Xero provides a basic inventory solution, allowing users to track items in stock, create purchase orders, add items to invoices and view reports to understand how well items are selling. However, the product must evolve in order to become a product market fit. With the rise of e-commerce, particularly through the covid pandemic, there are a number of exciting new opportunities to explore in this space.

KEY PROJECTS: Products and Services, Purchase orders, Onboarding, Integrations, New Feature Development

Xero Contacts allows businesses to see details of a customer’s or supplier’s sales, invoices and payments all in one place. Contacts was some of the first lines of code written when Xero was created in 2006 and is now deeply ingrained throughout the experience, and any changes impact multiple product teams. In addition to this, users’ mental model of what a contact is has evolved, and they require Xero’s contacts model to replicate their real-world business relationships.

This project required deeply understanding the behaviour of our users, modernising the underlying technology and delivering an experience that was consistent with Xero of today.

KEY PROJECTS: Contacts Modernisation, Multiple Contacts
BLOG: Enjoy better visibility of your contacts in Xero

The Xero Business Network was a concept designed to help businesses connect with each other, build relationships and do business together seamlessly through Xero.  This would be based on trusted data about businesses and the connections, transactions and interactions between them.

Through some deep discovery and customer engagement we were able to learn that customers expected Xero should behave in this way. Therefore, while we learned that this was not a product in its own right, we were able to identify a number of product improvements that we were able to pass on to other teams at Xero.