Xero is beautiful accounting software that gives small businesses and their advisors real-time access to accounting information anytime, from anywhere. Our universe revolved around our customers and the accounting practices that support them, and our mission was to make their businesses more productive.

I led the design strategy and execution for Xero's US design team. I mentored designers embedded in interdisciplinary projects and established standards for high-quality and consistent delivery. Together, we built Xero's Payroll and Expenses products launched in New Zealand, Australia, the US, Canada and the UK.

My team developed a new onboarding flow for our global Payroll product resulting in a 35% increase in conversion. The team adopted a Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE) process to run experiments, evaluate hypotheses and iterate on solutions. This led to a client experience that we were highly confident about shipping, removing uncertainty around prioritisation and return on investment.

Following that, we redesigned the UX of our Payroll product to conform to the Xero Design System, reducing engineering overhead by as much as 45% on subsequent builds and maintenance. Our design velocity and quality improved, too, with the team shipping more consistent, accessible and usable interfaces as a result.

We also designed and developed a new expense management tool from the ground up. Our standalone mobile app enabled employees to track, organize, submit, approve, and reconcile expenses. Our receipt scanner used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and advanced machine learning to automatically capture all the details from a receipt into an expense report. From our companion web application, administrators and bookkeepers could confirm statement amounts, review unsubmitted expenses, and manage their corporate spending with automated General Ledger coding, tax tracking, auditing and compliance.