Senior Product Manager - Payments

About this role

SENIOR PRODUCT MANAGER – PAYMENTS

OUR PURPOSE

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.

HOW YOU’LL MAKE AN IMPACT

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…