Overview
Xero's Inventory product had a loyal but frustrated user base. Satisfaction scores were low and feedback pointed to a product that felt complex, incomplete and disconnected from the workflows customers actually relied on. The challenge was clear: understand the real friction, and design our way out of it.
As Product Design Lead, I owned the end-to-end experience strategy – from initial discovery through to iterative design and delivery – working closely with Product Managers, Engineering leads and Customer Success.
The challenge
CSAT for the Inventory product had plateaued at a level that wasn't acceptable for a core Xero product. Qualitative feedback flagged confusion around key workflows – particularly stocktakes, inventory adjustments and reporting – but the signal was noisy and lacked actionable specificity.
At the same time, Xero's UK business needed to deliver Make Tax Digital (MTD) compliance features, adding complexity to an already constrained roadmap. The team needed to deliver regulatory requirements and improve experience – not one or the other.
"Customers told us stocktakes were painful. But until we mapped the full journey, we didn't know just how many steps – and how many failure points – existed between starting a count and trusting the result."
My approach
Discovery & stakeholder alignment
Ran structured interviews with Customer Success, Support and key customers to build a shared understanding of the problem space. Aligned stakeholders around the need for a journey-first approach before committing to solutions.
Customer journey mapping
Developed a comprehensive end-to-end customer journey framework covering the full Inventory lifecycle – from setup through daily management to stocktakes and reconciliation. The map surfaced 23 distinct friction points across the journey, prioritised by frequency and severity.
Targeted research & synthesis
Conducted moderated usability sessions and unmoderated task-based research to validate the pain-points identified in mapping. Used AI tools to accelerate synthesis – reducing research-to-insight time significantly and enabling faster iteration cycles.
Iterative design & delivery
Prioritised improvements into quarterly design sprints, focusing first on the highest-severity pain-points. Ran lightweight validation at each stage rather than gating delivery on a single large-scale test. This let us ship, learn and improve continuously.
MTD integration & stocktake feature
Worked in parallel with the UK MTD delivery, designing automated document matching for invoices and expenses. Alongside this, led the design of a redesigned stocktake workflow that simplified the count process and introduced clear reconciliation states.
Outcomes
The programme delivered measurable improvement across every metric we tracked.
What I learned
This project reinforced the value of journey-first thinking. The temptation in complex product domains is to jump straight to features – but mapping the full journey first meant we were solving the right problems, not the most visible ones. It also built alignment with Product and Engineering in a way that screen-level designs rarely do.
Integrating AI into the research synthesis workflow was a genuine accelerant. What previously took days of affinity diagramming could be done in hours, freeing the team to spend more time testing ideas and less time organising data.