Director of Product - App 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.

About the role: 

We are looking for a Director of Product Management to lead the product management group responsible for Xero’s App Store Ecosystem. This role involves direct management of 3+ product managers, and collaboration with engineering, design and marketing peers across Xero’s Ecosystem division. 

In this role you will own the product portfolio that powers our 3rd party App Ecosystem, including Xero’s App Store that enables our customers to find and integrate third-party software to run their business, the Billing Platform that powers application subscriptions, enabling developers to build and grow their businesses on Xero’s platform, and new explorations to enable 3rd party apps to integrate more closely into Xero’s core experience. You will provide oversight across your product 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 via our ecosystem of apps. 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 responsibility for a global product, you will collaborate with a multidisciplinary and cross functional team around the world with high levels of complexity, ambiguity, dependencies and stakeholder management. People leadership experience and ability to navigate cross-team collaboration is a significant part of the role. You will lead, coach and mentor a talented team of product managers. Your skilful leadership will enable them, and their cross-functional partners, to deliver compelling products and services that solve real problems for our customers. This involves working across disciplines to ensure that your product strategy is aligned to Xero’s overall product vision and goals.

What you’ll do

• Product strategy: Work with peers across Product, Engineering, Marketing, Developer Relations to define and evolve the Xero’s App Store strategy, with accountability for delivery towards our division’s objectives.  

• Delivery:  In collaboration with your engineering and design peers, define and execute on the product roadmap and prioritization to internal partners, including alignment of the Xero App Store strategy with the broader Xero product strategy

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

• People Leadership: You will coach and lead a number of product managers, to build a high performance and delivery culture and provide leadership in shaping the team vision, culture and ways of working.

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 management 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 the collection of apps in the Xero App Store, customer app purchase experience, and the supporting developer experience

•  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

• Minimum qualifications :

• 12+ years of prior experience working on SAAS products and/or app ecosystems in a small business audience setting

•  5+ years of people leadership experience, with demonstrated track record of growing individuals and high performing teams. Experience leading global teams would be advantageous.

• Deep understanding and experience with building and integrating with API platforms, 3rd party developer needs and platform capabilities, and app marketplace dynamics

• Demonstrated ability to manage and lead technical and design and tradeoff decisions with engineering and design peers

• Demonstrated success in leading a growth oriented product team, with responsibility for achieving product metric targets and commercial outcomes

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

• Proven experience collaborating with a diverse stakeholder group across engineering, marketing, and product management to develop products & realize commercial targets

• Proven ability to influence outcomes at all levels without direct authority

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.

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.