Director of Product, Identity & Signals
Xero
Product
San Mateo, CA, USA
Posted on Apr 5, 2025
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.
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. We are looking for this candidate to be based in West Coast US or AU/NZ, with hybrid or remote work. 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.
How You'll Make Impact:
- At Xero, our mission is to make life better for small businesses, and secure, seamless access is at the heart of that vision.
- As Group Product Manager, you will lead the all-up strategy and execution for our Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) and Identity Fraud Prevention platforms, ensuring millions of customers can securely and effortlessly access Xero and our ecosystem of connected 3P apps.
- This role is highly strategic, underpins almost every product at Xero, and will have significant executive and customer visibility. You’ll lead a team of 4-5 product managers initially, with room to grow scope significantly for a strong performer.
- In this role, you’ll drive innovation in identity, authentication/authorization, and fraud detection, balancing security with a frictionless user experience. You’ll shape the future of passwordless authentication, SSO, adaptive security, and AI-driven fraud detection, working closely with engineering, data, and design teams. You’ll also work closely with 3P services and shape the strategic direction of the next horizon in identity and security. Your leadership will directly impact Xero’s growth, user trust, and global expansion. If you’re passionate about scaling secure identity solutions, stopping fraudsters in their tracks, and delivering world-class user experiences, this is your opportunity to make a significant impact at one of the world’s leading SaaS companies. Join us in building the future of secure digital identity for small businesses.
What You'll Do:
- Actively network across Xero to understand how products fit into Xero's strategy, objectives and future.
- Work directly with the customer to conduct research, collect insights or validate understanding, getting support from the broader product function as required. Use customer data and insights particularly in assessing value and viability risks, to inform product roadmap and planning.
- Define the scope of the customer problem and frame possible solutions to test, validate and refine with the support from relevant team membersBuild strong relationships with the broader product function’s teams, collaborating effectively with your internal stakeholders.
- Planning in developing a strategy for the product line, including securing funding, resourcing. Can active role in the annual and quarterly OKR process, with support from product leadership Take responsibility for managing risks (in line with Xero Risk Management Standard) arising from non-functional concerns including security, privacy, regulatory change and compliance, accuracy, responsible data use and availability: consulting with stakeholders and leading trade-off decisions.
- Develop product roadmaps to execute on the product strategy, and can manage a product to its roadmapTake responsibility for establishing team delivery cadence and rituals, and facilitating these as required.
- Develop an effective release strategy, with the support from relevant team members Work collaboratively with the product function to ensure an effective launchMonitor the overall commercial & customer results of the product line, working with other product team members to support as requiredMonitor and analyze the ongoing performance of a product.
- Determine where improvements to the existing product can be made or scheduled. Provide support between stages of product development to ensure continuity and cohesiveness, and alignment of product to strategy and roadmap.
- Manage a product across the end-to-end lifecycle (e.g. launch through to sunset) to ensure maintenance and support throughout the life of the product.
- Work as a tie-breaking decision-maker, ensuring where the product team cannot get to consensus, the product manager will weigh up all inputs and make the decisionSupport recruitment of new Xero's as required, ensuring team members are high quality, fit Xero's culture, and are on-boarded effectively.
What Success Looks:
- Your work is contributing to team OKRS.
- You are responsible for the establishment of OKRs for your product
- You understand our customers and their problemsYour roadmap is being executed according to plan and you are focused on the most important initiatives.
- Individuals working on and around your product understand what’s being built, why it’s being built and when it needs to be delivered.
- You have strong relationships with your stakeholders who are engaged and have a thorough understanding of your vision, strategy and roadmapYou have clearly defined product success for your team, with key customer and commercial metrics articulated and constantly measuredYou demonstrate and amplify Xero’s values.
- In identity, authorization, and/or fraud detectionExperience as a platform PMStrategic thinking.
- Can lead and drive ambiguous problem areas and shape strong short and long term product strategies Strong cross-functional influence skills and stakeholder management.
- Excellent exec communication skillsTechnically minded and detail oriented.
- Experience with people managementUnderstanding of the SaaS / Fintech / Accounting industry and / or adjacent sectors relevant to Xero Hungry, willing to roll up your sleeves, and drive impact
What You'll Bring With You:
- Love customer problems: Plans, runs, documents and synthesizes user research initiatives using standard frameworks to deliver impactful insights for Xero. Uses multiple techniques to interrogate customer evidence to accurately identify and define problems customers care about. Develops and justifies well thought through MVP/MLP solutions to solve customer problems.
- Designs and executes experiments to validate solution options with quantitative and qualitative evidenceLook to the future: Clearly articulates the product’s value, functionality, and competitive industry trends, to act as a trusted source of information for the product/domainDevelops a product strategy and roadmap in line with Xero’s strategy to guide product decision-making and long-term goalsGenerates new ideas to drive more innovative and creative products.
- The Xero way: Effectively groups and prioritizes stories, bugs and chores, managing both team capacity and release timeframes. Effectively applies and advocates for Xero’s PM ways of working to improve team operations.
- Effectively manages releases, including developing accompanying assets, to deliver incremental value to the customer.
- Demonstrated commercial acumen: Accurately sizes market / segments by number of customers and financial value, relative to acquisition and pricing assumptions. Defines a product’s success criteria to align stakeholders to a shared idea of product success. Makes evidence-based decisions based on analysis of commercial, customer and product requirements to guide team progress.
- Do it together: Facilitates meetings with predefined structures or scripts (e.g., stand ups, IPM’s, and retro’s) leading to clear actions for a team to progress with. Communicates effectively as a product evangelist across the entire product lifecycle foster alignment and buy-in to the product. vision. Actively collaborates with other functions to drive successful collaboration on products and outcomes.
- Explore the data: Conducts objective, rigorous and accurate analysis, making logical and defensible inferences where data is incomplete. Communicates complex data and insights with impact across both junior and senior stakeholdersIntegrates data from multiple systems, sources, and people to deliver new insights to the team.
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.