VP Product - Banking

At Xero, we’re here to make running a business beautiful. By making small businesses more efficient 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.

As the VP/GM of Product for Banking, you will own the vision, strategy, and product delivery for our bank feeds and bank reconciliation products. 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. You will identify and execute on key opportunities for your portfolio that will add more value to our customers, ultimately generating a competitive advantage and enabling the company 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 leadership team and 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
  

Product delivery

• In collaboration with design and engineering teams, transform product ideas into actionable concepts, timelines, projects, and ultimately - launches - while maintaining a serious consideration of the financial implications, marketing needs, and the overall objectives of the business.

• Support product leaders in, and engage with, major commercial stakeholders as appropriate.

• 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.

People leadership
You will enable your team to do the best work of their lives.

• Provide team leadership, shaping the team vision, culture, product team scope and ways of working

• Coach and lead a number of individual contributors and people leaders, ensuring high performance and high engagement

• Effectively communicate and cascade 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

• Foster a safe environment for people to experiment and learn

• 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 teams 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

Experience

• 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.

• 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 realise 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