A Design + Product Leader
Xero Payroll Product Vision
Using design to drive innovation and the strategic product direction across one of our core products at Xero.
Context
Strategic design influencing the future of our product
The impact
The work you see in this case study was Initially developed in 2023. However the Payroll product vision evolved to inform a broader Xero-wide product vision in 2024, presented to and ratified by our Xero Board. This Xero-wide vision, focused on AI, mobile technology, and "magical experiences," aims to establish Xero as the leading accounting platform for small businesses and their advisors, with a target of realising 70% of envisioned experiences by FY27.
This case study examines the initial draft of the Payroll vision, as the final vision approved by the Board, is NDA-protected and confidential.
The problem
Following a period of rapid expansion and product acquisitions, Xero's core Payroll customer journeys became fragmented, resulting in experience debt and an unclear vision for our future. We needed to align our company around a product North Star experience that embraces AI and data-driven insights, maintaining our competitive advantage in the market.
My role
As a Principal Product Designer, I led the initiative and the team of 12 who executed on the work. I planned the approach, managed the team and stakeholders, ran the research and was a core contributor to the final visual artefacts of the vision. Our main stakeholders were cross functional EGMs, GMs/VPs.
First draft of vision artefact
Other Outcomes
Within one month of the vision launched, it was being utilised across our teams in quarterly planning, roadmap prioritisation and design work.
Made innovation part of roadmaps
The vision gave permission for teams to plan innovation sprints in their roadmap.
Prioritised UX debt across teams
Customer feedback could be tagged with our experience principles.
Improved experience dependancies
Design teams were innovating together across common problems to remove duplication.
Planning
Step 1: Identify the outcomes
This was a unique opportunity to showcase design's strategic value. My goal was to craft a vision that not only inspired and unified teams around a world class SaaS experience, but also serve as a practical roadmap, aligning with our divisional and Xero wide strategy to guide future planning and prioritisation.
Step 2: Identify the stakeholders
To foster widespread adoption, I worked with leadership to align on scope and build stakeholder buy-in. Recognising that leadership support is crucial for driving change, I worked with our design EGM and GM/VPs to identify how we could build traction with our C-suite to became champions of this work. This resulted in our Design EGM getting the CEO and CPO to have the vision ratified by the Xero Board in 2024.
Step 3: Create a plan
After defining our outcomes, I utilised the traditional HCD approach to identify the main activities we needed to run, focussing on key stakeholder check points to bring everyone on the journey.
Methodology
Mining data for insights
Literature review
To ensure our vision was customer-centric, our team embarked on a thorough review of our internal literature. We mined data to uncover the narratives and stories of our customers, believing that these insights would provide the most impactful inspiration for our product experience.
I led the team through a thematic analysis of 5 years worth of qualitative and quantitative design research, surveys, feature requests, and product data. This exploration aimed to distill our customers' experiences and aspirations, helping us shape vision experiences that would drive innovation.
Synthesising data
I used customer journey maps to synthesise the large quantities of data. This helped us visualise critical areas in the customer journey that held the most significance for our customers. The intention was to look for those critical moments that were most impactful, so we could take that into our ideation workshops
Creating stories
To prepare for the ideation sessions, we applied different lenses to our data to help us build narratives and problem statements.
01
User Goals
What are people trying to achieve? Both in their business but outside their business?
02
Pain Points
What are the main challenges for our users we keep seeing emerge? Why are these challenges?
05
Mental Models
These represent how we understand the world. Is our product aligned to their mental model? Do we need to adjust?
06
Social Stories
How does Payroll fit into the broader life of people? In and outside their business, what successes and failures do they encounter?
03
Behaviours
What range of actions do people perform in the product? What habits have they formed? How do they solve problems and create good outcomes?
04
Values
What are their value systems and beliefs? What do they like or dislike? What do people find 'of worth', not just in the product but in their lives as well?
Emerging Stories
The analysis helped us define stories around four central themes that kept emerging.
Anxious, confused, time poor and restricted.
Cross functional ideation workshops
Final concepts
Iterating until we found our visual concepts
I led the design team through a process of creating and iterating the visual concepts for the final vision artefact. Xero Payroll is desktop first, so we made the conscious decision to create concepts that showed the product on mobile. We wanted to push innovation and help our teams see how mobile could be leveraged across our product.
Final outcomes
The Payroll product vision was a key input into Xero's broader 3 year product vision. We are now in the process of working through design sprints to realise the vision concepts, and identify how we evolve our product experiences to meet our vision goals.