Senior Product Manager - Payments

Senior Product Manager – Payments

At Xero, we're here to supercharge small businesses. By making small business more efficient every day, connecting them with powerful technology and empowering the community behind them, their potential is limitless. When that happens, we're not only helping small businesses—we're building a stronger economy that can change the world.

As a Senior Product Manager in Xero's Payments team, you will help build the products and platform that enable millions of small businesses to get paid and move money securely, reliably and effortlessly.

You will own complex payment capabilities from end to end—spanning both the customer-facing experience and the underlying payments platform. This includes experiences such as merchant onboarding, payment acceptance, transaction visibility, funds availability, refunds and reconciliation, as well as the platform capabilities that support payment processing, pay-ins, payouts, settlement, orchestration and integration with payment processors and financial networks.

Your mission will be to help Xero deliver a modern, resilient and processor-agnostic payments experience that meets customer needs while improving transaction performance, reliability, time to money and commercial outcomes.

This role requires a payments generalist who has directly built both:

• Customer-facing payment products for merchants, payers or consumers.
• Back-end payment capabilities supporting the end-to-end movement and processing of money.

You will manage products across the full lifecycle—from customer discovery and product strategy through technical definition, launch, operation and continuous improvement. You will work closely with Engineering, Design, Risk, Compliance, Operations, Finance, Partnerships and Go-to-Market teams to solve complex customer and platform problems.

Your impact will be measured through customer, operational and commercial outcomes, including payment adoption, transaction success, time to money, reliability, customer satisfaction and payments revenue.

What You'll Do

Lead End-to-End Payments Product Development

• Develop the vision, strategy and roadmap for customer-facing payment products and the platform capabilities required to support them.
• Own products across the complete payment journey, from merchant onboarding and payment acceptance through authorization, processing, funds availability, settlement, payouts, refunds, disputes and reconciliation.
• Ensure that customer experiences and underlying platform capabilities are designed together as one cohesive product.
• Identify valuable and differentiated customer problems and frame clear solutions that can be tested, validated and delivered incrementally.
• Manage products from early-stage research and ideation through launch, scaling, ongoing operation and eventual retirement.

Build Customer-Facing Payment Experiences

• Develop simple, trusted and intuitive experiences that help small businesses accept payments, understand transaction status, access their funds and reconcile payments with their accounting records.
• Lead customer research to understand the needs of merchants, payers and operational users.
• Use customer data, qualitative insights and market intelligence to inform product strategy, prioritization and roadmap decisions.
• Partner closely with Design and Engineering to create high-quality experiences across web, mobile and embedded payment surfaces.
• Ensure that complex payment processes and exceptions are translated into clear and understandable customer experiences.

Develop Scalable Payments Platform Capabilities

• Partner with Engineering on the architecture and evolution of Xero's payments platform.
• Define product requirements for payment processing, pay-ins, payouts, transaction routing, settlement, reconciliation, ledgering and funds movement.
• Help evolve the platform toward a processor-agnostic model that supports flexibility across payment service providers, acquiring banks, payment methods and financial networks.
• Evaluate the trade-offs between building capabilities internally, using embedded components and integrating third-party providers.
• Ensure that new capabilities are designed for scale, reliability, extensibility and expansion across markets.
• Support the integration of new payment processors, payment methods, rails and network capabilities.

Improve Payment Performance and Reliability

• Drive improvements in transaction success rates, authorization performance, payment completion, funds availability and time to money.
• Define and monitor the operational health of the products and payment flows you own.
• Identify failure points across the end-to-end transaction lifecycle and lead cross-functional efforts to resolve them.
• Partner with Engineering and payment providers to improve availability, resiliency, observability and exception handling.
• Use data to understand payment performance by market, processor, payment method, customer segment and transaction type.

Navigate Risk, Compliance and Operational Complexity

• Partner with Risk, Compliance, Legal and Operations to build payment products that meet regulatory, security and operational requirements.
• Take responsibility for risks arising from security, privacy, financial crime, regulatory change, data accuracy, responsible data use and service availability.
• Lead product trade-off decisions that balance customer experience, risk exposure, regulatory obligations, technical complexity and commercial outcomes.
• Ensure that operational processes, support tooling and exception-management capabilities are considered as part of the product—not as an afterthought.
• Design customer and internal experiences that support refunds, disputes, failed payments, delayed payouts and other payment exceptions.

Drive Strategy, Execution and Commercial Outcomes

• Develop and execute product roadmaps that align customer needs, payments strategy, platform architecture and Xero's broader business objectives.
• Establish clear product goals, success metrics and OKRs.
• Take an active role in annual and quarterly planning, including funding, prioritisation and resourcing discussions.
• Lead release and rollout strategies, ensuring that products are launched safely and effectively across customer cohorts and markets.
• Monitor and interrogate customer, commercial and operational results, leading interventions where outcomes are not meeting expectations.
• Understand the economics of payment products, including payment volume, adoption, pricing, processing costs, margins and revenue.
• Make clear prioritization decisions that balance immediate delivery with the long-term evolution of Xero's payments platform.

Lead Through Cross-Functional Influence

• Build strong relationships across Product, Engineering, Design, Risk, Compliance, Operations, Finance, Partnerships and Go-to-Market teams.
• Create clarity around what is being built, why it matters, how it will work and when it will be delivered.
• Drive decision-making across complex stakeholder groups and act as a tie-breaker when consensus cannot be reached.
• Communicate product strategy and complex payment concepts in a clear, structured and accessible way.
• Represent the products you own in senior leadership, product, architecture and payments forums.
• Lead delivery cadence and team rituals, adapting them as needed to improve outcomes.
• Mentor and support other Product Managers, helping raise the standard of payments and product expertise across Xero.
• Contribute to the development and continuous improvement of product practices across Xero.

Success Looks Like

• Customers can accept payments, understand the status of their money and access their funds through simple, trusted and reliable Xero experiences.
• Customer-facing payment experiences and underlying platform capabilities operate as a cohesive end-to-end product.
• Your product strategy and roadmap are clearly understood and aligned with Xero's broader payments and business strategy.
• Your team is focused on the most important customer, platform and commercial problems.
• Payment adoption, transaction success, time to money, reliability and customer satisfaction are improving.
• Payment flows are scalable, observable and resilient, with clear ownership of failures and exceptions.
• New processors, payment methods and markets can be supported without unnecessary duplication or rework.
• Product risks and dependencies are identified early and managed in partnership with Engineering, Risk, Compliance and Operations.
• Your product has clearly defined customer, commercial, operational and technical success metrics that are continually measured.
• Releases are delivered safely and iteratively, with learnings incorporated into future decisions.
• Stakeholders understand the vision, strategy, roadmap and key trade-offs for your product.
• Other Product Managers are developing through your coaching, knowledge-sharing and leadership.
• You demonstrate and amplify Xero's values.

What You'll Bring With You

Essential Payments Experience

Deep, hands-on experience in the payments industry is essential for this role.

You must have demonstrated experience building and operating payment products across both customer-facing experiences and back-end payments infrastructure. This should