ProductTank New Zealand - World Product Day 2022, Growing Product People and Leaders from Aotearoa

We celebrated World Product Day 2022 with 2 talks about how Aotearoa is growing amazing product teams and leaders!

How Xero is growing its global product practice
Xero is a leading global platform helping small businesses and their advisors grow and thrive. Founded out of a Wellington apartment in 2006, Xero introduced a new “cloud accounting” category and has recently announced a total operating revenue of $1.1 billion and 3.3 million global subscribers. This rapid growth has led to some challenges as we’ve learnt to build product across 5 countries, 15 offices, and more than 2,000 Product Xeros.

David and Michelle from the Product Practice and Coaching team at Xero will reveal what some of these challenges were, and how they’re scaling Xero’s global product practice to address them

Growing into your first Product Leader role
Tas will share her experiences around the first Head of Product role, being thrown into the Marketing space at the deep end, how this increased her confidence and skills as Head of Product and what all Product people should know about collaborating with marketing to maximise the outcomes and impact of their work.

About our speakers:
Michelle Ross - Acting EGM - Product Operations
Michelle has 15+ years under her belt helping people grow and organisations adapt. She’s worked for several big name kiwi companies such as Air New Zealand, and Vodafone as well as large organisations overseas.

With a background in change and transformation, Michelle is passionate about bringing clarity to cross functional teamwork and helping people work smarter together.

Having joined the Xero team two and a half years ago as GM Product Practice and Coaching she’s currently on secondment as Executive GM for Global Product Operations.

David Malpas - Head of Product Practice
David has 20+ years experience working in product roles - originally in media, where he worked for brands such as Disney, MTV, TVNZ, and Sky, before turning his attention to SaaS.

He has a passion for the craft of product management, and enjoys the real world application and adoption of popular product management skills techniques into the organisations that he works for.

David has recently joined Xero as the Head of Product Practice where he is responsible for establishing the world class global product practice at Xero.

Tasneem Gould - Principal, GSD Alliance Training/Head of Product and Marketing, Flow Software
Tas has been privileged to work with some of NZ's best software companies including Xero, Orion Health, Deloitte, MYOB (x3) and SLI Systems. She's also involved with training and consulting with numerous organisations as part of GSDA.

Tas is an experienced practitioner and trainer in Product-led software development, with deep skills in Customer Experience Design, Product Strategy, Release Planning, and Agile Development. In her current roles, she's combining these to launch new products, expand into new markets and partnerships, develop delightful customer experiences, and create a smooth, inclusive and impactful product operations structure.

Tas is on a mission to share the Joy of Product as widely as possible, and works actively as mentor, coach and community coordinator to support and guide anyone interested in and practising better product management.