GM Analytics - Strategy and Operations

You will be one of the key leaders in the business globally driving effective strategy & execution. You will do this through leading strategic recommendations based in world class analytics and storytelling - delivering analysis and understanding of commercial and operational performance that helps Xero set and communicate its strategy, plan effectively, and execute efficiently.
You will work closely with the EGM of Product & Technology Operations, our Chief Business Operations & Strategy Officer as well as other senior stakeholders across the Business Operations and Strategy function, acting as a trusted partner. 
You will drive insights and lead strategic recommendations into how Xero can improve the efficiency of its operating system, identify areas of commercial opportunity and drive strategic recommendations linked to this insight. This role will be critical to ensuring our most senior Strategy & Operations leaders are enabled to get the right things done through strategic decision making grounded in analytics.  
You achieve this through leading a high-impact analytics team, working as part of a broader analytics and data community across Xero. The role will be tasked with generating pan-Xero insights, bringing together multiple data sources in a cohesive way to aid in the most strategically important decisions and require you to align closely with senior executives across the globe.

What you'll do...

• Identify strategic opportunities through use of data relating to how Xero operates and how we take our product to market.
• Be an industry leader in ‘last mile’ analytics, leading with vision, supporting and guiding your team to develop analytical models and performing deep dives that convert data into actionable insights.
• Be a trusted advisor to executives and decision makers using data in a simple and effective way, with world class storytelling and data visualisation skills to inform better decision making from non-technical stakeholders.
• Build deep knowledge across multiple data domains.
• Effectively prioritise a backlog of work to maximise the impact of the team and for Xero.
• Where appropriate, enable your team to use data science to apply advanced analytics and statistical techniques to provide recommendations, forecasts and optimisations.
• Be one of the most knowledgeable people at Xero with regard to the potential commercial return of Xero’s product investments, and ensure this is accurately fed into our GTM plans as they evolve.

Experience:

• 15+ years or more experience in analytics, in a stakeholder facing capacity.
• SaaS industry experience preferred.
• Proven leadership ability.
• Proven ability to effectively scope and drive analytics projects from end-to-end.
• Experienced at coaching team members to improve the communication, storytelling and technical capability.
• Experienced in delivering analytics in the form of interactive dashboards.
• Experienced in applying advanced analytics techniques and statistical methodologies.
• Experience across cloud data platforms,. eg. Snowflake / DBT.
• Leadership experience and exceptional professional maturity, having a solid understanding of how to make things happen within an organisation.
• Demonstrated experience innovating with data and analytics to create value

Critical Competencies:

• Technical
• Be a technical thought leader and advisor - being able to guide the team through mastery of SQL and Python.
• Mastery of Tableau and other modern BI tools


• Non-technical
• Highly strategic, able to lead strategic recommendations.
• Excellent people leader.
• Storyteller.
• Ability to clearly frame a problem and use that drive solutions.
• Highly commercial.
• Delivery mindset, with an ability to deliver programmes of work, focusing on realising customer value.
• Deep, structured, forward looking thinker.
• Able to turn underlying symptoms of process problems into clearly identified root causes.
• Prioritising techniques or methodologies to assist with prioritising amongst a range of urgent and important asks/needs

Applications close 15th October