Business Analyst - Payroll Software

Remote, UK
Product – Product - General /
Permanent /
Remote
Xero is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors grow and thrive. 

At Xero, our purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. This purpose sits at the centre of everything we do. We support our people to do the best work of their lives so that they can help small businesses succeed through better tools, information and connections. Because when they succeed they make a difference, and when millions of small businesses are making a difference, the world is a more beautiful place.

How you’ll make an impact...

You are a critical member of the UK payroll team tasked with eliminating the stress of payroll compliance and making it easier for small business owners to pay and manage their people. As a Business Analyst you will support product leaders and development teams in building a deep understanding of customer problems through data driven analysis, translating insights back to the team, organising work to be done, and contributing towards solutions that realise customer and business value. 

You’ll work cross-functionally to ensure customer and commercial goals for the product are effectively translated into stories, epics and tasks for the development team, and that the development team has all of the information it needs day to day to deliver.  

What you’ll do...

• Help ensure Xero’s UK Payroll product complies with the latest rules and regulations. 
• Ensure our software’s functionality is designed day-to-day in a compliant manner. 
• Work cross functionally with other product people, designers, engineers and senior leaders on the impacts of legislative changes and how it influences research and product development workstreams
• Research UK employment law and regulatory change. 
• Monitor the regulatory and competitor landscape to understand what our teams need to build.
• Perform detailed business analysis to support the creation of product solutions and describe the actual work to be undertaken by delivery teams
• Provide subject matter expertise around payroll workflows, business rules, customer needs and regulatory requirements to delivery teams throughout the product development process
• Support delivery teams with User Acceptance Testing prior to product launch
• Ongoing compliance audit/assessment of the UK Payroll product and competitor offerings
• Ensure that product development activity (whether directly compliance related or not) has a compliance lens applied to it to understand, consider and manage any direct/indirect compliance implications on the broader product
• Upskill fellow team members on all things payroll.
• Support with the triage of software bugs and customer incidents. 
• Contribute to producing and maintaining educational materials for clients. 
• Collaborate with other team members across the UK, Australia and New Zealand. A few out of hours calls per week is typical although we try to minimise these where possible. 
• Communicate complex topics to non-specialists using clear and simple language.
• Contribute to the collation and analysis of customer data to inform product planning
• Translate the customer problem into actionable user stories for the team Support the Product Manager to manage the backlog to ensure it follows the product roadmap and strategy 
• Work collaboratively with the broader product team to ensure effective launches

Success looks like...

• You are contributing to the development of OKRs and work is contributing to achieving the OKRs 
• Using your strong time management skills, you support the delivery of quality insights and recommendations to support product decision making
• You develop quality stories and acceptance criteria which enables customer / business value
• You demonstrate and amplify Xero’s Values 
• You help to make sure the backlog is supported with necessary data and analytics

Critical Capabilities...

    • UK payroll domain expertise
    • Working level knowledge of UK payroll and Xero’s UK payroll product
    • The ability to interpret and apply relevant rules and regulations.
    • Understanding of associated subject matter such as pensions and HR.
    • A working understanding of day to day payroll operations, procedures, and documents.
    • Love customer problems: Helps to plan, run, document and synthesise user research initiatives using standard frameworks to deliver impactful insights for Xero Uses multiple techniques to interrogate customer evidence to accurately identify and define problems customers care about
    • Develops and justifies well thought through MVP/MLP solutions to solve customer problems 
    • Helps to design and execute experiments to validate solution options with quantitative and qualitative evidence 
    • Look to the future: Articulates the product’s value and functionality, and identifies the domain it operates in
    • Applies a product vision and strategy in their own decision making
    • Seeks diverse ideas for improvement from other teams or parts of the business 
    • Work the Xero way: Thrives as part of a highly skilled cross functional team, including product, design and engineering specialists who enjoy highly collaborative ways of working
    • Effectively groups and prioritises stories, bugs and other tasks.
    • Supports with releases, including developing accompanying assets, to deliver incremental value to the customer
    • Demonstrate commercial acumen: Articulates the product’s success criteria in appropriate forums to support team decision-making
    • Actively participates in discussions on the customer and product implications of a team’s work 
    • Do it together: Facilitates meetings with predefined structures or scripts (e.g., stand ups, IPM’s, and retro’s) leading to clear actions for a team to progress with
    • Communicates effectively as a product evangelist across the entire product lifecycle foster alignment and buy-in to the product vision
    • Actively collaborates with other functions to drive successful collaboration on products and outcomes
    • Explore the data: Conducts objective, rigorous and accurate analysis, making logical and defensible inferences where data is incomplete
    • Communicates complex data and insights with impact across both junior and senior stakeholders
    • Integrates data from multiple systems, sources, and people to deliver new insights to the team

Experience...

    • Working with UK payroll related matters in detail day to day. 
    • Experience with agile processes in a software development environment desired but not a essential
    • Experience in analysing data, providing insight and recommendations desired but not essential.
    • Experience with SaaS product development desired but not essential
    • Experience in a problem-solving role using critical thinking skills 
    • Demonstrated experience as a valued team member working within teams to deliver customer / business outcomes
Why Xero?
Offering very generous paid leave to use however you’d like (plus statutory holidays!), dedicated paid leave to care for your physical and mental wellbeing as well as an Employee Assistance Program to access mental health care for you and your family, private medical insurance, gym passes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices, flexible working, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.

Research has shown that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single competency or experience . If you are excited about this role, but your past experience doesn't align perfectly, we encourage you to apply anyway. You could be just the right person for this role and Xero. If you have any support or access requirements, we encourage you to advise us at time of application and throughout the interview process.