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.

Our Purpose

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 an impact 

The goal for our global Design team is to continue to develop the World Class Design culture at Xero. 

You will be responsible for evangelizing a design system and practice that helps create consistent and beautiful products; developing the standards and guidelines which clarify the expectations of our design teams, and growing and enabling capabilities of designers within your team. You'll help to define the design direction and vision for product areas and/or initiatives, working in partnership with design, product and engineering leaders, and ensure they are defined and communicated in a way that provides clear direction to other designers and product teams.

You'll explain and promote a balance of ‘Best Practice’ and innovative design approaches to enable teams to achieve world-class design at Xero and ensure design direction is in place to support the product roadmaps and strategy of product teams. 

You’ll be responsible for framing up medium to long-term, high-level design evolution across product programmes and initiatives. Your impact will be a force multiplier for teams, amplifying their efforts so that they in turn can solve Xero customers' problems more effectively. 

Design practice and capability

• Work with GM Design, Product Design Directors in your portfolio and other Product Design Principal’s across portfolios to continually evolve and grow our design practice, processes, and capabilities to support the delivery of world-class product design solutions.
• Champion and drive product principles and practices, including exploring new critical thinking approaches to solve complex customer problems 
• 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 andensure quality is achieved consistently across the product

Product thinking

• Partnering closely with Design and Product Leaders to set the design vision and direction for a portfolio or initiative, raise the visual and interaction design quality and get teams working in a way that makes great products. 
• Define a clear design vision that aligns to the broader direction and contribute to the product strategy of your initiative, portfolio or product area 
• Collaborate with other Product Design Directors 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 showing how a user will experience your solution – both the interaction flow and visual design solution
• Scale and evolve solutions to critical customer problems across multiple teams and areas of the business.
• Partner closely with researchers to understand customer needs and advocate to solve the right customer problems

Relationship management

• Influence, challenge and enable teams to deliver high quality product experiences. 
• Work closely with Marketing, Product Management, and Engineering to deliver stunning and effective product interfaces 
• Build and maintain positive relationships with other functions
• Maintain regular design sessions with designers in your product, portfolio and/or initiative
• Have a handle on roadmaps and upcoming design / technology challenges, guiding teams to navigate them successfully
• Work closely with pods, coaching/mentoring designers to make better product decisions.

Success looks like

• The designers impacted by you increase the consistency and quality of the experiences they deliver.
• The teams impacted by you have a greater awareness of all the connecting dots and how to achieve seamless experiences
• The teams impacted by you regard engaging with design practices as a pathway to success.

What you’ll bring with you

•  Track record of innovating and delivering design experiences at scale 
• Demonstrated quality in design craft, process and thinking 
• Recognized as an expert within the field of design, with extensive design specialist knowledge 
• Excellent communication skills 
• An inclusive, collaborative approach that helps maintain our values and contributes to making Xero a great place to work
• Experience leading other designers working on complex software 
• Experience building and iterating on a product based on usage patterns, user feedback and an evolving strategic landscape 
• A portfolio that demonstrates high-quality design outcomes, contributing to user experience and business value 
• A mastery of the entire design process from uncovering customer needs and pain points, to executing elegant interfaces

Why Xero?

At Xero, we are empowered to bring our ‘whole self’ to work. Our collaborative and inclusive culture is one we’re immensely proud of. We know that a diverse workforce is a strength that enables businesses, including ours, to better understand and serve customers, attract top talent and innovate. We care about learning together and celebrate our teams’ continuous improvement and career development. 

We offer a great remuneration package, including compelling benefits and perks, like Xero shares. We also support flexible working arrangements that allow you to balance your work, your life and your passions. Our Canadian Xero family includes Hubdoc, an automated data capture platform and we have offices in Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver. From the moment you step through our doors, you’ll feel welcome and supported to do the best work of your life.