Technical Product Manager - Observability

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.

About the team

In Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), we drive and influence Xero to provide the most reliable experience for our customers. We are a global team based across New Zealand, Australia and the USA. 

We combine software and systems engineering to enable engineers across Xero to build and support products that are observable, stable, performant, tolerant to failure, and operate as intended in the face of varying conditions.

We strive to maximise the impact of post incident learning across the organisation to improve the reliability and robustness of the Xero platform, while providing enablement and training across observability, reliability engineering, incident management and service ownership.

About the role

The Technical Product Manager for Observability plays a crucial role in shaping the organization's observability strategy, collaborating closely with SRE and product engineering teams to define a comprehensive vision, translating technical challenges into actionable product initiatives.

This role will work with various engineering teams across Xero to identify gaps in monitoring and logging capabilities, facilitating workshops to create roadmaps for systemic infrastructure improvements, and support the evolution of the observability toolchain through team feedback and operational experiences.

Our ideal candidate will bring a balanced mix of technical knowledge and product management expertise. You'll be passionate about SRE & DevOps, with strong communication skills, and empathy for engineering teams and the challenges they face.

What you'll do:

• Foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement in observability practices across Xero
• Establish and own communication channels, helping teams develop shared mental models about system reliability and performance
• Evaluate and manage relationships with observability tool vendors.
• Optimize tool usage by regularly reviewing data to identify areas of high cost or inefficiency, analyzing feature usage to maximize value and minimize unnecessary costs.
• Actively study the market landscape to stay ahead of new technologies and industry trends.

What you'll bring (technical skills):

• Deep understanding of cloud services and modern software development and deployment practices
• Deep understanding of modern observability frameworks (Ex. OpenTelemetry)
• Hands-on experience with observability tools (eg New Relic, Sumo Logic, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog)
• Experience with log aggregation and analysis tools (Ex. Sumo Logic)
• Ideally a background in Site Reliability Engineering or platform engineering
• Knowledge of cutting-edge technologies such as AI/ML in observability, serverless monitoring, and cloud-native approaches is highly valued

What you'll bring (product management):

• Excellent communication skills, capable of advocating for product ideas and effectively conveying technical concepts to a varied audience
• Proven experience championing strategic priorities and helping others relate to and align with it. Ideally with the ability to relay several different prioritisation models, and a strong understanding of when to use which and why
• Proven product experience — with an extensive toolbox of modern product discovery practices to draw upon. Proven experience coaching Product Managers
• Proven experience using a range of metrics to monitor the success and health of products and services. Proven experience of making evidence-based decisions
• A solid track record of addressing customer needs. Proven experience connecting teams closer with customers (and not just be a proxy for them)
• Excellent stakeholder management skills. Proven experience building meaningful, collaborative relationships across all levels of the business

We embrace diversity and inclusion and value a challenge mindset at Xero. Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply for jobs unless they meet every single competency or experience.

If you are excited about this role, and your experience doesn't align, we encourage you to apply. You could be the right person for a role. If you have any support or access requirements, we encourage you to advise us at the time of application and throughout the interview process.

Why Xero? 

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, health insurance, life insurance, and income protection, wellbeing and sports programmes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices, flexible working, career development, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.