Lead Product Designer

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.

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:

• Lead Product Designers help define, design and deliver seamless product experiences within a product area at Xero. Working on your own design tasks, as well as assisting others through design collaboration, feedback and mentorship. You’ll contribute to the design vision and direction, working with the Design Principal and key relationships with Product leaders within your product area. You’ll help define how we improve as a Design team by working closely with other Leads and Principals, as well as our Design Leadership Team.

What you'll do:

• Promote collaborative design opportunities between designers to increase capability and
• robust design thinking
• Maintain an up to date knowledge of trends within the product and design industries
• Work closely with designers in your portfolio or initiative to mentor, build capability and ensure
• quality is achieved consistently across the product
• Assist and mentor team members in their development, identifying opportunities for them to grow and achieve their goals.
• Partner with the Product Design Director(s) and Principal or Lead Designer(s) in your product area to lead projects and mentor designers. Work with design leadership within your portfolio to understand the Product Design vision and direction. Help drive consistency and quality of execution within your product area to deliver beautiful, enabling, and meaningful experiences which solve the customer problem and align to business strategy. On a day to day basis you will undertake your own work as well as lead and mentor others to:
• Partner with peers across Product, Technology, Product Marketing and other functions to inform strategies and objectives, scope road maps, agree priorities and plan work programs to help fulfill user needs and business objectives across your product areas or portfolio
• Contribute to Product visions, along with plans for evolutionary, iterative updates, that allows the Product vision to be realized over time
• Collaborate with designers across other product areas to understand connections and opportunities to learn & leverage each other's work or work in more efficient ways.
• Collaborate with design leadership to introduce new technologies, techniques and design tools to improve performance and process
• Collaborate with designers across the org to ensure design is working towards a seamless end to end customer experience
• Collaborate with the product team to implement and improve design patterns, and when needed invent new design patterns
• Along with designers in your team, produce and share prototypes, concepts showing how a user will experience your solution – the service and/or product
• Scale and evolve solutions to critical customer problems across multiple teams and areas of the business
• Partner closely with researchers or lead studies to understand customer needs and advocate to solve the right customer problems
• Conduct desk research including domain and competitor analysis, interaction/design trends and 'best of' examples
• Analyze relevant considerations such as research insights , product strategy and roadmaps, technical environment and constraints
• Create frameworks such as wireframes low/high-fi, visual frameworks, content/data models etc, which articulate the components, journeys and elements required to solve 'the problem'
• Challenge current solutions, by exploring ideal future concepts and identifying new interaction solutions and patterns that meet customer needs in a better way
• Develop phased design solutions that bridge the gap between a future state and current patterns, XUI design system and other relevant constraints and considerations
• Collaborate with other designers to test ideas, share challenges, mentor others in their work, provide feedback and build quality in our practice
• Design for accessible inclusive experiences that meet or exceed best practice and all internal standards
• Develop detailed interactions and interfaces which are smart, contextually relevant & deliver measurable results
• Present and communicate design work to a range of different audiences
• Create effective handover materials which clearly communicate how the design should look and behave throughout interaction flows and journeys (e.g. User flow diagrams, design specifications, experience/interaction specifications etc)
• Partner closely with Design Research and Product colleagues to identify research opportunities, plan and undertake research and testing relevant to your product area.
• Participate or where necessary conduct generative user research to understand customer underlying goals, needs, behaviors and pain points
• Participate or where necessary undertake synthesis of research data, drawing out and articulation of insights
• Participate or where necessary conduct user testing in conjunction with the Design Research or ReOps team
• Influence, challenge and support designers within your product area to deliver high quality product experience
• Work with your Product Design Director to contribute towards strategic product initiatives
• Facilitate cross functional team workshops to bring everyone together at key points in the process and around key decisions
• Collaborate with cross functional teams to ensure proposed solutions balance user needs, business strategy and technical constraints
• Partner with development teams during sprints to provide design QA and problem solve issues as they arise

What does Success look like:

• You’re continually lifting the bar in your own product design work, creating inspiring and innovative solutions and you’re helping other Designers do the same
• You’re respected by your peers, the design team, and Product leaders
• You’re leading and delivering on schedule against agreed deadlines, to the highest quality standards
• You’re collaborating and communicating well with your Xero colleagues, especially Design, Product & Technology teams

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.