only helping small businesses, we’ll be building a stronger economy that can change the world.

How you'll make an impact

As a Principal Product Manager you will be responsible for owning a coherent portfolio of projects and is accountable for the entire product lifecycle and identifying new areas of investment (new projects) for the product. The product decisions you’ll solve are highly complex and have long-term strategic impact on the overall Product Area, aff ecting all user, customer and partner constituents.

As a Principal Product Manager you’ll be accountable for the value and viability of a project and it's impact on key success measures. 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 eff ective 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

Be a highly eff ective and respected decision maker with your project portfolio, recognized as the product expert in your area. This may include deprioritizing or canceling projects in a timely manner, while ensuring learnings from the project are captured and circulated and that team morale remains high during these changes.

Connect products and their teams in various phases of development to ensure continuity and cohesiveness, and alignment of products across Xero

Train, coach and upskill product team members to build product practice and embed best practice across Xero

Regularly identify new product opportunities and be highly adept at building consensus for and support of those ideas.

Develop and document, in consultation with product leadership, a suite of product practices to standardize the best way to do product at Xero.

Collaborate and consult eff ectively with the broader Portfolio leadership team on product delivery and strategy: Engineering, Product Operations and Product Strategy, Product Marketing Management and Product Design.

Identify opportunities and gaps where Xero can innovate, including by working with User Research to define the research that will understand opportunities and generate key insights in the problem space that develop into diff erentiated features.

Sell improvement opportunities for action to senior leaders within your area

Develop high-level strategy for the product management craft, shaping the execution of product management within Xero

Work in a highly cross functional way, involving significant coordination with multiple PM and Eng teams and manage significant XFN complexity.

Proactively propose trade-off s in resourcing or scope and identify ways for disparate teams to work together to achieve a common goal.

Support recruitment of new Xero's as required, ensuring team members are high quality, fit Xero's culture, and are onboarded eff ectively. Be a seasoned expert on all 'hats' of PM hiring, and should also contribute through strong partnership where there are PMs with specific hiring needs.

Work directly with 20+ engineers and be able to describe in detail the full stack and interactions of the product sub-area on a technical level.

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

You’ve been able identify, negotiate and secure resources needed for a plan, whilst understanding the priorities of your extended team (ie Product Area) and how to operate eff ectively within them.

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 eff ectively manage or solve complex and diff icult 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

Communicate effectively:

Be an active listener and pick out key points in discussion

Be a strong negotiator, able to work with peers across functions and get buy-in on ideas

Be a very strong group presenter, giving clear and motivational presentations that align teams and compels people to action

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:

Being skilled at working the whole team through complex and controversial decisions quickly but thoughtfully to ensure the right decision is made and the whole team is supportive of and motivated toward that outcome.

Effectively facilitates ad hoc meetings or redirects meetings in-flight to manage diff icult 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 eff ectiveness of product decisions

Teaches others to meaningfully translate information and insights for diff erent stakeholders and audiences

Collaborates across functions to integrate information from a variety of sources and teams and generate meaningful insights

Experience

Experience creating product roadmap(s) from conception to launch, driving the product vision, defining the GTM strategy, and leading design discussions.

Knowledge of multiple functional areas such as Product Management, Engineering, UX/UI, Sales, Customer Support, Finance or Marketing

Experience managing day-to-day product, technical, and design direction for large scale systems

Extensive experience practice thought leadership, defining product roadmaps and long term planning at a Portfolio / Sub-portfolio(s) level in enabling new and improved approaches to product practice

Knowledge of multiple functional areas such as Product Management, Engineering, UX/UI, Sales, Customer Support, Finance or Marketing

Demonstrated experience collaborating with diverse and senior stakeholder groups to realise 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 leading cross portfolio initiatives to deliver customer / business outcomes

Extensive experience in mentoring, supporting and coaching

EA licence 15C7529

EA Personnel R1985185